Two nights ago, I was rung up by a journalist on The Times and asked to comment on some of the sentences being handed out by the courts in the aftermath.  I think quite a few have been over the top, and said so.  The next morning I was asked to do Sky News off the back of the Times story and the media snowball began.  By the end of yesterday, I had done just about every media outlet in the country, and quite a few from abroad. Here is the statement I made once I’d spent long enough in the office to get something out in writing via the press office, and here are a couple of pieces of subsequent coverage.

I think what I said was reasonable, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting the criminal justice system should just ignore the many offences committed during the disturbances.  Unfortunately, very little of the country’s reaction to the riots is about reason and suffice to say I’ve received a lively public response, including the accusation from one very angry punter that I had brought England to its knees.

Sorry about that.

The News of the World was certainly no friend of penal reform.  Both NOTW and The Sun have longstanding memberships of the ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ club.  Pandering to the News International tabloid agenda on law and order inspired New Labour to double the prison population in search of positive headlines and the blessing of Rupert Murdoch.  Most recently, both titles have campaigned vigorously to see Ken Clarke sacked for his liberal sentencing reforms (although his pro-European stance may have inspired the ferocity of the assault).

Andy Coulson was no friend of penal reform either.  As David Cameron’s director of communications, Coulson is believed to have argued against the Clarke reforms and there were a raft of stories spinning against the Ministry of Justice that emanated from Downing Street.

Just before the general election, the Howard League had a direct run-in with Mr Coulson.  We got wind that he had convinced Cameron to give an interview to, yes, the News of the World, in which the Conservative leader would throw his weight behind a longstanding Sun/NOTW campaign to bring back prison ships.  Prison ships had not hitherto been on the agenda for a thoughtful shadow justice team that had spent some time developing much of the agenda that is now being enacted by Clarke in government.  In the end, we spoilt the NOTW exclusive by giving it to a number of rivals the day before, mixed in with some invective on the cynical opportunism of the move.

The resulting furore was perhaps the first time since Gordon Brown had become Prime Minister that David Cameron looked vulnerable as leader of the opposition.  To my mind, it also highlighted the dangers of hiring a former tabloid editor to be your director of communications.  The full extent of how unwise it was for Cameron to appoint Andy Coulson is now clear for all to see.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the irony that a newspaper which liked nothing more than vilifying prisoners and destroying any prospects of penal reform may shortly see a number of its former employees jailed, including quite possibly Mr Coulson himself.  There is an increasing likelihood that journalists will soon join former members of parliament and peers of the realm as a disproportionately represented demographic of the prison population.

Beyond this pleasing irony, does the demise of the News of the World and the weakening of News International generally, herald a new dawn for penal reform?  Could a political class free from the demand to kowtow to Murdoch’s agenda find the space opened to lead a more rational debate on law and order issues?  If the phone hacking scandal moves out to embrace other tabloid newspapers – in particular, the Daily Mail – might we see a reversal of the media culture which has had such overweening influence over the formation of criminal justice policy in this country?

Possibly.  But with readerships in steady decline, the influence of the press was already waning.  And in one particular way, the transforming media landscape might well be positive for penal reform.

Finland is often cited as an example of a nation which has seen its prison population fall over many decades.  When I visited Helsinki with the Commission on English Prisons Today, Finnish justice officials told us that crime was not really an issue for the press in their country.  It was reported, of course, but in fairly neutral terms.  Why might this be the case?

In Finland, people largely buy their newspapers by subscription.  For this reason, there is no real incentive for the Finnish papers to compete with each other for sensational headlines that will catch the eye at the newsagent.  Plastering mugshots of notorious crime suspects on the front page is unlikely to shift extra copies.  Without an overbearing focus on high profile and heinous crimes (which are thankfully rare both in Finland and here), the Finns are more likely to form their view of crime based on the more mundane offences committed and brought to justice locally.

What has happened in Finland could also happen here.  The effect of the internet on the newspaper industry is seeing the gradual move to some kind of payment and subscription model.  It is possible that this model will change the way the news is reported over time, and that crime will become less of a focus for the news sites of the future.

