The Spectator’s Notes | 11 December 2010

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop.

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the policy.

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In March 1998, the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft, an enlightened body devoted to Anglo-German understanding, paid for me to travel round Germany giving the same lecture each night.