Prison governors told to slash costs

Back in November 2012, in his first major speech as Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling said that 'we have to focus on making the prison system cheaper not smaller'.

Today's Guardian reports that Mr Grayling has ordered prison governors in England and Wales to cut per capita costs of imprisonment by £2,200 per year. The Justice Secretary apparently sees the troubled G4S-run Oakwood mega-prison as the model for future low-cost prison development.

Elsewhere the newspaper's Home Affairs Editor, Alan Travis, asks where the public debate is on the relentless rise of the jumbo jail.

Last year our director Richard Garside argued that we should 'set our sights higher and start to imagine a future without prisons', rather than merely working out ever more cost-effective ways of warehousing a growing prison population.