ON FRIDAY a 20-year-old woman called Louise Giles was found hanging in her cell in Durham prison. The Home Office naturally turned on the waterworks. As one of its spokesgoons intoned: “This was traumatic for the staff and other prisoners. Our thoughts go out to Louise Giles’s family at this difficult time.”

Indeed. Still I don’t suppose it was quite as traumatic as the event that sent Giles to prison in the first place: her killing of Helen Hay outside a nightclub just over a year earlier, with a kitchen knife she just happened to have in her handbag. It’s not like we hadn’t been warned either. Six weeks before the murder Giles had been given a community sentence after attacking medical staff and police officers. She escaped a prison sentence because she was deemed a “ modest risk”. A year before that Giles had also threatened to kill a couple of social workers.

Still, that’s the Home Office for you. Big on compassion, but lousy when it comes to meting out justice.

Meanwhile, Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, has blamed the plight of suicidal prisoners on overcrowding: “If you lock up this number of people this is the consequence. This is what is going to happen: more people are going to die in our prisons but also our prisons aren’t going to be able to do the positive stuff nearly so well.”

Now, maybe it’s true. Maybe, Harold Shipman and Fred West killed themselves because there were scared of having to share a bunk bed with a cat burglar. But maybe it was guilt. Maybe they were just giving themselves the justice that society itself refuses to give them.

Still, that’s a debate for another day. Whether you’re a hanging-and-flogging conservative, or a community service-addicted liberal, the solution ought to be the same. The only time in recent years when the violent crime rate fell was when Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, started throwing villains in prison. Labour has tried to carry on the good work, but we have now reached saturation point. There are 78,008 people incarcerated, a record number. More than half our prisons are overcrowded. Something has got to give.

If we want to live in a caring, safe and compassionate society, there is one obvious, humane solution: we must build more prisons.

Peter Briffa blogs at www.publicinterest.co.uk