- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 October 2003 16.48 BST
Government plans for new "super jails" to take on Britain's burgeoning prison population were today attacked by the former chief inspector of prisons.
The prison service plans to build eight US-style super jails, holding more than 1,500 inmates, to replace 30 existing prisons.
Sir David Ramsbotham, the chief inspector of prisons until 2001, said the initiative would not work.
Speaking in a SocietyGuardian.co.uk online chat, Sir David said: "I hate large jails. Big impersonal prisons do not work, if working means preventing re-offending not just being administratively convenient lodging houses."
He added that American prisons with more than 2,500 inmates were "an abomination".
Sir David called for more smaller so called "community cluster prisons" of the kind recommended by Lord Woolf in his review of the criminal justice system. The former chief inspector also recommended more "credible alternatives to custody", such as tagging of prisoners and more weekend imprisonment to allow offenders to work.
Sir David, who served first under Tory home secretary Michael Howard and then under Labour's Jack Straw, claimed the criminal justice system was "constipated by initiatives".
He added that too many people were being imprisoned "without sufficient resources for them to change their offending behaviour".
"Imprisonment is currently conducted in overcrowded conditions where too many prisoners are left in their cells all day gazing at television," said Sir David.
He also attacked Mr Straw's justification for denying prisoners the right to vote.
"I was horrified to hear Jack Straw say that prisoners had lost the more authority to vote. To my mind voting is not a matter moral authority but a citizen's right."
