THE state of Durham Prison is quite shocking: it somehow runs at 172 per cent capacity with nearly 1,000 prisoners kept in cells, designed for just over 500, for at least 22 hours a day.

The state of our prisons as a whole is quite shocking: just 1,451 of the 88,956 places are available and so yesterday, the Labour government set Operation Early Dawn going whereby people awaiting trial can be held in police cells rather than in the full remand prisons.

That’s all well and good for the moment, but where are the police’s new arrests going to go, and how many police hours are going to be spent doing prison warders’ jobs when they should be out on the front line, tackling crime?

The inescapable conclusion is that this is the shocking legacy of the last government. The Tories will argue that they inherited a creaking system from Labour in 2010, but they clearly haven’t invested sufficiently in improving the situation.

Some will argue that convicted prisoners should not live like lords and they should have thought about being locked up for 22 hours a day before they committed the crime.

Prison is a place of punishment and a way of protecting the public from miscreants. It seems to work – the tough sentences being handed out to rioters have helped calm the country.

But prison also has to play a part in turning these people’s lives around, and it can’t do that if it is running at 172 per cent capacity. HM Inspectorate of Prisons found that there was a growing drugs market inside Durham which was linked to a growth in violence.

If prisoners are increasingly going to be released back into society dehumanised and with a drug habit that’s tending towards violence, the rest of us are not going to be sleeping comfortably in our beds.

READ THE FULL STORY: INSPECTORS FIND THRIVING DRUG MARKET IN DURHAM PRISON