With bursting jails and Europe’s longest sentences, the last thing the UK needs is more rightwing ‘reforms’

‘The justice select committee found that 70% of people think sentencing is too lenient.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Here we go again, tightening the screw and lengthening prison sentences to please that insatiable appetite among some voters for locking up more criminals ever longer. It is a British disease – born of public ignorance of the fact that for many decades, the UK has had the harshest sentencing in western Europe, with more people imprisoned per head of the population than China. That’s an ignorance that both Tory and Labour governments have pandered to, cynically, for political gain.

A despairing justice select committee, chaired by Tory MP Bob Neill, found 70% of the population think sentencing is too lenient. The committee implored the government last month to “actively engage the public on sentencing policy”. People know next to nothing about how sentences have been lengthened time and again, often underestimating existing prison tariffs for crimes.