It's good to see that the Ministry of Justice is basing policy on evidence, as this Radio 4 programme lays out. However, it is too easy to look to the United States. Good though the Missouri System clearly is, it is a reaction to a national régime which locks up more offenders than anywhere in the free world. Surely, we should be examining systems closer to home - for instance, in the Netherlands, which has emptied so many of its own cells that she is importing prisoners from Norway.
Moreover, Glen Parva is only an experiment and one wonders whether it will survive the sort of attack from the Daily Mail which has done for previous progressive moves in the British prison system. I would like to think that if Wales were given responsibility for our own policing, prisons and probation, those measures could be routinely introduced here and that there would be a reduction in home-grown crime.
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