Even after the recent prison disturbances in Birmingham and elsewhere, there are some who still pretend that talk of crisis in Britain’s prisons is so much liberal hand-wringing. No one who watching tonight’s BBC Panorama investigation into conditions in one of the country’s biggest jails can possibly take refuge in that lazy claim any longer.

The programme’s undercover reporter spent two months in HMP Northumberland, which houses almost 1,350 male inmates. He discovered widespread drug use, poor regimes, door alarms not working and a hole in a security fence. These failings reflected the inability of staff to exert sufficient control in the prison, a consequence in part of lack of staff, generating growing uncertainty and danger. Instead of the rehabilitation programmes it is supposed to offer, the prison was effectively compelled to focus solely on risk management.

If that isn’t a crisis, it is hard to know what the word means. No one believes that Northumberland is untypical or unrelated to wider trends. And no one can pretend that rehabilitation, training and education are possible in any but the most perfunctory manner in such drug-driven disorderly circumstances, if they are possible at all.

The justice secretary, Liz Truss, actually admitted as much in her speech on criminal justice reform at the Centre for Social Justice on Monday, although it was not the main message she tried to convey. Ms Truss spent much of her speech trying to argue that sentence inflation is not the penal problem that many claim, and defending the importance of stiffer sentences for violence against children and women. Yet woven into these defiant arguments were some stark admissions about Britain’s prisons: our prisons are “too violent”; unruliness and self-harm are at “unacceptable levels”; drink and drugs in prison are a “scourge”. All that, and much more about dysfunctional prison regimes that she simply left unsaid, is true. And it is not acceptable.

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The plain fact is that Britain’s prisons are struggling more than ever to do the job they have been given. There is not one unique sign or cause of this multilayered problem. Nor is there one magic bullet solution. To pretend that the prisons are the sole cause of the problems that have been exposed repeatedly over the years is ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous to pretend that the prisons are not part of the problem as well as part of the solution. If prisons become incubators of crime and of drug use that feeds crime, or pressure cookers for rising suicide levels, then they are failing, not succeeding.

All these things are happening, and not just in Northumberland. The answers include more money, better-trained staff, drone controls, drug treatment orders and facilities, better regimes, including alternatives, and changes in sentencing guidelines. None of this will be addressed in a quick fix or easily – as Ms Truss knows. But only the government can grip it, no one else. Cuts and policy swings are absolutely the wrong place to start.