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Prison Population

I am grateful for the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s concern for my innocent victimhood. I do not regard those ideas as platitudes. I believe in community sentencing and considering how we can prevent reoffending in the long term. We are doing a considerable amount of work and putting extra resources into drug treatment orders, which is much more than what happened when the right hon. and learned Gentleman was in office. There is a big problem with drugs in the United Kingdom today, and we need to examine imaginative ways to deal with it. Drug treatment orders are important. We are doing a great deal of work on the type of person who is likely to become an offender. When people enter the criminal justice system, they have often gone too far down the line to get them out of it. Perhaps we can achieve a cross-party consensus on some of those issues, and I hope that the right hon. and learned Gentleman uses his influence on the liberal tendency in his party to make that happen. We can make a difference, and I hope that we will.