We should not be surprised by the president of the Prison Governors Association’s view that politicians have reduced the Prison Service to “lunacy” (Prison places in England and Wales are ‘bust’, says governors’ union chief, 9 October). The roll call of shame is long: first, England and Wales have 159 per hundred thousand of the population in prison, which is high. Second, the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10. In many European countries it is 14. Third, the demands on probation services to return people on probation to court and people on licence straight back to prison for a missed appointment breach takes no account of the fact that such people are on probation or licence because they broke the rules – indeed, they have spent a lot of their lives breaking rules. And lastly, remands in custody pre-sentence are dispensed far too readily and sentences have got longer over the past decade or so. Is it any wonder that the prison system, like the criminal justice system, is not merely broken but smashed to smithereens? Andy Stelman Retired assistant chief probation officer We do not need to build more prisons (Two-thirds of prisons officially overcrowded in England and Wales, 15 October). We need more secure psychiatric hospitals run by the NHS in locations near the patients’ homes. A prison, especially an overcrowded one, is not able to treat someone with an acute exacerbation of a complex mental health problem. We also need, if we can, to replace the network of services helping people with chronic substance issues to move them away from criminal acts to fund illicit substance misuse. Imprisonment should involve education and rehabilitation to reduce the risk of reoffending. This will even help the staffing crisis. There is no satisfaction in working in an environment where you know that people who leave will be back soon. Dr Michael Peel London We miss the point. Overcrowding is only partly a result of failed penal policies. Returning prisoners to a life of dysfunctional relationships, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, addiction and poor physical and mental health, while expecting them to turn their lives around, is a policy born of fantasy. Expecting the probation service, even a properly trained and staffed one, to address these evils is part of the same fantasy. Probation officers can only bring together existing resources in a coherent plan. If the necessary elements of the plan don’t exist then we are back in a fantasy land, where risk can be mitigated but not resolved. Rob Wakefield Bristol Although there is no doubt that sentencing policy has caused the prison population to inexorably rise, in other ways the government is compensating by slowing down the rate of convictions for even the most serious crimes. At the Old Bailey, the private company that is responsible for fulfilling the contract to supply security staff in the courts fails to do so. The consequence is that although everyone else – lawyers, judges, juries, witnesses and defendants – are there at considerable expense, the courts sit idle and trials are delayed. It seems an odd way to run a criminal justice system, causing significant hardship and injustice, and is obviously a colossal waste of time and money. Perhaps the minister of justice could explain why they have adopted this strategy? Paul Keleher KC London