THE more I looked at the Prison Service the more I recognised a bureaucratic nightmare. More than 1,800 people work in the faceless monolith that is Prison Service headquarters. From it spews an endless stream of rules, regulations, operating standards, operating instructions, orders, targets and performance indicators.

In 1995 one prison recorded all correspondence received from headquarters in a month. The result was 230 letters and 65 faxes, as well as 24 e-mails per day. Extrapolated to include every prison in England and Wales over four months, this amounted to 47 tons of paper, a pile nearly a mile high.

What madness! Who on earth could possibly have time to read all this? In 2000 the governor of Holloway told me that 80 per cent of his time was taken up with bureaucracy. No wonder managers in prisons have so little time for prisoners. They are tied to their desks, submerged under a bureaucratic avalanche.

The Prison Service’s impersonal approach to management, where no one appears to be responsible or accountable for anything, is characterised by another development all too prevalent in the public sector: the growing use of myriad targets and performance indicators.

These are useful management tools when sensibly designed. However, their value is degraded if they tell you nothing about the quality of the activity that is being targeted. The most effective way of challenging re-offending is to provide every prisoner with a programme of purposeful activity. But how can the target figures be taken seriously when the Prison Service sets different rules for private and public sector prisons? A private sector prison which does not provide the 30 hours of purposeful activity per week specified in its contract risks being fined. Public sector prisons invariably have lower targets based on an average of 23 hours, but they are not disciplined even if, as with Belmarsh, they deliver only 11.

More information than a bold statistic is the breakdown of how those hours are spent. But currently we have no way of telling how much time is devoted to behaviour programmes, education or the improvement of work skills.

To combat drug abuse, the Prison Service has introduced mandatory drug testing of a randomly chosen 10 per cent of the prisoner population each month in every prison. Initially 25 per cent tested positive, but by 2000 — when the percentage of those tested had dropped to 5 per cent — those testing positive had also dropped to 13 per cent. Prisons are judged on targets that require an annual reduction in the numbers testing positive. How honest are the reported results? One day I saw nine certificates on the wall of a prisoner's cell. “What are those for?” I asked. “Testing negative for drugs. They know I don’t use, so they test me every month. I’ll have ten if you come in two weeks’ time.”

In Rochester prison, which claimed to have almost no positive tests, we discovered that asylum seekers and immigration detainees were being included in the mandatory percentage. Not only was this illegal because they were not prisoners, but they were held separately from prisoners and had no access to their drugs.

However, prisons such as Altcourse, where every prisoner was tested on admission, reported that at least 70 per cent of prisoners admitted to having a drug problem on admission to prison. Twenty-five per cent admitted to using heroin or crack cocaine. Mandatory testing initially sent a message around the prison system that drug testing was being taken seriously, but it is now largely discredited and certainly does not indicate the size of the problem. Intensive treatment is available in only 50 out of the 137 prisons.

But here are some figures you can believe. Ninety-five per cent of all prisoners are male, and 65 per cent are between the ages of 21 and 39. More than 4,000 are female, their numbers rising faster than any other sector. Almost 3,000 prisoners are children. More than 1,000 are over pensionable age. The proportion of prisoners from ethnic minority backgrounds is three times that of their proportion in the community as a whole.

When they first go to prison three-quarters of inmates are unemployed, a third are homeless, 65 per cent of all adult males have a reading age of less than eight and more than half the prison population have no educational qualifications of any kind.