LONG gone are the days when the King, or Queen, could simply imprison people on a whim. The legal notion of habeas corpus requires that anyone being held or imprisoned must be brought before a court so that it can be decided if their imprisonment is lawful.

Habeas corpus is Latin, it means “you have the body”. It is saying to whoever is imprisoning a person that they must justify why that person is being held to account. Such a right has been enshrined in British law since 1679.

If a person commits a crime, however, the last thing we want is the criminal being treated better than the victim. Calls for prisoners to be allowed mobile phones, photo booths, satellite TV and for sentences of less than six months to be scrapped have divided people. Some feel we’re going soft on criminals. Others argue that with high reoffending rates, the punishment aspect isn’t working so we must try to reform, then rehabilitate criminals, not just punish them in an act of retribution.

If you’re a victim of crime, it’s understandable to want a meaningful punishment for the perpetrator. Perhaps your first reaction is, quite naturally, “let the punishment fit the crime”.

I can sympathise with people who are aghast at the idea that prisoners should have satellite TV, mobile phones and that their cells should be more like a basic hotel room. We can all see, and perhaps approve of, the image of a cold, bare room with bars as a reminder to convicted criminals that they are there for punishment, not a holiday.

Our first thoughts should be with the victim and, at present, victim support requires a major improvement. More emotional, mental health support and sometimes active financial support is needed for victims.

But we also need to ask what the purpose of prison is, or should be, and whether our legal system is there to provide retribution, or to try and undo the damage caused by a criminal act. Clearly for some crimes, such as murder, undoing the damage isn’t possible.

For other more minor criminal acts, such as vandalism and graffiti it is possible that community service and restoring or repairing damage, perhaps even making things better than they were before, is possible.

The Ministry of Justice is proposing that sentences of less than six months (except in the case or violent or sexual offences) should be scrapped. There is some good evidence behind this idea. The concept of the “short, sharp, shock” intuitively may be attractive. But the evidence shows that far from reforming criminals, it may do more damage than good.

Generally, the prisoner reoffending rate is too high at 49 per cent. For those subjected to short sentences the rate is, surprisingly, much higher at 60 per cent. It’s clear that we need to urgently address this situation.

Since the early 1990s the prison population has doubled, from 40,000 to just under 80,000 in 2018. As the population increases so will instances of crime. Simply building more and more prisons does not tackle the underlying problems that lead to crimes being committed, or people reoffending.

Several key issues need to be addressed. Over half our current prisons are overcrowded. In 2017 there were nearly 30,000 assaults recorded in prisons. More worryingly there were 44,600 incidents of self-harm in the prison population. But the biggest problem we have is that nearly 50 per cent of the prison population is assessed as being functionally illiterate as adults. This doesn’t mean they are incapable of reading or writing, but that their level of competency is what we’d expect from an average 11-year-old.

I’d broadly agree that short-term sentences do more harm than good. People who have committed a small, non-violent offence will, when locked up even for a short time, be exposed to others who are more hardened and enmeshed in criminality. In the desire to fit in, follow the lead of others inside, short-term prisoners may well be pressured into criminal acts or taught things that will later mean re-offending becomes the natural pathway they take.

Rehabilitation requires that people who have committed crimes acknowledge the damage, hurt and pain they have inflicted on others. This cannot, in my view, be achieved by deprivation and cutting people off from society and family. Yes, prison should be a punishment. Loss of total freedom should be the punishment, but harsh inhuman treatment is not the answer.