Populist as opposed to effective penal policies are not the sole preserve of the Tory party. During the last Labour Government, I worked in Holloway prison and I vividly recall the then Home Secretary cancelling a children's Christmas party simply in response to some lurid newspaper headlines that completely ignored the needs of children. We constantly had to remind ourselves that the mantra 'every child matters', which had been introduced as a result of the Victoria Climbié scandal, did not apply to the child of a prisoner.

There is no official record of how many children of prisoners there are, but the Ministry of Justice admits to estimates of something in the region of 200,000. We have to bear in mind that some prisoners will not disclose that they have children when they're taken in. The Families and Friends of Prisoners here in Wales estimates that 12,000 children of prisoners are living in south Wales alone. They found that 95 per cent of these children had had to move home when their parent went to prison, which also means moving school and losing your friends. It is little wonder that this upheaval in the child's life leads to depression and behaviour problems in school.

The Visiting Mum project set up by the Prison Advice and Care Trust does enable Welsh children to visit their mums in Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire once a month. For some children, this is 150 miles away from where they live. The evaluation of even this visibly brief contact shows that there is a reduction in anxiety, improved behaviour at home and in school, and less self-harm amongst the mothers.

So, the work that voluntary organisations like PACT and FFOP continue to do is extremely valuable but cannot disguise the fact that having a parent in prison triples the chances of that child themselves becoming a prisoner in later life. For boys, the outcome is even grimmer: two thirds will follow the path of their parent into prison. 

It's now 11 years since the widely applauded Corston report recommended the need to consider the best interests of children in sentencing policy, and the replacement of all women's prisons with small custodial women's centres. Unfortunately, little has changed. Women continue to be more harshly treated than male offenders, and we now have over 13,000 women entering the prison system every year. Nearly half of these are on remand—much greater numbers of them than men—and less than half of those women are found guilty when it comes to court—or less than half of those women found guilty are given a prison sentence once the case is heard. So, they could have avoided going to prison in the first place. Women are twice as likely to be sent to prison for a first offence. Overwhelmingly, they are there for theft rather than violence or other serious offences. Eighty per cent of that theft involves shoplifting. Often they're stealing to feed their kids or to support their partner's drug habit. About half these women have been the victims of crimes much more serious than the ones for which they are being imprisoned.

Many men go to prison for non-violent offences too, and given the prevalence of mental health issues amongst prisoners, it's deeply disappointing that courts in England and Wales are not using the mental health treatment requirement available as a sentencing option since 2003. It directs an offender to undergo mental health treatment as part of a community sentence or a suspended sentence order. They have the potential to reduce the prison population very significantly, but their numbers have been falling in the last nine years and they're now at their lowest point in a decade. In the last five years, they've only been involved in less than 1 per cent of all community orders or suspended sentences, and this is failing to get to the heart of the problem, which is the reason why people are going into prison at all, and why the reoffending rate is so high. In fact, it is higher than similar offenders serving a community sentence. So, being in prison makes it more likely that you will reoffend.

The House of Commons Justice Committee reported that the re-conviction rate for prisoners serving less than a year was 70 per cent in 2008, compared with 38 per cent for those sentenced to carry out unpaid work or other community sentences. This cycle of reoffending costs our economy between £9.5 billion and £15 billion a year. Other countries manage things a lot better. Sweden is closing prisons rather than spending £200 million building new ones. The director general of Sweden's Prison and Probation Service explained in 2014, 

'Our role is not to punish. The punishment is the prison sentence: they have been deprived of their freedom. The punishment is that they are with us'.

So, looking at the needs of their prisoners, he explains, 

'it is not one problem that our clients face, but two or more, sometimes as many as seven or eight...including perhaps drugs, alcohol and psychiatric problems. And these problems did not just appear overnight. These are things that have developed over years. Most of the sentences...are relatively short. The window of opportunity...to make a change is very small, so we need to start from day one. Our strategy is to cover the whole range of problems, not just the one problem.'

Now, Holland, too, has a crisis in their penal system, but it's the opposite of ours—they have a shortage of prisoners. They've already closed 19 prisons and are planning to close even more, unless they can persuade other countries to send prisoners to them. The deputy governor of Norgerhaven, a high-security prison, says, 

'If somebody has a drug problem we treat their addiction, if they are aggressive we provide anger management, if they have got money problems we give them debt counselling. So we try to remove whatever it was that caused the crime. The inmate himself or herself must be willing to change but our method has been very effective. Over the last 10 years, our work has improved more and more.

'Persistent offenders—known...as 'revolving-door criminals'—are eventually given two-year sentences and tailor-made rehabilitation programmes.'

So, a decade ago the Netherlands had one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe, but now, fewer than 10 per cent of them return to prison after their release. This is a great success story. Compare that with England and Wales, where roughly half of those serving short sentences reoffend within two years, and the figure is even higher for young adults. Proportionately, the Dutch prison population is three times lower than that of England and Wales and they save an awful lot of money not sending people to—. Even the most overcrowded jails here are costing us more than a place at Eton.

So, do we have the capacity to change and do we have the political will to change? The new Secretary of State for Justice made a speech yesterday that included some helpful noises about aspirations to bring down the population in prison, and that the prison system needs to be aiming to enable people to go into places of humanity, hope and aspiration. So, I hope that we can persuade the UK Government that we can be allowed to trial some new ways of working on community sentences, on small women's centres or places of detention, and work on the causes of the reasons why people have offended in the first place, so that we don't see them coming back again and again.