Britain’s prison system is brutal and broken. Why does reforming it seem so impossible? | Simon Jenkins

Prisoners are being released early because jails are overflowing. We know what better policies would look like - but politicians won't act

Guess which public service is hardly ever mentioned in stories about austerity? The answer is prisons. Last week, prison governors were told by the justice minister, Alex Chalk, to send prisoners home two months early to free up cells because 99.7% of prisons were full. He must have been desperate. Imagine hospitals being told to send patients home two weeks early because car parks were full of ambulances. Imagine schools leaving students unattended in classrooms because there weren't enough teachers. For a sign of a society in decay, you need to look no further than our booming prison population.

In 1960, there were 30,000 people in prison in England and Wales and the government of the day declared it a crisis". In 2000, there were about 60,000; the present total of 85,000 is predicted to rise to up to 105,000 by 2027. The UK as a whole has almost 150 prisoners per 100,000 people; by contrast, Germany has 70 per 100,000. The nation is prison-mad, and has the largest prison population per head in western Europe. The total number was boosted in 2020 when normal sentence remission was reduced from half to a third in what seemed a fatuous bid to get tough on crime". To that was added 25,000 immigrants and asylum seekers in detention - in effect prisoners awaiting Home Office bureaucracy at the taxpayers' expense. Such is the chaos in the court system that there are also 15,000 prisoners on remand, legally innocent until they are proven guilty. This is not cheap. Prison costs 48,000 a year for each inmate. That is almost the same as Eton, perhaps a preferable source of rehabilitation.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist