Sir, Insufficient resources have been allocated to community penalties to make them effective (Comment, Oct 10, and report, Oct 11). What that means is, for example, the majority of drug treatment and testing orders fail. Lack of resources often drives the Probation Service back to court to rescind community orders for lack of staff to service them.

The National Offender Management Service has excellent schemes but the pattern is for huge resources to be invested at the start and then for them to be pulled back as the success of the initial project increases.

Politicians see longer custodial sentences as the easy response to public concern over crime. That is reflected in the sentencing guidelines and in the draconian, alarmingly short-sighted, provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

Faced with the toxic combination of legislative myopia and community sentences unlikely to work, judges are in an increasingly difficult position. The trouble is that the solution — putting resources where they matter — is, necessarily, long-term. It does not attract ovations at party conferences. That is why, I fear, little will happen.

RICHARD GORDON, QC
Brick Court Chambers
London WC2

Sir, I applaud Libby Purves for drawing attention to the impact on prison officers of the gross conditions in so many prisons. Daily they bear the brunt of the overcrowding, with little or no credit.

As chairman of the independent monitoring board at HM Prison Preston, which is the most overcrowded in the country, I have the opportunity to appreciate what is achieved as the staff struggle to provide something approaching a decent and humane regime. It is long overdue that we should pay attention, too, to the effects of overcrowding on staff, both uniformed and administrative.

No significant impact will be made on the frightening levels of recidivism unless we as a society have the courage to look critically at the suitability of those we send to prison — and not to send so many.

PETER ANWYL
Preston

Sir, In view of the expensive failure of the Government’s penal policy, is it not time for the European Commission to issue guidelines to ministers on how to reduce the British prison population so that it moves towards the much lower European average?

HOWARD SERGENT
London NW3

Sir, The population crisis in our prisons suggests that the Home Secretary should re-establish probation day centres. These were viable alternatives to prison throughout the 1970s and 1980s but were phased out by his department in the late 1990s.

Day reporting centres, based on the English model, have continued to flourish in the US. Forty-six states have the facilities, many of which have electronic monitoring and routine drugs testing. There are specialist units that deal with bail cases, early-release parole, women, young people, drunk drivers, substance users and those in need of psychiatric treatment.

The day reporting centre in Cook County, part of metropolitan Chicago, has kept more than 10,000 young (mostly black) men out of prison while awaiting trial. While in the programme these men have committed few further offences and almost all have turned up for trial. The centres, on average, cost between a quarter and a half of an equivalent jail bed per day.

One day reporting centre in every probation area in England and Wales could reduce the prison population immediately by 4,000 places, and an additional 20 — in existing or rented spaces — in urban areas could raise this to 6,000.

Successive UK governments have been only too ready to follow punitive exemplars from the US. Maybe it is time to reverse that trend and to reimport the day reporting centre model, which is safe, constructive and cost-effective.

PHILIP PRIESTLEY MAURICE VANSTONE
Wells, Somerset

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