I'm particularly concerned that, as the figures have grown, the focus has gone much more onto containment rather than training and rehabilitation, because those violent offenders usually do come out at some point, and there's a serious job there to ensure that they don't remain a threat to society. They do require very serious treatment and rehabilitation.

I think we ought to look at this whole question from the point of view of the various jurisdictions at the moment, so the jurisdictions that have policy over prisons—penal policy—are England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. While Scotland has a similar pattern of imprisonment to England and Wales, although it is a bit lower, the pattern in Northern Ireland is vastly lower. It approaches much more the best practice in western European countries. I think that if we were to take responsibility for criminal justice, and the reason I've argued, over the years, for criminal justice policy is that it would allow us the most important thing, it would allow us to set sentencing policy and control our prisons. If you look at federal systems around the world, it's very common for community level policing and for most issues relating to criminal justice and the prison system to be at the level of the federal unit, and central Government retains responsibility for very high crimes and misdemeanours, the likes of terrorism and high-security prisons. That division seems to me a very logical one.

I'm very concerned that we don't always realise how bad the situation is in Welsh prisons for which we have responsibility to provide health services and education services. Swansea and Cardiff prisons are badly overcrowded. Both of them are in, I believe, the top-10 most overcrowded prisons; that means over 150 per cent capacity. This, I think, is a serious concern to us.

Jenny has referred to international comparisons, and this statistic that we have the highest level of imprisonment in western Europe certainly makes me uncomfortable. If it were working, I suppose you could then have the basis of an argument, 'Well, you know, we are tougher for very good reason,' but I have to say that I think there is a very, very sound centre-right argument for a considerable reduction in the number of people we imprison. I'd like to go back, if not to the 1920s, when the average prison population fluctuated between 10,000 and 14,000, at least to the 1980s, the age of Thatcher, when the prison population hovered around about 45,000. There was a great increase in the 1990s under both Governments—sorry, both a Conservative Government and then a Labour Government continued this pattern. We really have gone in the wrong direction.

There are some categories of this question that I think need particular reflection, as well: the number of care leavers in prison is something that we need to be very much aware of. Lord Laming's report last year, or just the year before, into the number of looked-after children that are brought into the criminal justice system because of patterns that are not applied to their peer group, but get applied to them because they are, quite frankly, seen as liable to be potential offenders, again, greatly troubles me.

But I do not think this is a particularly partisan issue. There are very, very sound arguments both on the left and the right for a better prison policy than we currently have, both on grounds of humanity, but also in terms of the effectiveness of what we're doing. At the moment, the system is failing, and it needs to change.