Dr Williams, speaking in a debate on a report, Rethinking Sentencing, at the Church of England’s General Synod in York, said that there was a cross-party consensus that the present situation in penal policy was “simply scandalous”.

Bishops, clergy and laity endorsed a motion welcoming the Government’s proposals to develop “restorative justice” in an attempt to limit reoffending. Urging that prison should be regarded as a last resort, they expressed dismay at the rising prison population.

They called on individual church members to embrace criminal justice as a “cause for prayer and public concern” and asked them to become involved in practical initiatives.

Dr Williams criticised the imprisonment of women and children, and also raised questions about the “ethnic profile” of Britain’s prisoners.But his main concerns were overcrowding and the regular moving of prisoners from jail to jail. Over the past 15 years the prison population has nearly doubled, from 42,000 in 1991 to 76,000 today.

Dr Williams said: “A Christian ought to regard punishment in this setting as something that brings about change. We currently have a situation in which the expectation of the system is fundamentally that change does not happen. Change does not happen to the offender, it does not happen to the victim, it does not happen in society more widely.”

He said that one of the main reasons change failed to take place was the way prisoners were constantly moved around the system. “Programmes of rehabilitation and education in the prison system are consistently frustrated by the abnormal mobility of the prison populations, as a direct consequence of overcrowding,” he said.

“People are moved from one prison after three months or so, to another prison where there is no comparable programme of education to what they may have been having in their first place of custody. That is increasingly the problem in the system and a problem which has a lack of consistency and a lack of actual policy about education and rehabilitation.

“These programmes are frustrated and they are not likely to be helped by some of the ideas for further privatised involvement in this area.”

Dr Williams spoke of the “outrageous treatment” of children in the penal system. He said: “We have heard about problems for women in prison and the disruption to family life.” and that “there are members of the synod who can speak much more eloquently about the issues surrounding the ethnic profile of the prison population”.

The report being debated contained contributions from a leading former Home Office civil servant, prison governors and a Lord Justice of Appeal.

Opening the debate, the Bishop of Worcester, Dr Peter Selby, co-author of the report, said: “Prison overcrowding, deeply damaging to the aim of restoration, is a clear image of the doctrine of original sin: everyone thinks the numbers are too high, but they continue to rise.

“Certainly, Martin Narey’s (the Director of Prisons) ‘decency agenda’ has done much to improve attitudes in the service. But a more sinister explanation lies in the way which the very proper instinctive revulsion we feel about crime, especially notorious crimes of violence, becomes increased through the activity of headline writers and the governing dynamic of policy.

“The instincts and the feelings are very understandable, but civilisation consists in part of the channelling of such instincts into constructive processes directed into dealing effectively with the problem.”

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