OUR JAILS ARE FULL TO BURSTING - AND IT'S ALMOST ALL DOWN TO DRUGS

This weekend some 71,000 people are behind bars, just 1,300 short of the
maximum number possible - and yet crime rates have fallen. Why? Look to the
increased use of heroin and crack cocaine and the 47,000 prisoners who need
detox.

The reception block at Pentonville Prison late one afternoon last week, as
the Group 4 security vans arrive from court. In the gloomy yellow
corridors, the stench of old vomit, mixed with cigarettes, is overpowering.
Thirty men, haggard and bewildered, are already penned in the
plateglass-fronted holding pen, queueing to use the two telephones.

In one corner, a scabby-faced man of 28 - he looks much older - trembles
uncontrollably: he's at an advanced stage of heroin withdrawal, he says,
and deliberately smashed a car window in front of a policeman. He wanted to
be sent to prison, because he knows that here he will get a methadone
prescription.

'I can't get help outside. I've been trying to come off for two years. I'd
rather be doing detox here than out on the streets, using drugs.'

The prisoners wait in the pen for a doctor's examination, for their
paperwork to be processed and to exchange their own clothing for grey
prison sweatsuits, socks and underwear. 'I know what you're thinking,' says
my Prison Service guide. 'It is a bit Hieronymus Bosch.' On an average day,
there will be 100 new arrivals. Pentonville - with 45,000 separate prisoner
movements in and out of reception each year - is the busiest jail in Europe.

Last week, after a brief dip around Christmas, the result of the
Government's extension of electronic tagging, the prison population of
England and Wales stood at 71,149, almost back to the all-time high it
reached last autumn. It is currently rising by 400 inmates a week. Just
1,300 prisoners below its maximum capacity, the Prison Service is close to
breaking point. Its staff and managers are well aware of the consequences:
overcrowded cells and worsening regimes; prisoners shipped far from their
families; and a much greater risk of violence, riots and suicides.

By the end of March, the doors will open on three new prefabricated wings
at existing jails, providing room for another 1,300 inmates. Shortly
afterwards, two new prisons, with room for 1,300 more, will open at
Ashford, Kent, and Heathrow. Few doubt the extra spaces will soon be
filled. Since 1993, when it hit a low of 42,000, the prison population's
rise has been relentless. Unlike any other public institution, the Prison
Service appears to be an open-ended resource.

The paradox is that, throughout this era of rampant jail expansion, crime
rates have fallen steadily: the Home Office British Crime Survey, widely
considered the most reliable source, suggests an overall decrease since the
mid-1990s of 22 per cent. The numbers of people convicted have also fallen,
from 1.5 million in 1991 to 1.35 million 10 years later.

At the simplest level, the explanation for the prison population explosion
is that there are more prisoners because magistrates and judges have got
much tougher. Although the total remanded in custody has increased since
1993, from 10,000 to around 13,000, the number of convicted prisoners
serving a sentence has soared from 31,000 to 58,000, of whom about 4,000
are women. (Contrary to popular belief, women are somewhat less likely to
go to prison, and on average receive shorter sentences).

'The biggest thing is the public climate,' says Paul Cavadino, director of
the offender rehabilitation group Nacro. 'Whether they're taking their lead
from the media, politicians or conversations in their local pub, sentencers
clearly believe they're supposed to pass heavier terms.'

Fewer than half those convicted at Crown courts were sentenced to immediate
custody in 1993; by 2001 it was 63 per cent. Only 6 per cent convicted by
magistrates went to prison in 1993, but 15 per cent in 2001. Average Crown
court sentence lengths have also risen dramatically. The average burglar
jailed in 1993 could expect to go away for 11 months; his counterpart in
2001 for 16.5 months. Similar increases apply to other crimes.

