What should we do when there’s no cell space left in our disordered jails? The prison population figures published yesterday show a small drop compared to last week, with nearly 87,900 currently incarcerated.

There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make prisoners worse.

We are locking far too many people up for the good we can do them and society

Our overcrowded prisons are falling apart. Too few staff looking after too many prisoners with nothing meaningful to do in brutalising conditions is a recipe for chronic instability. It does much to explain why the prison service can’t attract and keep good staff and why our jails release alienated survivors of a system where ‘rehabilitation’ is a fantasy. More than half of all adult offenders released after prison sentences of a year or less go on to reoffend. A business making widgets with a failure rate this bad would go bust overnight.

So the Justice Secretary finds himself in a bind. Alex Chalk knows that in the short term letting prisoners out earlier than their release date, including those convicted of violent offences, is the only way to stop our dismal criminal justice conveyor belt from juddering to a complete halt.

Chalk has had to increase the scope of this fraught process to keep pace with demand for a system that’s 99 per cent full. What started off as a modest release on supervision 18 days early is now likely to expand to up to two months. That’s a huge additional burden on a probation service already reeling from its huge workload and the lethal mistakes it has made. A recent example are the ‘very stark failures’ by overstretched and inexperienced probation staff which were found to have contributed to the brutal deaths of a mother and three children in Derbyshire in 2021 murdered by a man serving a suspended sentence for arson at the time. He is now serving a whole life sentence. This is the service now expected to take on more risk at short notice.

The Justice Secretary also can’t build himself out of this crisis. A new prison programme designed initially to close our fetid Victorian dungeons is now merely adding to that capacity at a rate that still hasn’t a hope of keeping pace with projections of a prison population north of 100,000 by 2027. What does this mean in practice? Just last year a prisoner found guilty of assaulting a prison officer with boiling water had his conviction quashed due in part because of overcrowding. Would you work in a place like that?

Longer term, Mr Chalk is pressing ahead with plans to abolish short sentences altogether with a new Sentencing Bill that presumes custody of 12 months or more will be suspended unless there are exceptional circumstances. This, together with the latest attempt to reduce the population of foreign nationals in the prison system could create some much needed headroom.

There is good evidence to say that suspended sentences are a better way of encouraging reform than the custodial alternative. It’s not a very hard case to make when you consider research that suggests 20 per cent of prisoners first got hooked on heroin inside the jail.

Some Conservative MPs are worried about the message this new legislation will send to citizens who perceive crime to be on the increase and police increasingly ineffectual at controlling it. In reality the picture is very mixed but perception is everything in an election cycle.

The reality is that we are locking far too many people up for the good we can do them and society. Retribution is important. Retribution without reform is impotent. The jailers, battered and harried, are leaving faster than they can be recruited. Those remaining struggle to keep themselves and those in their care fed and watered from one end of a shift to the other. Anything else – work, education, training and offending behaviour programmes – is a faltering luxury, not the essential recipe for rescuing human potential.

The cure is to have a prison system that has the time and space to deal with the truly dangerous – those guilty of violence against the person or the state. This will mean emptying prisons of people who in different ways cause harm to themselves and others and doing something to stop them. One example is the large numbers of people imprisoned for non-violent acquisitive crime, often after dozens of squandered chances to clean up the drug habit that fuels their offending. Let’s be clear, these people torture communities – but they should be locked up in secure NHS treatment facilities rather than prison where their offending is merely delayed or too often weaponised.

In reality, nobody much cares about prison, unless or until they become the victims of one of its feral graduates. Even then, the victims of crime are often poor themselves, with jail for those who prey on them acting as a community respite, not a solution, to entrenched generational offending. But occasionally, and this is one of those moments, the abject state of our prison system forces itself on to the front pages. An opportunity presents itself to question the basic assumptions about what prison is for and how much we are prepared to pay to make it work. We have got here by a combination of poor planning, inept corporate leadership and bad politics. Escaping the dire consequences of this will be that much harder.