Here is one final little irony then.  Those newspapers which are currently trailblazing pay walls in this country are the News International titles, including indeed the former News of the World.

So what do G4S do? Announce they will axe more than 120 jobs.

It should be emphasised that the research also reveals problems with community sentences themselves, problems which highlight the need to properly invest in immediate and intensive community intervention.  If you turn up at court and get sent to prison then you are behind bars by the end of the day.  Currently, if you turn up at court and get a community sentence, you may not commence an order until weeks or even months later.  The prisoners we spoke to also said they found it difficult to comply with community orders which were sporadic and elongated out over many weeks.  These things have to change.

Back to Clarke, and the worry is that political pressure will do more than simply see the sentencing discount scrapped.  For example, if Clarke’s proposals to restrict the disastrous indeterminate sentence for public protection were to be diluted, or even deleted, then the struggling and sclerotic penal system will be in very dire straits indeed.

I’m not going to say much about Clarke, other than to link to this excellent column by Suzanne Moore on the issue.  And only in passing shall I remark on Ed Miliband’s opportunism in abandoning what might have been a coherent strategy for a quick tactical win at PMQs.  Neither shall I dwell on the fact that Miliband’s attack on Clarke was doubly opportunistic in that it saw one politician attack another for what was essentially misspeaking, for which all politicians should remind themselves of there but for the grace of God, go I.  Nor should I waste much time pointing out that Miliband’s subsequent self-justifying opinion piece in the Independent carried no coherent policy alternative on reform and rivalled Lars Von Trier for hole/self/digging action.

Instead, I want to focus briefly on what is an extraordinary assault on Clarke by Matthew d’Ancona, the media’s emissary on all things Cameroon.  His column in today’s Sunday Telegraph is unequivocal that Clarke should go, which is surprising only in that while the right of the Conservative party might be expected to make hay over Clarke’s remarks, one would expect a Cameroon to be more circumspect.

The inspiration of this piece is Andrew Cooper, the former pollster turned director of strategy at Number 10.  Cooper, we are told, is “deeply concerned” about the open flank the Tories are leaving on law and order.  Penal reform may not be polling well.

Rather than pit the ethical argument for reform against political calculation, which hasn’t served the cause too well over recent years, let’s look at this on pragmatic terms.  After all, Cooper has previously been described as offering Cameron a “pitiless empiricism” by d’Ancona.  A relentless focus on what the polling data tells you is unlikely to advocate a full speed navigation towards Ken Clarke’s sentencing plans.  Given the Westminster Village is many many miles away from real life in Britain, you can forgive it’s denizens for relying on the focus groups.  But sometimes ‘pitiless empiricism’ is not enough and can actually lead the Westminster Village into even more unreal territory.  That may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s true.

While any reform that appears soft on crime faces a rough ride in the court of public opinion, abandoning sentencing reform only makes sense if there is a credible alternative.  Just as Ed Miliband was unable to offer any alternative (apparently he was for prison reform, but against shorter sentences, well anyway it was nice that he namechecked the Howard League), d’Ancona/Cooper struggle to come up with a Plan B for the Ministry of Justice.  We are told, quite rightly, that Clarke’s proposals are motivated first and foremost by reconciling his departmental spending plans with fiscal reality:

It is quite true that the Ministry of Justice must find savings of 23 per cent by 2014-15. Clarke’s strategy is to reduce both the number of custodial sentences and the time prisoners actually spend in jail: a recipe for disaster. The MoJ should instead be mandated by No 10 to look much more aggressively at saving money by the contracting out of prison services and – above all else – to deal once and for all with the 10,700 foreign prisoners in British jails. On Tuesday, Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, disclosed to the Commons the grand total of foreign inmates expected to be transferred to their countries of origin in 2011/12: namely, “about 60″. Until that scandal is dealt with, not a single measure should be taken to deter or reduce custodial sentences.

