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.