Do us a favour, Archer

I have a simple answer to Archer's prison diary. Don't ban it, just make every prisoner write one. The massed scribblings of Britain's idle poor should be delivered by the barrowload each week to the offices of the Home Secretary and the Chief Inspector of Prisons. They should be edited and issued for public consumption. Only then might the state of British prisons reach public attention.

Everyone who goes near one of London's Victorian prisons comes away appalled. They cry with Archer (in the Daily Mail): "Home Secretary you are doing irreparable damage to decent people's lives". These are the state's most overcrowded, squalid, neglected, brutalised and desperate institutions.

I have often passed Brixton, Pentonville, Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs and looked up at their grim Dickensian walls as if they were an unreal film set. Only Brixton have I visited. Some may think some schools and hospitals are bad. Some may be shocked by homeless hostels.

Nowhere in London is as dreadful as a prison.

Archer is, of course, a fool to be seen making money from his diary. He is a fool to break the rules by discussing his trial in print and by using other prisoners' names to dust his ordeal with glamour. Like his weekend exploits, he seems to think fame puts him beyond rules.

But then fame was why he was given a vindictive sentence and a stay in one of the worst Category A jails - Belmarsh in Woolwich. This was no insult added to injury, more a smash in the face after a kick in the groin.

I carry no can for Archer, but the spectacle of the judicial system gleefully taking it out on a pseudo-toff is unedifying.

Yet it takes the celebrity to get prisons onto the pages of the Daily Mail, as yesterday with Ian Huntley in the Daily Mirror. Governments of both parties have driven the jail population to the highest level in history, a staggering 72,000. Some of these people are able later to make their peace with society. Most cannot.

After consuming an average of £22,000 a year of public money, 60 per cent reoffend. Thousands become hardened drug addicts. Everything about British prisons, the squalor of open lavatories, the crowded cells, the inactivity, the drugs, the aftercare, is worse than anywhere else in Europe.

On prisons, public opinion appears to be deeply divided. There are those who believe that squalor is just retribution and deterrence. To such people prisoners "get what they deserve" and there is an end of it. If many re-offend, that shows they should have been locked up for longer. Perhaps prison should be made worse.

I find this attitude idiotic. Locking up not just Archer but some 50,000 non-violent offenders, most of them young, is expensive and a spur to later criminality. Most people acquainted with prisons agree that only some 20 per cent of inmates are a serious danger to society and need to be held apart, some probably for life.

The rest are in prison because authority has shrugged its shoulders and decided not to bother with their misdemeanours. Tens of thousands, a majority, are victims of Britain's inane, unreformed drugs laws.

Most American states, even those as prone to imprisonment as Britain, have community service and rehabilitation more developed than anything here. I gather that no other civilised country would have given Archer four years for perjury, including time in a Category A prison.

California would have imposed a hefty fine and a year's street cleaning, or even prison visiting. Nowhere in Europe would imprison a libel perjurer, nor the petty thieves, small-time fraudsters, corner drug dealers, three-time burglars and drunken brawlers who are the staple inmates of Her Majesty's jails. Imprisonment as a punishment for burglary and motoring offences has doubled in the past 10 years.

Taking a man away from his house, his family and his means of earning a living patently endangers any hope that he might "go straight" after a conviction. It makes repeat criminality more, not less, likely.

Even those who regard human dignity as a matter for wimps must see Britain's obsessional imprisonment as self-defeating. David Blunkett is now having to hire ships to house his surplus convicts. Small wonder the Treasury has refused him another penny for his addiction to prison.

What echoes through Archer's deathly prose is the sheer pointlessness of it all, procedures designed to break an inmate's spirit, the tolerated drug addiction, the devastating breach with loved ones.

Archer finds a 23-year-old family man imprisoned for driving a van without a licence, shut up in a Belmarsh cell with two murderers. He finds 60 per cent of prisoners involved with drugs - victims as much as exploiters of the drug laws. He finds that Ann Widdecombe's random drug tests have led, as many predicted, to prisoners turning by the thousand from marijuana to less detectable heroin.

I do not believe that Britons are uniquely hard-hearted or vindictive towards those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

It is not vindictiveness that leads us to jail twice as many women as we did just seven years ago, or to force teenage burglars to share cells with sex abusers and murderers. It is just plain ignorance.

Seeing inside a prison should be every citizen's duty. Essential to jury service should be a requirement that every juror visit a prison first.

These places are crammed to bursting because the public wants criminals out of sight and out of mind - and to hell with the expense and repeat offending.

At last Jeffrey Archer will have done the state some service if he draws this to public attention.