Bad news in today’s Telegraph: the prisons crisis is upon us again, despite a major early-release programme introduced in July.

Ministers are facing a new prison population crisis despite ordering the early release of thousands of inmates. Campaigners say they expect the population to climb back to a new record high within days.

Sorry to sound like a stuck record, but when will they accept it’s time for a whole new approach to prison, with a focus on rehabilitation instead of mass incarceration?

Or do they actually like spending more on crime and punishment than anyone in the OECD? (see Figure 3 on page 20)

We all know that the Labour Government doesn’t have the best track record of delivering IT projects on budget and on time (and we’re not even going to mention ID cards). So it’s with a heavy heart that I bring you news of another Whitehall computer-related farce, this time from the shiny new Ministry of Justice.

The National Offender Management System was supposed to keep tabs on the country’s 300,000 prisoners and probationers. The budget for the system of £234 million has, according to The Guardian, “proved to be optimistic” - with the current estimate for the project reaching four times that, well on its way to £1 billion. Consequently, the Government has now frozen the whole project and cancelled the rollout to thirty more prisons that was supposed to happen by the end of the year.

The Ministry of Justice last night confirmed that a “rapid review” of the custody-Noms information system, officially known as C-Nomis, is under way. Ministers are to decide in mid-September how much of the project can be salvaged. It is expected that it will be adopted in a scaled-down form for the 140 prisons in England and Wales but is unlikely to be rolled out across the probation service. Cancellation could involve paying the contractors, EDS, a £50m penalty.

The Government has spent £155m so far on the project. Value for money, as ever.

Read the full story here.

On Tuesday I noted the revelation that court cells cost £1600 a night, just a whisper more expensive than a deluxe suite at the Ritz.

But it turns out I was duped. Humble apologies.

The £120,000 the Home Office has paid out for court cell accommodation wasn’t for the whole of this year, it was for just 20 nights back in January and February. This was admitted by the Ministry of Justice this morning.

And it paid for not 77 prisoners, but a measly 12.

That’s £10,000 a night each. And I can’t find a hotel in London that charges that much; even the capacious Prince of Wales suite at the Ritz is only £5,500. A snip!

A little story we dug up - you can read it here - keeping prisoners in court cells while the prisons are too overcrowded to take them has cost more than a deluxe suite at the Ritz.

Of course, the Ritz doesn’t have quite the same level of security, though you are in for a wrestle with the doorman if you try to cross the threshold in ripped jeans…

Spiralling self-harm, overcrowding, hunger strikes, wrongful detention - sadly just another day in the prison service thanks to the government’s mishandling of last year’s foreign prisoners crisis.

The whole sorry affair is exposed today by Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, in a report cheerily entitled:

Foreign National Prisoners – Ineffective Systems, Rising Self-Harm And Population Pressure

Basically, after the Home Office revealed 1,000 foreign national prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation (if you’ve forgotten, the BBC explains it here) they panicked and started locking up everyone they could think of, including some British people who, it is to be supposed, looked a bit foreign.

We think there are now about 1,300 foreign nationals who have finished their sentence but are still locked up. It costs about £150,000 a night to keep them there - and many are actually desperate to go home. All in all, a sorry state of affairs.

There’s something of a prison staff crisis in many of our prisons, figures released this morning show. Belmarsh is 57 officers short - meaning more than 1 in 10 posts is vacant.

Other prisons facing problems are Manchester, Woodhill, Chelmsford, Wakefield and Frankland, all with over 30 vacancies.  For Chelmsford that’s 13% of the staff.

This comes on top of serious problems with staff recruitment for the proposed new prison in Kennet, Merseyside. John Reid tells us they’ve only recruited 30 staff so far. At the end of January, the Home Office took the Prison Officers’ Association to court for apparently encouraging industrial action prompted in part by the Kennet proposals, which the POA believe (and here) could make staffing shortages worse.

It’s all getting pretty messy, that’s for sure.

With prisons bursting at the seams, and prisoners spending nights in poilce or court cells, it’s no surprise people have been wondering if the government is desperate enough to put higher risk prisoners in low security prisons.

They can, however, only put prisoners in the right category of prison, or higher - so a Category A prisoner cannot be put into a Category D (or Open) prison. Only if a prisoner has been recategorised can he (or she) be moved. So the question is really whether the government has been tweaking the categorisation rules to make it easier to downgrade people, and make space in High Security prisons.
The Home Office now says categorically it has done nothing of the sort and Prison Service Order 0900 which governs categorisation is still in force, and hasn’t been changed in the last two years. So why does the Prison Officers Association disagree? They issued a press release in January claiming:

The POA have exposed the scam of continually changing the allocation criteria to shoe horn prisoners into open conditions to crisis manage an ever increasing population.

The prison service, have disposed of their Prison Service Order 0900 outlining specifically the criteria for categorisation and allocation in favour of a more easily changed IT based process.

More investigation needed, it seems.

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!

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.