Cameron's u-turn on prisons

It's hard to find much to disagree with in Simon Jenkin's eulogy to the lost hope of sensible thinking about criminal justice. I'm not sure which is worse, David Cameron's shameless flip-flop in the face of tabloid hysteria (pretty shocking to hear Ken Clark described as 'the paedophile's pal'), or Ed Milliband's equally shameless attempt to outflank him on the right.

What's most depressing, of course, is that this type of get tough, lock 'em up 'policy' is, on almost all available evidence, worse than useless. Whether we're talking about system contact and deviancy amplification, the well known link between experience of heavy-handed criminal justice interventions and lower levels of trust and the legitimacy of the law, or what happens to people once they actually get to prison, the more heavy handed and punitive the system, the more likely it is that the behaviour of those caught up in it will worsen, not improve.

It's not surprising that newspaper hacks appear incapable of thinking along such subtle lines (although it's hardly rocket science). Most British newspapers are unable to see anything in other than total black and white (for all that, as Orwell foresaw, black sometimes becomes white and particularly vice versa). What is depressing, though, is yet another pathetic abdication in the face of their imagined power. As Jenkins notes, the idea that tabloid newspapers represent the country is frankly laughable, and the evidence that they affect the way people think thin indeed.