Today, the Home Office tells us they don’t know how many people sentenced to life since 1997 have already been released.

This is rather surprising given that back in June last year they seemed perfectly able to access the information.

With the average life sentence now just 11 years – which makes rather a mockery of calling it “life” at all, it’s pretty important we know just how short some of these life sentences can be. Calling a one or two year sentence “life” is basically just a lie, and the government should come clean about it.

Of course, last time they came clean, the papers didn’t take kindly to the news that lifers were, as they put it, “roaming the streets”. Could the fear of bad publicity be what’s prompting Gerry Sutcliffe’s reticence? Surely not…

Is it just me, or is it rather worrying that the government is still relying on a decade-old report when it comes to evidence of mental health problems in the prison population?

Given this 1997 report revealed that 90% of offenders have some kind of mental health problem, and as many as 1 in 10 is functionally psychotic, you would have thought it worth keeping up to date with the scale of the problem.

Sadly, instead of investing money in mental health facilities, the government is determined to keep building extra prisons to warehouse people who desperately need treatment.

And on a less serious point, it even seems no-one’s sure when the report was actually done - in this answer just three days ago they said it was in 1998. Make up your mind, Gerry!

The government is awfully proud of their success in tackling anti-social behaviour.

Despite the fact that somewhere between 47% and 55% of ASBOs are breached, they remain a success, according to the ever-optimistic Vernon Coaker.

This is all based on the fact that last year, 1 in 6 people told the British Crime Survey (p53) they were troubled by anti-social behaviour, down from 1 in 5 in 2002/3. This is, apparently, the “true measure of our success” with ASBOs.

Funny, then, that the only change is almost solely down to a collapse in the number of people worried about burnt out or abandoned cars.

While that success is commendable, I really don’t think it has anything to do with ASBOs. Certainly, the last time I checked you couldn’t issue ASBOs against cars but maybe that’s next on the legislative agenda….

It’s becoming increasingly clear John Reid’s “plan” to build some new prisons is nothing of the sort. Today he tells us the project is “in the planning stages” so he doesn’t know how many cells will be built in each year, how much will be spent in each year, or really anything useful whatsoever.

The total cost estimate has gone up by £200m, though, since September when it was only going to cost us £1.5bn.

There are serious problems even with the two new prisons that Reid announced today - the Home Office still doesn’t have planning permission for the one in Woolwich, and even if everything does go to plan, the prisons will only deliver an extra 1300 places. Not much use when official estimates say the prison population could hit 102,000 by 2012.

What we really need is a wholesale rethink of the prison estate and the use of custody - and as luck would have it the Liberal Democrats have had a go already - you can read Nick Clegg’s proposals here.

We’ve known for a long time that the government doesn’t have a clue how many illegal immigrants there are in the UK. This makes a certain amount of sense - the whole point of being illegal is you try to stay out of the way of officials, even official statisticians.

But now John Reid claims he hasn’t the faintest idea how many people are in the country legally either, saying:

“It is not possible to say with accuracy how many legal immigrants are present in the country, because there is currently no means of counting those who leave the country of their own accord without informing the immigration authorities.”

OK, so it might not be possible to give an exact figure - but not even an estimate? Can they not make an educated guess? How are they going to get all these people to register for a biometric immigration document (aka foreign national ID Card) if they don’t know how many there are?