I am taking a bit of a liberty by cutting and pasting from the comments section at the Daily Mail. If anyone objects, let me know and I'll take it off. It talks about the consequences of the prison fiasco and what I see as the Governments culpability in the death of an innocent woman.
There is already a crime of corporate manslaughter, why not one for Government manslaughter?
It's a terrifyingly familiar story. Twice the courts had the chance to put drug addict Sean Francis behind bars for beating his girlfriend and threatening to kill her. Twice they let him walk free.
So what happened next? Less than 24 hours after his second release, it emerged yesterday, Francis stabbed Wendy Billing to death in front of their toddler son.
There'll be many more cases like that in the months ahead.
When Francis struck last September, magistrates and judges were already under intense pressure from the Home Office to ease prison overcrowding by granting bail and awarding non-custodial sentences.
Today Ministers have cranked up that pressure tenfold, with a panic-stricken letter to the courts urging them to set free all but the most serious criminals.
How could they so shamelessly neglect their duty to protect the public?
For years, Ministers have been warned of the desperate need for more prison places. Why, the Home Office's own statisticians predict we may need another 20,000 by 2011.
Even if Home Secretary John Reid gets round to providing all the 8,000 extra places he promises - and there's precious little sign of that - he'll still be more than 12,000 short.
Who knows how many more Wendy Billings will have to pay with their lives for the Government's abject failures?
Remember Tony Blair's promise, all those years ago, to be 'tough on crime'? Of all his empty pledges, it's turning out to be the emptiest of the lot
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