Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question.

I don’t. With no shadow of doubt it will be our prisons. We’re committing too many people for too long to too brutal confinement in too crowded prisons. Our descendants will be aghast at the blind eye we turn to the abuse, the numbers and the futility. Nor can it be claimed we knew no better and must be judged by the prevailing attitudes of our day. For years Norway has run small prisons with an emphasis on treatment and training, proximity to the prisoner’s family and day release for many. It costs much more per prisoner but they have far fewer prisoners – 54 per 100,000 of the population – and one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. England and Wales has one of the highest rates of re-offending and three times as many inmates per 100,000 as Norway: the largest prison population in western Europe. It’s shaming.

Our descendants will be aghast at the blind eye we turn to the abuse, the numbers and the futility 

I rehearse these facts now – and not for the first time in The Spectator – because at least for the next few months we have a Justice Secretary keen to make small start in edging us towards a more humane approach. Alex Chalk has already used his powers to allow the early release (35-60 days) of certain prisoners (not seriously violent, sex or terrorist offenders) and met the usual howls of protest from elements on the Tory right and other groups – as though those released early were not anyway going to be released in five to nine weeks’ time. Mr Chalk has been able to face this protest down, force majeure, because our prisons are bursting at the seams, and at one point recently there were only some 500 remaining places across the whole prison estate.

So the safety valve of early release has done its emergency job, while the government’s prison-building programme to deliver 20,000 extra places and relieve overcrowding is progressing well. But Chalk (and the official policy of this government) has a deeper-rooted change planned for statute, and it’s ready for parliamentary approval and royal assent: a Bill that would adjust – hardly more than adjust – sentencing policy. The Bill would in fact strengthen sentences for some of the most serious offenders but mark a shift away from the shortest custodial sentences, where (it’s argued, to my mind convincingly) the influence of prison life for relatively minor offenders appears to be corrupting rather than reforming. Re-offending rates for these prisoners are particularly alarming: 55 per cent. For suspended sentences the rate is half that.

The Justice Secretary’s modest proposal comes with a strengthening of non-custodial measures such as tagging, community payback schemes and court orders short of incarceration. The benefit is twofold. First, it reduces pressure on prison places and so contributes to making the prison experience less degrading; and secondly, for those minor offenders who no longer spend time inside, it increases the chances of their going straight after their sentence is over.

So if we’re talking civilised reform, this sentencing bill will help. And if we’re talking politics and the next general election, I cannot believe this is going to lose support for the Tories. It’s not as if the opposition is likely to use prison reform as a stick with which to beat them, and I bet there are hundreds of thousands of Conservative-minded voters (like me) who’ll in fact be reassured by evidence that the party hasn’t lurched in a nasty direction. Nevertheless there are rumours that Rishi Sunak has become bothered about claims that rapists will be tramping across people’s vegetable gardens (the legislation will not of course apply to rapists or any serious offenders). This is not the Sunak I recognise, the Sunak of whom Chalk has been a die-hard supporter.

It’s possible the PM is flinching because of an argument once advanced by Michael Howard (in untypically thoughtless vein) that ‘prison works’, since so long as anyone is in prison they cannot commit a crime. This must be called out for its sheer absurdity. Recidivism is a fact of life. Many prisoners will, and many won’t, commit further crimes after release. A driver who caused death by dangerous driving may drive dangerously again. Some burglars steal again. The science of criminology remains unable to say with confidence who will or won’t re-offend. Once a prisoner has served his sentence (however long), those who supervised him will rarely be able, hand on heart, to certify he’s unlikely to re-offend. So are we saying that unless they can be sure, he should be detained indefinitely? If so, prepare to double – treble, quadruple – our prison numbers.

I commend to the present Prime Minister a former home secretary’s view: ‘A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment… and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man: these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.’

That was Winston Churchill in July 1910. Have we really regressed since then?