The British are prison addicts. We scour the country for reasons to imprison. We jail for not having a television licence, for Googling in jury rooms, for smoking cannabis, for hacking a phone, for “swapping points”, for perjury or, the latest obsession, “historic sex abuse”. Every week someone over 60 is jailed for actions unreported 30 or 40 years ago. In the past year, 700 people have been sent to jail for this crime, making up about half of the rise in the prison population.

No other nation in Europe jails with the same abandon as Britain. As a result, its jails are bursting at the seams, currently with 84,000 prisoners and rising fast. Overcrowding, drug abuse, violence, attacks on warders, and suicide (88 in the past year, up from 52 in 2013) are all increasing. Meanwhile, the prison officer population has been slashed by almost a third in three years. Prisoners are confined to cells for as much as 23 hours a day. Successive inspectors of prisons raise the alarm, to absolutely no effect, the latest concerning the Isis youth prison in Kent, which was called by one inmate a “gladiator school”.

To all this the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, asserts that: “There are pressures which we’re facing but there’s not a crisis.” It is “challenged” but not “in crisis”. The vocabulary is pure cliche. The only certainty is that the courts are jailing far too many people, and that they and their political masters are hooked on the habit. People should be sent to prison to protect other people, mostly from violence. Yet 70% of male prisoners and 80% of female are non-violent offenders.

All other reasons for so terrible a punishment – the impact of imprisonment, however brief, lasts for life – should be handled by and in the community. It should be through treatment, restorative justice, fines, banning orders or, in the case of foreigners, deportation. Prison should be a last resort, not an appeasement of victim justice. Other European countries do not “race to jail” as does Britain, and are not crime-ridden as a result. Only America is comparable in the savagery – and racial partiality – of its jails.

The so-called crisis is not in Britain’s prisons. It is in its courts and parliament. The last politician who as justice minister understood and genuinely tried to cut the prison population was Ken Clarke. He was sacked.