In the contemporary United Kingdom, few topics are more volatile than crime and how society should respond to it. The fear of street crime leaves people trapped in their homes, illegal drugs and the violence they engender are widely considered our society's most serious problem. For politicians, nothing spells ruin so quickly as being perceived as being "soft on crime."

In this atmosphere, a chorus of voices demands that the criminal justice system "gets tough" with offenders.

More prisons, longer jail terms, fewer restraint on the actions of the police and the courts: these are the measures that are proposed to make our streets safe and curb the violence in our daily lives.

It is unfashionable in the extreme to question whether such policies will actually work. Those who do are often dismissed as "bleeding heart liberals" who care more for the criminal than for their victims. Yet the questions demand to be asked. Taxpayers are called upon to spend millions of pounds every year to build more and bigger prisons and lock up more of our fellow citizens. Is this money well spent? Whose pocket is it going into. Will it bring justice to offenders or security to the law abiding?

These questions about money are far from trivial. As a way of protecting the public or stopping crime, the prison system of this country is a monumental disaster, an insane juggernaut whose only rule is to keep growing.

But when prisons are analysed as economic institutions - in terms of both their own structure and their function within the larger society, they begin to make a grim kind of sense.

Imprisonment is usually justified to one of two philosophies: 'protecting the public* or rehabilitating the prisoner. By either standard however, the evidence is overwhelming that prisons achieve neither.

If there is any empirically established relationship between crime and imprisonment, it is that prison fosters crime.

That is not to say that prisons function mainly as 'universities of crime' although it is partly true that criminals do leam new skills in prison.

Far more important is that prisons are violent institutions which breed violent individuals prepared to commit the extremes of violence out of the merest of trivialities even whilst undergoing their imprisonment. If one had systematically and diabolically tried to create mental illness, one and is amongst the top ten of the industrialised world. Nonetheless, crime continues to plague our society to a degree unknown in other European countries which do not come close to our rates of imprisonment.

In this context, the image of the "bleeding heart liberal" - that universal object of scorn - is one that deserves particular scrutiny.

Implicit in this characterisation is an assumption that public safety and social justice are somehow at odds - that policies which protect the civil rights of prisoners in the prison system cannot really be effective in stopping crime.

A far more compelling case can be made that social justice is a requirement for public safety.

Economic bias IS a structural feature of our prison system. Understanding this relationship can yield important insights into why that system functions so poorly to protect the public.

Contrary to popular belief, the seriousness of a crime is not the most crucial element in predicting who goes to prison and who does not. Society's losses from 'white collar crime' far exceed the economic impact of all burglaries, robberies and theft. Nonetheless, the former class of offender is less likely to go to prison than the latter.

The violence of a crime is another way of measuring its seriousness.

Are prisons mainly reserved for the dangerously violent?

The answer is again no.

The significant numbers of prisoners in our prisons are there for offences that did not include violence.

A large percentage of these are from the poorest sections of society and a large percentage were unemployed at the time of their arrest or only had sporadic employment.

Of those with jobs, many have incomes near or below the poverty belt or because of their lack of job skills are employed at below the minimum wage.

A significant number of prisoners will not have completed their schooling and of those that did, few will have left with any educational qualification. Alarmingly the literacy rate is always lower amongst prisoners than in the general population.

The social policies of the 1980s caused an unprecedented increase in the numbers of people living in poverty as well as widening the gap between the incomes and living standards of the rich and poor.

Throughout this entire period, prison populations grew rapidly. With budgets slashed for every type of social service, prisons now stand out as the country's principal government programme for the poor.

Most of the people behind bars have committed economic crimes and if one compares it all with other variables one can think of, one will find a positive correlation only with unemployment

And yet the current obsession in offender rehabilitation is applying psychology based, so called 'thinking skills' and 'social skills' which must rate as one of the most cynical approaches yet to reduce offending and make society a safer place.

In 1976, me US Joint Economic Committee of Congress heard testimony that there was "wide agreement that unemployment creates economic and psychological stress that frequently manifested in criminal behaviour."

The committee also heard figures that showed that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment sustained over a six-year period, it could be associated with an increase of more than 3,000 new state prison admissions.

>From this perspective, prisons may be seen as wharehouses for people who have no place in the economic order.

Prisons also serve a function for the unemployed in communities with ailing economies. A new prison can be a real economic boost especially if the community lacks a major local industry providing for a recession-proof economic base.

In fact prisons are more than recession proof, they are the one industry that benefits from recession.

In 1983, a year of deep economic recession in the USA, the Bureau of Labour Statistics ranked prisons as the fastest growing occupation in the United States.

The United Kingdom seems set on following that example with an ever increasing prison buildings programme and private investment both in the building of prisons and administering them.

The apparent economic boost offered by prisons is deceptive however, because it is artificial and non-productive except for some prison industries contracted to local firms which becomes cheap inmate unskilled labour.

In this respect, prisons are similar to military bases.

This is not to minimise the seriousness of crime, whether violent or not. The point is rather that swelling the prison population has failed to reduce crime.

The economic bias built into the prison system also works against crime victims because most victims of crime are not as one would expect, the wealthy or comfortably off but more likely to be of the same background and economic status as the offender and stand to suffer most from the repressive policies mat fail to stop, and in many cases fuels criminal activity.

The economics of the inner city areas where crime is the most prolific means that for survival, parallel illegal economies have sprung up, further reinforcing the patterns of crime.

Many young people give up early on a fruitless search for meaningful employment and economic advancement and look to crime as their only path to economic gain Under these circumstances, young offender institutions and prisons often play a more powerful socialising role than school, family or work.

What follows is simply an added force for violence, despair and community destruction and on release from prison the added stigma of ex-prisoner does little to enhance job finding potential.

It rather seems that the real roots of crime are associated with a constellation of suffering so hideous that as a society, we cannot bear to look it in the face. So we hand our casualties over to a system that will keep them out of sight.

Critics of prison systems argue that prison breeds violence, not less when prisoners are returned to the community.

Dr Terry Kupers, a psychiatrists who studied the effects of confinement, testified in the 1980s that "people who are denied human needs such as adequate contact with loved ones, a decent private space to live in, some control over their own environment, some productive outlet and a chance to learn and grow, become increasingly resentful. Fear and hostility and confusion wells up inside them.

As another commentator noted, "prison teaches you that violence not only works but works well and very quickly."

Crime could be fought by increasing the participation of the community in education, social and economic institutions. The money poured into maintaining the prison system could be used to create jobs, improve education and training and stimulate economic opportunity. Instead, the social policies of the last decade have reflected a consistent choice to abandon local communities and their needs and consequently there has arisen criminal communities that were not once there.

As a result, our society is polarised further and further, not only into haves and have nots, but also the incarcerated and the inearcerators.

Prisons do not protect society from crime. Instead, they avoid the far more challenging solution of economic justice by reinforcing patterns of economic and social inequality.

It is only by discouraging reliance on incarceration that we can seek humane and democratic ways to make our communities healthy, productive and most of all, safe places to live in.