It will be a long stretch until our jails are fit for purpose

After years of underfunding and neglect, it should come as no surprise that the British prison system has broken down, even before it has had to cope with an influx of many hundreds of inmates to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure following the recent riots.

In crude terms, the eventual crop of rioters will probably exceed the tiny number of places available, which is about 1,000 out of a prison population of 87,000 or so in England and Wales. And, of course, that is not counting the normal flow of people rightly sentenced to time behind bars for the protection of the public. Something has had to give.

So it has proved – and in what the prisons minister James Timpson calls a justice system in “crisis”, emergency short-term measures have had to be taken. Operation Early Dawn is underway. Obviously, it is not acceptable for murderers, rapists and indeed rioters convicted of such serious sentences to remain at liberty.

The least-worst choice, then – already embarked upon by the previous government – is a series of measures to allow certain non-violent offenders to be released after completion of 40 per cent of their tariffs, rather than the usual 50 per cent. More use is to be made of prison cells, and a “one in, one out” procedure instituted, with more prisoners being moved around and further away from home.

Somehow, the system will have to cope because there are no alternatives and tough, unpalatable, piecemeal solutions are going to have to be found. As the prime minister pleads, he cannot build a new prison in the space of a week, and even that would not be sufficient to deal with the overcrowding and consequent unmanageability of the prison stock.

It is sometimes a cynical, unedifying sight when a politician casually blames their predecessors for some problem. However, in the case of the prisons, the Conservatives may fairly be found guilty of failing the public in one of the most basic functions of government – providing adequate spaces for the prison population and thereby helping keep the public safe. It is not unreasonable, at this moment, to ask some searching questions about how things came to this, who was responsible, and why it happened, the better to improve the dire situation.

Unlike the NHS, education and even the military, there is no great electoral benefit in investing in the criminal justice system. The party that has been in uninterrupted, if not absolute, control for 14 years before the recent general election must not escape criticism. The courts, probation service and prisons are just as vital public services as schools and hospitals but they have been given nowhere near the same priority.

So far as those trying to deliver justice are concerned, the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne era of austerity has continued almost unabated since 2010. It is something of a cheek, then, for Conservative politicians to suggest that this is all Labour’s fault and that the new government is setting criminals free because they are soft on crime. If reoffending does take place, then it will be the fault of the people who ran the prisons into the ground. Had a fraction of the money spent on the Rwanda plan been invested in the prisons – which are not full of migrant offenders – then we would not be in this crisis now.

There are no votes in giving lawyers a pay rise, and no public sympathy for those doing time. Instead, an unusually mercenary generation of politicians has, until recently, cut the police, demanded longer custodial sentences, failed to build sufficient new prisons, and then inflicted deep real-terms cuts on the running of the existing estate. Too much has been asked of a court and prison system quite unable to provide it.

So the government is right to confront its predecessors and the public with the inevitable consequences of past failures and to ask some challenging questions about what the criminal justice system is for. A sentencing review, promised in the Labour manifesto, seems the very least that could be expected in the circumstances.

If the public are unwilling to build many more prisons to deal with ever-longer punitive sentencing, then they should be asked what they would prefer to do with persistent shoplifters, burglars and fraudsters. In Lord Timpson, with extensive experience of rehabilitation and a cool, rational approach to crime and punishment, the government has someone with the imagination and the authority to put the system on a sustainable footing. It will take years, not weeks to do so. He faces something of a long stretch himself.