Why are English prisons full to capacity?

Since 1997 and the coming to power of New Labour, the rhetoric about “being tough on crime and the causes of crime” has been spewing endlessly out of the Whitehall press office. I believe that it was Jack Straw who famously coined this phrase originally, but if it’s not him saying it, then at least in principle it’s being bandied around by Tony Blair or one of his many Home Secretary’s, Blunkett, Clarke and most recently John Reid.

However, despite the rhetoric, the performance of this Labour government is abysmal, they have catastrophically failed on both counts. The prisons are so full, that BBC News reported earlier today that the Home Office have written to judges and magistrates asking them only to impose jail sentences for the most serious crimes.

Q1. Why after 10 years of Tony Blair’s leadership has crime increased to epidemic proportions with the prison population at its highest ever in the history of this nation?

Q2. If increasing numbers of people are being convicted of offences which justify incarceration, how does this square with – being tough on the causes of crime?

We all know that any doctor worth his salt treats the root cause of a disease and not just the symptoms. So how does New Labour treat the cause of crime, and why are they so patently ineffective?
For people to live honest and good lives they need to have a moral framework by which to live by. A Samurai warrior would call it his bushido. For hundreds of years Britain’s bushido has been the Judeo-Christian ethic. Moral and ethical values based upon the teachings of the old and New Testaments. This has worked well for Britain and indeed after embracing the bible as the instruction book for both personal and collective life in this country we became one of the foremost world powers. Now that we have cast off our imperialistic past and embraced all the good and wonderful promises of that most secular of states, The European Union we have now embraced a different creed, humanism. The trouble is it doesn’t work.
So we want to live without the constraints that a God centric faith provides, ok, let’s see how long it is before there is the same sort of wickedness in Britain that there was in Sodom and Gomorrah which led toi their annihilation.