So we are all supposed to sleep safely in our beds now the government has announced an extra 10,500 prison places in up to three, super sized ‘titan’ prisons? An effective use of £2bn of taxpayers’ money, if building more prison places produced a safer society. But, like motorways, the more you build the fuller they become.

And does a prison building programme reduce crime? Prison works in the sense that it takes people out of circulation. It’s true that once offenders are incarcerated they can’t commit crime, but the trouble is they keep coming out and reoffending. We all know there are some very dangerous and violent offenders that need to be locked up to protect the public but there are thousands of offenders who are trapped in a revolving door of prison and crime.

One ex-offender I met recently has received 23 prison sentences over 18 years and that’s a sadly typical story. For these people, the short sentenced, mainly nonviolent offenders who make up just under half of the prison population, prison doesn’t work. 65 per cent of adults and 75 per cent of young offenders are reconvicted within two years of release and that’s just the ones that are caught. Prisons are universities of crime where an offender can learn myriad criminal skills. For many offenders prison is not a deterrent, it’s an occupational hazard. A recent study by the Home Office of drug dealers in prison found that most of them continued their business undeterred from within prison walls, earning up to £100,000 a year each. And finally there is the cost- £41,000 per year for an adult and £51,000 a year for a young offender. Money well spent if prison produced law-abiding citizens – but they don’t.

Prisons have become the ultimate social service, warehousing the mentally ill and addicted: they are full of men and women who have been abused, are in care, have been excluded from school, and are unable to read and write. For these people prison is a way of life. Institutionalized from an early age, a prison term means nothing, in fact it means three meals a day, getting your washing done and not having to face up nor take responsibility for your crimes. Building more prisons is an expensive way of making many offenders worse.

In order to make prison work we have to bring down the numbers in them by reserving prisons for serious and violent offenders. We have to reduce the manufacturing of social failure by really focusing on tackling the causes of crime like poverty, supporting struggling parents, better education for all, giving young people more constructive activities and tackling drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness.

We also need a broad range of well-resourced alternatives to custody for those who have committed crime like priority- and prolific-offender programmes, targeting the offenders committing the most crimes and involving the police, probation and other providers. We need community payback schemes focused on high-crime areas where offenders do compulsory work to make these communities safer, restorative justice schemes where offenders have to face up to their victims, and drug treatment programmes and diversion to treatment for those with mental illness.

Will the public buy this? Numerous public opinion polls including those commissioned by SmartJustice show the public is a lot more sensible about how to reduce crime than the media make them out to be. Crime reduction is about effective long term solutions not punitive knee-jerk reactions and building our way out of the crisis by providing yet more prison places is not the answer.