Inside Out - the Tories accept the liberal view of prisons by asking Jonathan Aitken's opinion

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Actually I don't think that Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer should have gone to prison, though both should certainly have been disgraced for their lies in court.

Perjury in civil cases rarely if ever leads to jail, and it has always been my view that these two went to jail as part of a general Blairite frenzy, in which the criminal justice system sought to show that it was as New Labour as everyone else. 

Oddly enough, though I think Jeffrey Archer in general a laughable figure, I have some sympathy for the way he has behaved since he was imprisoned.

His books on his experiences are interesting and informative for anyone who is paying attention, and I think he was treated spitefully and exceptionally by the authorities when they put him back into a closed prison.

As for Jonathan Aitken, I am of course delighted at his repentance, but if he really is so awfully penitent, shouldn't he be more inclined to shut up about it?

He hasn't exactly gone into a Profumo-like purdah ( *some of you may not know that John Profumo, who shared the favours of the call girl Christine Keeler with a Soviet Diplomat while he was a junior defence minister in the 1960s, and lied to the Commons about it, then vanished into London's east End for 40 years, doing quiet good works and keeping his mouth shut).

In fact Mr Aitken is the most glamorous, jolly penitent I think I have ever come across.

And now he has accepted an unpaid job with the Tory Party, advising them about prisons.

In one way, this delights me. I think the Tories are amazingly inept, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those who never knew, about Jonathan Aitken's mysterious libel suit and its wretched outcome.

I trust it will slow down their alleged resurgence, not that I think their vote is in reality anything near what the polls pretend. I should be interested to see it tested at a by-election.

But even more damaging is the idea that the reform of the prisons should be, or can be, accomplished thanks to the views or reminiscences of a former middle-class prisoner.

Much of the mess in our prisons today is thanks to reforms demanded after middle class suffragettes and pacifists were locked up in prison in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The resulting reforms created jails better suited for Bertrand Russell and Christabel Pankhurst, but much too nice for the Kray brothers.

The key thing about our prisons is not the effect that they have on those who are sent to them. It is the effect they have on the vast majority who are not sent to them.

This is twofold. Do they protect the unharmful and the law-abiding from crime and disorder? Do they deter those who might consider breaking the law, by spreading fear of what will happen to them if they do? No, and no.

For far too long, British political and social reformers have looked at prisons from the point of view of the inmate. This is largely pointless.

Prisons these days mostly contain people who are already pretty incorrigible by the time they get there (I should add here that there is also a fair leavening of pitiful incompetents, too dim to outwit even our modern police, and , tragically, the mentally ill abandoned by
'Care in the Community'. But these are not the concern of this article).

It is far harder to get into a British prison than it is to get into most British universities.

The typical British criminal (unless he is a retired vicar refusing to pay his council tax, or she is a victim of crime and intimidation desperately defending herself when the police have failed to do so) must try, and try and try again to persuade a reluctant police to stop giving him cautions, a reluctant CPS to prosecute him if the police want him prosecuted, and then to persuade reluctant judges and magistrates actually to send him there.

If there had ever been any chance of 'rehabilitation', then it will have been missed long, long before he finally collects his prison track-suit bottoms at the reception desk in Wormwood Scrubs.

And the impression I have gained from my own visit to Wormwood Scrubs a few years ago, and from conversations and correspondence with prison warders ( as well as a careful reading if reports on such prisons as Wymott, in Lancashire) is that the prisons are now largely in the hands of the inmates.

The officers, in my view, do a surprisingly good job in trying to prevent our prisons from turning into absolute hell-holes. But they simply lack the authority to do the job they ought to be doing.

This means that a violent, ruthless person, given to drug-taking, will cope perfectly well in prison, where he will find the informal rules of behaviour favour him.

Prison, on the other hand, is often a place of terror and misery for the gentle and non-violent, and for those who do not have the support of a gang or other group.

Heaven help the wrongly convicted in such places.

This is even worse in the penitentiaries of the USA,where there is far less protection for the weak against the strong. 

So, for those who most need to be punished, prison is not a place of punishment at all.

The regime has been softened to such an extent that career criminals view occasional periods of imprisonment as necessary hazards of the job, to be cheerfully borne.

In some cases, according to the retired Prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple, petty criminals and drug addicts actually welcome their spells in prison as a time when they are looked after.

Thus 'rehabilitation', always a fanciful idea when applied to adults with formed characters, is even more unlikely than it might appear.

The best we can hope for is that the evildoers get older and eventually give up because they aren't strong enough any more. 

What's more, word gets out among those who are potential criminals, that this is what awaits them if they eventually rack up enough cautions and unpaid fines and suspended sentences to qualify for an actual spell inside… And it does not deter them.

Do not mistake this for a claim that prisons are 'holiday camps' or 'hotels'. That is silly language, exaggerated and untrue.

The real problem is that they are not really anything.

The American expression 'warehousing' is the most accurate. They have no moral force, no confidence in the rightness of their objective (if they have one at all), no belief that their inmates have done evil things for which they need to do penance.

They claim to be a form of mental hospital, in which troubled 'offenders' are set on the straight and narrow. But they have no medicines, real or metaphorical, to achieve this. In any case, they don't really believe in the straight and narrow.

Nobody is sentenced these days until 'reports' on his circumstances have been prepared. So his crimes are explained, and partly excused, by his background.

There is no true withdrawal of normal life. There is TV, there are games, gyms, a choice of food, undemanding work - and there are drugs, which circulate unchecked throughout most of the system.

There are few punishments, and these are harder and harder to inflict under Human Rights laws. Sentences are automatically halved, so remission does not need to be earned.

The effect on those who obey the law out of duty is not hard to find. We are abandoned.

If you doubt this, then explain this week's admission by the police that two million crimes a year (40% of crimes) now go uninvestigated, because there are too many of them.

There are too many of them because, for far too long, we have had a cardboard criminal justice system that frightens nobody.

A general realisation among the nasty that they will not be seriously punished for crimes or evil actions increases the numbers of the nasty and the number of crimes they commit, until a police force ten million strong couldn't cope.

That is where we are.

The last thing we need is even nicer prisons, designed with the aid of an Old Etonian former Tory Cabinet Minister.