PRISON privatisation has been a disastrous failure and must end. That’s the only possible conclusion from a damning litany of chaos, cock-ups, lies, fraud and cruelty so staggering that it takes the breath away. 

There is no justification for paying hundreds upon hundreds of millions of pounds to the likes of G4S and Serco to make such a shambles of running our criminal justice system.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry while leafing through the Howard League’s report. For every Keystone Kops farce — £900 million given to a privateer which bought vans too big to fit into court entrances — there’s an act of barely conceivable brutality.

A man with terminal cancer kept waiting in handcuffs in the street while his guards buy lunch at Greggs. 

A 14-year-old boy who took his own life after being unlawfully restrained and beaten — including the “nose distraction technique,” a slimy piece of PR-speak which translates as “punched in the face hard enough to make him bleed.”

A woman who says she was forced to clean up the blood from her own miscarriage. Which country is this? What century is this?

You’re left asking: Have we got the inside and outside of these cells the right way round? Shouldn’t the people responsible be behind bars themselves?

Not just the foot soldiers of G4S and Serco’s privateer armies but the top brass giving the orders — the executives pocketing vast salaries paid for with our money.

And yet the privateers seem to operate with near-total impunity, from top to bottom of the organisation. The killers of Jimmy Mubenga have so far got away scot-free — although relentless pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service means they may yet be brought to justice.

G4S and Serco were banned from bidding for probation contracts after allegedly cheating us of hundreds of millions in the prisoner tagging scandal. But they will surely be allowed back into the fold after a few months spent pretending to be penitent, and in any case they still have their snouts in any number of taxpayer troughs.

And their loss only amounted to Capita’s gain, proving what a cosy carve-up the whole world of outsourcing and privatisation really is. 

The plain fact is that prison privatisation has failed by every possible measure. It has failed by the left-wing measure of humanity, compassion and the state’s duty to protect its citizens. It has failed on the right wing’s stated terms of efficiency and cold hard cash.

It has failed just as every single other privatisation has failed, from water and gas to rail, Royal Mail and the NHS. 

It has succeeded in only one way — which is its real purpose of looting billions of pounds from our pockets and handing the cash to privateers regardless of success or failure, or of the hideous crimes they commit in pursuit of profit.

G4S and Serco should be banned immediately from bidding for any government contracts. But that is only a first step. 

The time has come to dismantle the entire shadow state that has taken over our public services — the cosy cartel of Sodexo, Compass, G4S, Serco, Capita et al — and replace them with a system that we know actually works.

Public services owned by the public, run for the sake of the public and accountable to the public.