The idea that the Ministry of Justice can cut its spending by a quarter without addressing the ever-ballooning prison population is sheer nonsense.  Private contracting out of prison services is never going to shave that much off the budget, and indeed what plans the department does have on contracting out through payment by results may not deliver savings*.  For example, the use of PBR by the Department of Work and Pensions saw that department’s central administration costs rise, and the National Audit Office has stated that the end result was “not value for money”.  The foreign prisoner issue, meanwhile, is not a simple one and has defeated a long line of Justice and Home Secretaries.  The idea that John Reid or Jack Straw just didn’t try hard enough to solve it is laughable.

Empiricism is all very well, but must be carried through all stages of the governing process if it is to earn the adjective ‘pitiless’.  What might seem crystal clear from opinion polling still needs to translate into credible policy and realistic delivery.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  I know what the pitiless empiricist would observe.

*The concept of introducing payment by results into probation is currently being examined by the Justice Select Committee.  I gave oral evidence last week which you can watch here.

It has been a truly great holiday, not that we have been doing much travel-wise.  But the weather in London has been fantastic and my wife and I started the break off with the mother of all spring cleans.  It has done wonders mentally and emotionally for both of us.  For once, the whole rebirth schtick feels real.

Anyway, I’m too busy enjoying things to blog at length.  But the Better Half (because she really is the Better Half) has blogged about something I was going to blog about – the writer Elif Batuman and her book on Russian literature which has just been released in the UK – which saves me from bothering.  So I will just link to it instead, not least because the passing Tron comparison is pleasing.

There is a welter of stuff about David Foster Wallace appearing on the net, in the run up to the release of his posthumous unfinished novel The Pale King. It includes this fine radio documentary broadcast recently, which someone has helpfully posted to YouTube.

Perhaps the single best thing though that I’ve seen in the last few days on DFW is a wonderful look at the great man and his work through one of his hitherto unknown (at least to me) passions: the self-help book.

Birmingham is a massive prison, with almost 1,500 prisoners, and suffers from many problems associated with local prisons, including chronic overcrowding, few activities for prisoners, as well as a constant churn of prisoners in and out, with many being jailed far from home.  These are all largely problems that are systemic, and outside of any particular provider’s control.

What about the things that a provider might influence?  In the most recent of a series of critical inspectorate reports, the Chief Inspector of Prisons wrote that “a high proportion of prisoners said that they felt unsafe at Birmingham” and that “staff-prisoner relationships remained a considerable weakness at Birmingham”.

Given that safety and poor staff-prisoner relations are key problems at Birmingham, it is odd that the government has decided that the private sector would be better placed to run this huge, complex institution. Because concerns around safety and poor staff-prisoner relations are common features of private sector prisons.

The National Audit Office overview of the performance of PFI prisons found that they do not “perform as well on safety [in comparison to public sector prisons]. For example, there are relatively high levels of assaults in PFI prisons…In our qualitative interviews, prisoners also expressed concerns about safety issues related to the relative inexperience of staff in private prisons.”

Staff at the lower levels in private prisons do tend to be inexperienced in comparison to Prison Service employees.  This is because private prisons pay their prison officers considerably less than their public sector counterparts (although at the most senior levels of governor grade this contrast is reversed).  The prison service pay review body found that there was a 39% lead in average basic pay for public sector prison officers over private sector prison officers.  This was raised to a staggering 61% once holiday and pension benefits were factored in.  By paying the vast majority of their staff less, the private provider can offer the sort of ‘efficiencies’ that will look good in any market testing exercise.

One of the key factors in good staff-prisoner relations, on the other hand, is a decent ratio of staff to prisoners.  The fewer staff and the more prisoners, and the more staff will need to rely on static security such as bars, gates and CCTV.

Not only do private sector prisons tend to employ poorly paid and inexperienced staff, but they also tend to employ less of them.  A recent parliamentary question on prison manpower found that while the ratio of public sector staff to prisoners is 1 officer for every 3.03 prisoners, the ratio of private sector staff to prisoners is 1 officer for every 3.78 prisoners.

Setting aside ethical objections to introducing the profit motive to punishment, the evidence that the private sector can succeed with Birmingham where the public sector failed is thin on the ground.  Indeed, the evidence suggests that the private sector might actually do a lot worse.