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Knife Crime

I am pleasantly surprised to say that I agree with every word that the hon. Gentleman says, given our previous exchanges in a debate on drugs and alcohol when we did not agree on everything. Does he agree that if we adopted the policy that short sentences should be served in the community, it would relieve some of the pressure on prisons and we could have more training and education in them? In the last Parliament, the Education and Skills Committee's report on prison education found that all the good intentions in adult and young offender institutions were being destroyed because there were not enough prison officers to take people from cells to training areas, and there were so few hours available it was meaningless.