I hate to say it, but Michael Gove was right – if we want to fix the prison system, we need to stop locking up so many people

Yet more grim news about the state of British prisons has emerged, this time courtesy of figures from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), that show violence increasing at an alarming rate.

But the headlines will be generated by the fact that a record 71 prisoners were last year released from custody by mistake in England and Wales.

They are not considered culpable – they didn't try to escape after all – and in many cases they will not be pursued.

Cue howls of outrage, and furious leader columns in the tabloid press demanding action. They won't ever ask why these people aren't being chased.

It is probably because, like the overwhelming majority of prisoners, they are non- violent offenders and they are thus not considered to pose a risk to the public. In other words, they don't need to be in prison.

Michael Gove is one of the most destructive politicians in British history. As the food critic Jay Rayner recently wrote upon being invited in to his Environment department to talk about matters relating to his specialism, he has shown himself to be “a plotter, and a conniver and all-round rather nasty piece of work”.

However, Rayner noted that Gove started off rather well during his spell at the Ministry of Justice. Here was a man who seemed to recognise that Britain jails too many people, creating the expensive mess of today's prison system. Here was a man who saw that a large number of those inhabiting it aren't really bad. They might have mental health problems. Or they might just be sad.

He was right.

I vividly remember as a young journalist sitting at the magistrates court in King’s Lynn. The town has some rather grim London overspill estates, which have more than their fair share of social problems, many related to drugs, but with poverty also playing a role.

We cub reporters would watch a succession of rather depressing characters coming before the bench, and we would quietly cheer their CPS prosecutors. The defendants would often have long records. Many seemed all but incorrigible. Send them down!

The badass of the town’s bench, a deputy headmaster at one of the local high schools, often did just that. As someone who has been the victim of crime more than once, he was my hero.

Until, that is, one of defence solicitors we were friendly with brought me up short with a question as we sat at our favourite watering hole one evening. “What good does putting them in prison do?” he asked. That summed it up for me, and (apparently) for Gove while at Justice. What good does it do? Not just for them, but for us.

Prison produces higher rates of reoffending than the alternatives (probation, community penalties) and keeping large numbers of people locked up is ruinously expensive. Short staffed, prisons are prone to becoming unsanitary and violent, as the MOJ’s figures showing a 20 per cent rise in assaults on staff or prisoners, demonstrate.

The tabloids may scream blue murder in response to the 71 people mistakenly sent out on to the streets. Lags at large! But it appears they are among the 70 per cent of male prisoners that are non-violent offenders. Or the shocking 80 per cent of women in that category, often sent down for minor offences such as shoplifting or other types of theft, linked to, you’ve got it, drugs and/or poverty.

I’m not saying here that there isn’t a place for custodial sentences, including for some non-violent offenders. I’ve just been writing about the miserable bank fraudsters who preyed on small businesses in the Reading area and left a trail of devastation and misery in their wake. Their offences were non-violent. But they surely deserved to go down.

Thieves, and confidence tricksters like them who act with malice, may not always directly commit violence. But the impact of their actions is violent. They should pay a penalty for that.

Nor am I saying that there isn't a place for custody as a deterrent. Society would be well served by showing a little less lenience to those who use their cars as weapons, for example.

But most people who are in prison today are there as a result of offences that are petty and pathetic. They’d be better off paying their debts to society by cleaning up canals, or through spending time in rehab centres, or by sitting in front of a whiteboard.

Their actions impose a cost on society. And yet handing them custodial sentences imposes a still greater cost, as the figures from the MoJ prove. And it's not as if the Government has a lot of spare cash laying around with which to foot that bill.

There have inevitably been calls for more prison officers in response to the MoJ's figures. But we wouldn't need them if we just imprisoned fewer people.

It pains me to say this, but on this one issue we should listen to Michael bloody Gove and think seriously about what we, as a society, are trying to accomplish by being Europe’s biggest jailors. We’re getting this terribly wrong.