Advanced proposals to build three, four-storey, 2,500 place jails will be dropped next week in a major U-turn.   Mr Straw will tell Parliament he has opted instead to build five smaller prisons, each holding 1,500 inmates – as many as the largest existing prisons in England and Wales.

Ministry of Justice sources said the decision was made in response to local opposition and criticism from penal reform groups and were not linked to funding. But the Tories said Mr Straw was responding to a £400 million “black hole” in prison finances.

A consultation paper on prison expansion published in June last year said each Titan would be housed on a giant 50-acre site and hold a cluster of smaller units holding around 500 inmates.   Planned locations were near the country’s major population centres in London, the West Midlands and the North West. New prison places are needed to fill a predicted 13,600 shortfall by 2014. The prison population crisis has meant that since June 2007, 52,117 criminals have been let out up to 18 days early.

Budget plans agreed by the Ministry of Justice and its agency Noms (National Offender Management Service), which is responsible for both the prison and probation services, will see cash cuts in all four regions.  In Gwent, for example, the overall budget is due to reduce from £22.8m in the financial year that began last week to £20m in two years’ time.

Mike Dunne, co-chair of the Gwent and Glamorgan branch of Napo, said: “We are extremely concerned about the potential impact of these cuts on our members’ ability to do their jobs properly. There is evidence that increasing workloads for probation officers results in an increase in crime. Coupled with the recession, which in itself is likely to result in more crime, there could be very serious consequences. The public will undoubtedly be at greater risk …

Mr Dunne said that Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, had stated that the public sector, like the private sector, should expect job losses in the recession.  “That’s all very well,” said Mr Dunne. “But whereas when car sales go down and demand decreases, there isn’t the need to employ so many workers in car factories, the same does not apply in the probation service. We still have the same number of clients to deal with, probably more” …

Justice Minister David Hanson, the MP for Delyn, said: “There is absolutely no evidence in the figures cited by Napo relating to the number of new crimes that would be committed and suggestions that there will be a 25% reduction in supervision are totally unsubstantiated.  “There has been a 70% increase in probation funding in real terms over the last 10 years and an increase of more than a third in staff.   “Re-offending rates are down, successful drug treatments and offending behaviour programmes are up, and the target for Community Payback is being exceeded.   “The Government will not do anything to endanger these successes in the future.  “Public protection is the main priority for the probation service and it will not be put at risk.”

There were 2,122 cases of drugs being discovered in prisons from January 2008 to March 2009.   Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie said the problem had doubled in five years, with jails now “awash” with drugs.  The Scottish Government said it had a “zero tolerance” attitude to drug use and was working to limit supply …

Ms Goldie said: “It is nothing short of incredible that the number of drug finds in our prisons has more than doubled in less than five years.  In 2003 there was an average of 2.3 drug finds per day. For the past few years that figure has more than doubled. It is unacceptable and it appears that Scotland’s prisons are now awash with drugs.”  The Conservatives have called for every prison to have a drug-free wing where inmates can go to when they want to come off drugs.  “We should be helping prisoners get off drugs, rather than providing an environment for drugs to flourish,” Miss Goldie said.

Thames Valley Probation Service is having to make the cuts over the next three years following a reduction in its budget from the Government. Four offices, including two in Oxford, may be shut under a review.   It is also feared up to 140 staff may lose their jobs and Banbury MP Tony Baldry said it would mean the probation service would struggle to monitor the 8,000 people a year it currently deals with …

Mr Baldry said he understood staff from closed offices might be relocated to a central base in Botley Road, Oxford, meaning they would have less time to monitor criminals outside the city. Mr Baldry said: “It will not be an improved service. “The whole point of local offender management is to have knowledge of the offender, local circumstances and their family.  Removing offices and staff is a retrograde step. It’s going to mean probation officers will spend all their time driving round the county. It will clearly damage offender management” …

Justice Minister David Hanson MP said: “Public protection is the main priority of the probation service and it will not be put at risk – offenders who pose the highest risk receive more intensive contact, with other resources being directed accordingly.”

Experts from King’s College London examined Community Orders and Suspended Sentence Orders, which were introduced in England and Wales four years ago.  They require offenders to do unpaid work or undergo rehabilitation.  But a probation officer interviewed for the study said those under the orders left court “laughing their heads off”.   Offenders who were interviewed said they felt “relieved” when they were given an order instead of a jail sentence …

One probation officer said breaches were not dealt with seriously enough and “that gives completely the wrong message.  “You go to court for a breach and you don’t get sent to prison, you go back on the van next week and all your mates tell everybody else about it. It doesn’t have the deterrent effect that it’s meant to have.”   The most commonly suggested improvement to SSOs was that offenders who breached them should be sent to prison.  One officer said: “I know prisons are full, but they’re full with the wrong people. We need to send out the message that if you’ve got a suspended sentence and you breach it, you go to prison.”

The BBC report has a lot more detailed information.

The measure will be available to Northern Irish courts from the start of April, several years after being introduced in England and Wales.  Criminal Justice Minister Paul Goggins said it would play a significant role in improving public protection and in managing and rehabilitating offenders.   Curfews enforced by an electronic tag will be used in a variety of ways – as a condition of bail, as a condition of release from prison under licence, or as a requirement of a community sentence or a youth conference plan … He said it was a significant step in the delivery of public protection and would support the rehabilitation and resettlement of offenders and assist in the enforcement of bail curfews.

International security company G4S has been appointed to deliver the monitoring service in Northern Ireland … Field monitoring officers based in Northern Ireland will conduct installations and follow-up visits, and violations will be recorded as G4S`s control centre in Manchester.

More detail available from 96FM.

Mike Ewart, the chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service, spoke out after the nation’s prison population last week hit a record high of 8,137. Scotland’s eight prisons are designed to hold a maximum of 6,625 people.  Ewart said the service had reached a point where the prison population has exceeded design capacity and the level at which it is safe to operate.  He said: “The risk has become unacceptable. I would be derelict in my duties if I had not let ministers know, but I could not divulge what ministerial advice has been given.  It is an emergency. We are legally required to take every prisoner we are sent but we are over design capacity and over the safe legal limits. What we are doing is putting Scotland at risk.”

Ewart is understood to have sought legal advice on his two conflicting duties, to look after every prisoner in his care and to lock up everybody given a custodial sentence. There is some concern in the prison service that jails are now so overcrowded they could be subjected to a legal challenge on health and safety grounds. The exact legal threshold for prison numbers has never been tested in court.

Ewart said: “We need a cap on the prisoner numbers in the longer term. The evidence from other European jurisdictions shows that this is what they have done to move away from excessively high prison populations. We need to be able to say, when we are full, we are full. We are not safer locking these people up. It is a pernicious lie to say this is about community respite. Putting more people in prison actually makes us less safe. Having reached this level, which is unsafe operationally and legally, I have to speak out.”

More details from The Scotsman.