Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion.

I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.

In the meantime, offenders will continue to go into our prisons clean and come out addicted

But several things are different. Prisons have always had illicit drugs problems that the authorities have struggled to deal with. This battle is now all but lost but it has a perverse benefit. Drugs are now so freely available across our jails that prisoners can to a large extent self-medicate away the reality of the awful conditions they and the staff who watch over them are locked up in. Moreover, the illicit drugs trade, much of which is controlled by organised crime gangs, is so great that a determined effort by the authorities to regain control would probably result in the sort of widespread disorder that ignited in the chapel in Strangeways prison 34 years ago.

The dominance of........

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