But why? Some argue that crimes are getting worse. 'I remember as a young
barrister being involved in a GBH case,' says a senior northern judge. 'The
judge was horrified, because the defendant put the boot in. These days
there's a sense of relief if they've merely put the boot in. There's so
much anger: road rage, neighbour rage. And people seem much more ready to
use weapons.'

The 2001 Halliday report on sentencing, published by the Home Office,
disagreed. Tougher sentences, it said, 'do not appear to reflect a more
serious mix of offenders passing through the courts... the sentencing of
similar offences and offenders has become much more severe'.

Yet, although the last Tory Home Secretary, Michael Howard, famously
proclaimed that 'prison works', Labour Ministers have often urged the
judiciary to use imprisonment sparingly. Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief
Justice, has also warned repeatedly of the negative effects of prison
overcrowding. Yet the judges aren't following their leader. Is this simply
a matter of media, mood and public perception? Or are there deeper, more
intractable forces at work?

The place to begin to look for answers is the nature of the prison
population itself. Some penal reformers have argued that the main problem
is the increase in people serving short sentences, 12 months or less, and
that the jails are bursting mainly because of people whose offences are so
trivial - TV licence fee evasion, for example - that they shouldn't be
there at all. On closer inspection, however, this argument looks problematic.

On the one hand, it is true that a high proportion of short-sentence
inmates probably wouldn't have been imprisoned 10 years ago. For example,
15 per cent of burglary convicts got a community sentence in 1993, but just
5 per cent in 2001. 'There has been a general movement downwards of the
boundaries between different kinds of penalty,' says Cavadino. 'Fines are
rather less common. A higher proportion go straight to probation-supervised
community sentences, and a much higher proportion to prison.'

Reversing these trends, on the other hand, would not be easy, and even if
it happened it would make only a marginal difference to the overall prison
population. Last month Woolf was attacked by the right-wing press when he
issued new sentence guidelines suggesting that burglars without previous
convictions should not normally be jailed. Missing from the furore was the
actual number of first-time burglars now serving sentences of fewer than
four years. Unpublished Home Office research has the answer: 290 - fewer
than 0.3 per cent of total jail inmates.

The research has discovered that 15 per cent of sentenced prisoners have no
previous convictions - the same proportion as 10 years ago. However, if one
factors out those convicted of violent assaults, sex offences, robbery and
drug dealing, the proportion falls to less than 3 per cent, about 1,600
people. At the end of last year Martin Narey, the then Prisons
Director-General, asked his staff to discover how many people there were in
jail for not paying their TV licence. The answer on the day they looked
was: one.

At Pentonville, I ask staff to show me the files of 20 prisoners pulled
from their stacks of cabinets at random. They cover almost every type of
crime and sentence: an armed robber serving 10 years; a serial
rapist-kidnapper on nine; several burglars doing 18 months. All but one
have been to prison before, most of them several times, and all had
previous convictions - in some cases, 30 or more. 'It's the same people,
again and again,' says Jaqueline De Allie, head of inmate administration.

In 2000, the last year for which figures are available, nationally 65 per
cent of prisoners had at least five previous convictions. The biggest
growth in the preceding decade was in the proportion of inmates with at
least 11 previous convictions, which rose from 25 to 32 per cent of the
rapidly expanding total. Proof, it could be argued, of prison's
ineffectiveness at reducing re-offending. On the other hand, in a
sentencing climate in which judges are likely to give higher sentences to
people with bad criminal records, mounting recidivism looks very significant.

We need to look again at the nature of the prison population. Much more
important than the growing numbers of short-sentence inmates are the
lengthening terms for people convicted of relatively serious crimes who
would almost certainly have gone to prison anyway. In 1990 there were
16,154 inmates serving sentences of more than three years. By 2000 this had
risen to 28,090, and it has continued to increase since. Less than a fifth,
17 per cent, of sentenced prisoners in the system are serving terms of a
year or less - and with the spread of electronic tagging, most will be home
within three months in any case.

