If Akenaton knows for a fact that many would rather be in the inside than the outside, he must mean the ones who have come into contact with him.

Akenaton is inadvertently right in saying there are many people who have a personality disorder (as opposed to the inflammatory "psychopathic thugs" he refers to) and successive governments have looked at this differently. The issue being that they fall in the middle. If they are seen as patients, then care can be neither curative nor palliative, and if they are seen as offenders then you have to wait for them to offend before dealing with their issues. A bit of a catch 22, and the last Labour government got as far as a green paper on a third system where personality disorder could be addressed without waiting for someone to get hurt. Nice idea in principle, but don't forget that is the general gist the Chinese government use to dissuade dissidents.

Regarding the prisons, Al's impression is a wee bit nearer the mark, although there are rarely two prisons the same. Yet even the more modern, recently built even, that I inspected are not designed to make you want to go back in a hurry. Overcrowding alone means they are not even as humane as they were designed for, even the victorian ones...

We need a progressive approach and HMIP and The Howard League both stress the legal necessity for it in prevailing legislation, but chronic underfunding and the prison service is fire fighting just to incarcerate, never mind rehabilitate. The awful mindset of the justice secretary isn't helpful either.