As we have seen, the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, based on the just deserts theory of punishment as espoused by C.S. Lewis and other ethicists in reaction to the prevailing positivist treatment model, had led to a decline in the prison population. This was not to last. Howard put paid to that, and his Labour, Coalition and Conservative successors continued the same upward trend in numbers. This was unprecedented, and bucked the hopes of earlier generations.

In 1900 there were roughly 14,500 men and 3,000 women daily in prison in England and Wales. By the outbreak of the Great War it was 13,500 and 2,500 respectively, and numbers dropped during the course of the conflict to 9,000 and 2,000. By the outbreak of the Second World War the total was around 10,000 men and a few hundred women. Then, with the peace, began the ‘Age of Expansion’, an epoch from which we have not yet emerged. By 1949 the number of men had risen to 19,000 and women to 1,000. By 1964 the totals were 29,000 and 1,000; by 1974, 36,000 and 1,000; by 1984, 42,000 and 1,500. This was bad enough, but twenty years later the numbers had jumped to 70,000 and 4,500, culminating in 2014 when approximately 82,500 men and 4,000 women were in prison at any one time in England and Wales. Of these one in ten is under the age of twenty-one, a proportion greater than in any other West European country. Despite attempts to halt the upward trend by ministers worried about the capacity of prisons to cope and the cost to the public purse – Hurd in the late 1980s and more recently Clarke who during his time as Justice Secretary expressed his dismay that the prison population had doubled since his days as Home Secretary – they have remained stubbornly at this level ever since.