Letter: Successful rehabilitation of offenders is the issue here

What next? A return to debtors' prisons? That will surely reduce the number of benefit scroungers, if not bankers.

This might please the most fought over political target group (the hang-em-flog-em-and-deport-Johnny-foreigner brigade) but it will prove expensive for the country in many ways, with no proof of an effective outcome. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In 2007, the New Labour government announced it would be building three giant Titan prisons, each holding up to 2,500 prisoners. There was a wide spread outcry against the plan, largely based on evidence from the USA and France, where such institutions had proved to cause more problems among prisoners and increased reoffending.

That was against a considerable body of contrary evidence, locally and internationally, for the achievements of smaller, local prisons. The plans for Titans were quietly dropped.

In that it was (and still is) widely known that many offenders had problems with drugs, mental health or limited education, I wrote to the Home Secretary, Dr John Reid, to ask him to provide details of the Home Office budget to treat those conditions, in support of rehabilitation, in comparison to the £2.3 billion to build the Titans. With some persistence, I discovered that there was no such Home Office budget.

Successful rehabilitation is known to reduce a wide range of social problems and their related costs to the taxpayer. That is not to say that perpetrators of serious crimes should not be punished by long prison sentences, but small amounts to treat small offenders, if applied professionally, could provide considerable savings, in the heartache of victims and in public funds.

What's the bet that there is still no Ministry of Justice budget for that need? Still, why expect boring effectiveness when you can have the hype of efficiency, aka cost-cutting?

Malcolm MacIntyre-Read, Much Wenlock