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Prison Population

Does the Minister accept that in the past 10 years four Home Secretaries have responded to media pressure by taking away discretion on sentencing from the courts and putting them under pressure, which has dramatically increased the prison population to almost double what it was when I was Home Secretary, without paying the slightest heed to the inevitable moment when they would hit the buffers and there was no accommodation? Although I do not know what the new Ministry of Justice is for, except perhaps to make the Minister an innocent victim—he has made a statement about a fiasco for which he is plainly not responsible—will the new Department produce a change of culture in which the platitudes about community sentences and making prison only for those who need it are turned into reality by returning proper discretion to the courts and ensuring that prisons are used only for violent, dangerous and recidivist criminals in conditions in which there is some hope that some of them will be rehabilitated?