Charles Clarke2 It doesn’t happen often but the government has the right idea here. Because we know they will never do the things necessary to prevent crime from happening in the first place (supporting family structure, providing first-class education, reducing welfare, arresting and imprisoning larger numbers of criminals and so on) their only real focus can be on reforming the miscreant while they have him.

The UK’s reoffending rate is very poor - about 80% within two years of release - and more than one commentator has pointed out that when you imprison a criminally-inclined person and then simply release him at the end of his sentence - back into the arms of his criminally-inclined friends - you actually support the person’s descent into persistent offending.

In his first keynote speech on penal policy, Mr Clarke said the emphasis needed to shift away from a contest to see who could be toughest and towards stopping people re-offending when they had finished their sentences.

“We need to move away from the idea that prisons can be universities of crime towards them being institutions that ensure offenders become working and productive members of society upon release…we have to make reducing the number of re-offenders the central focus of our policy and practice…It is essential if we are to cut crime.”

Mr Clarke said he wanted to devise a system built around “a form of contract between the criminal and the state where each individual in prison, on remand or on probation is required to commit to a non-criminal future, to no future re-offending.”

I’m deeply sceptical of government intervention in private lives and I suspect that Labour’s tendency to believe in its own innate power to make the world a perfect place - a delusion not cured by the fact that almost all areas of UK life are in decline - will be the undoing of this plan. But the thinking is good so I’ll cross my fingers and hope they follow though and do something useful.