Is this rise in recidivism and longer sentences just a matter of public
mood? Or is it possible something real, something long-term and very
serious, is happening in the nature of offending, and that the judiciary is
partly reflecting it?

The anecdotal evidence is there in Pentonville, where I sit with six
inmates approaching the end of their sentences. All but one have used
heroin and crack cocaine; of whom all attribute their criminal acts to
their habits. 'I was using UKP900 a day, man!' says Brian. 'If I hadn't
been caught and come inside, I would have killed someone. I was smoking
crack even when I was taking my kids to school.' He is doing 15 months for
wounding: 'I stabbed someone. It was drug-related. I was high when I done
it. He was a dealer.'

At 34, Robbie from Liverpool has been to prison 'about 10 times' before.
'I've taken heroin since I was 15. Every single crime I've done in my life
has been to support my habit.' This time, he's been jailed for just eight
months for shop theft, but his previous convictions include armed robbery
and aggravated burglary.

Beneath the surface of official statistics, the increase in class A drug
use starts to emerge as a principal cause of the increase in inmates. Last
year a staggering 79.8 per cent of prisoners entering Pentonville reception
had taken cocaine or heroin within the previous 48 hours.

Dr Ashvin Balabhadra runs the drug detox programme on B wing. 'When I
started here in 1999, about 125 a month were coming through reception with
immediate, serious substance misuse problems. Now that's up to 275 or 300.
We're using the same methods to identify them: urine tests, pupil tests,
information from outside and the history taken by our own staff. The local
NHS sees fewer patients needing detox in a year than we deal with every month.'

The Observer has obtained national figures for new prisoners requiring
immediate detox treatment. They show that they have risen steadily from
about 16,000 in 1996 to 47,000 in 2002.

The official statistics for convictions for hard drug dealing and
importation confirm this emerging story. Unlike every other major group of
offences, where convictions have fallen or remained steady, these totals
have vastly increased. In 1993, 1,852 people were convicted for trafficking
in class A drugs. The figure for 2001 was 6,551.

Of course, these statistics explain some of the prison population rise on
their own: most hard drug traffickers get long sentences - some of them,
such as the hun dreds of desperate Third World female 'drug mules', very
long indeed. But the knock-on effects will be considerable. Class A drug
addicts - like those I meet in Pentonville - are often determined to kick
their habit, but enormously prone to relapse, and once addicted again
overwhelmingly likely to re-offend. And the biggest growth in the prison
population is among the serial recidivists.

So what to do? Drugs aren't the only reason why sentences have got longer
and the prison population soared. The legal 'tariffs' for some crimes, such
as rape and mobile phone street robbery, are longer. 'If Ministers want to
cut inmate numbers, they need to mount a sustained campaign to persuade
sentencers to do just that,' says Cavadino. 'Roy Jenkins and William
Whitelaw did this, and it worked.'

But this is also a challenge to so-called joined-up government. The fact
that a heroin user will try to get into Pentonville in order to get the
methadone that will stop his withdrawal symptoms does not betray a logical
approach to this large and expensive social problem.

Here and there are glimmers of hope. One success story of the Government's
penal policies are drug treatment and testing orders, which give drug-using
offenders the chance to avoid prison if they undergo drug rehab and undergo
weekly urine tests to prove they are drug-free. Yet in many areas the
courts ran out of the budgets within a few months of the current financial
year. It gave them no choice but to send eligible candidates to prison instead.

In the Pentonville gym, officer Paul Sandford gestures to his orderlies,
trusted inmates rippling with muscle. I ask him the question that has
stumped Home Secretary David Blunkett: why has the prison population risen?

'One word: drugs,' he says. 'These guys look pretty well, don't they? They
come in here like skeletons - the crack diet, we call it. Here we give them
exercise and decent food. It's like a health farm. The problem starts again
at the prison gate. I hate to say it, but most of them will be back a few
months later, looking like skeletons again.'