The UK locks up more people than any country in Europe, with the exception only of Belarus. In Europe prisons are emptying and closing. Here, although they keep building them, they are massively over crowded. Often two to a small cell, built for one, with a shared toilet, or maybe a bucket, crammed in. Some prisoners are locked up like this for 23 hours a day. There is filth, there are rats, cockroaches and a seething undercurrent of violence, a suffocating hopelessness. The staff are too few and can’t cope, and prisons become ever more dangerous.

Governments come and go. They panic every so often and take some desperate action. They might build a (hugely expensive) mega prison holding 1,680 people, or release prisoners early. They’ll put some into police cells, make dormitories in any spare space. But still they come. More and more of them. And the courts can’t cope, and the waiting lists grow, first by weeks, then months, and now, years. There is no sign of any relief or end to this relentless march to incarceration.

Every year more laws are made, more imprisonable offences created and sentences grow longer and longer. All designed to keep the public safer. But, does it?

Most people sent to prison will come out. If they don’t get reformed and rehabilitated inside, and come out worse than they went in, the whole expensive, excruciating exercise is pointless. What is prison for? Who should be sent there? Are these questions even asked anymore? If minor offenders, the mentally ill, the traumatised, are brutalised in these places, they may never recover. Many bounce straight back inside. How can this make anyone safer?

Laws are made with good intentions. We have to believe their primary reason is to protect the public. But too often they have unintended consequences.

The most outstanding, outrageous example of this is The Misuse of Drugs Act. It is a major driver of prison overcrowding. It has so much wrong with it that it’s now far more dangerous than the drugs it doesn’t protect us from. How long can successive Governments refuse to recognise this?

This Act is particularly dangerous because it prohibits the legal supply of any drug not explicitly approved by the Government. It gifts supply to criminals. The Government has chosen to favour the the two most dangerous drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Quite rightly, though, they regulate and control them, bringing a fortune in taxation to the Treasury. But many people want and choose to use other substances. This demand for drugs will never end so it would surely be expedient to find a way to live with them as safely as possible. Tragically, instead of putting health and life first by bringing drug supply under legal control and regulation, they’ve decided, for the last 54 years, to attempt to punish people out of using them. The result? Drug use has rocketed, gang violence has escalated, and accidental, avoidable, drug deaths have soared. At the same time the prison population in England and Wales has leapt from 42,000 in 1970 to 87,900 in 2024.

This horrifying number could be halved overnight, though, if The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971was reformed. This is so important because, crucially, this Act ignores science, reality and humanity. It relies, instead, on hysteria, stigma and prejudice. It tries to drag everyone into the lie that drugs are evil, ruin lives and anyone who uses them is a useless drain on society.