Home Office Minister Liam Byrne has made the preposterous and bizarre claim that ID cards will be “a great British institution” on a par with the 19th century railways, and “part of the fabric of British life”. I won’t discuss here the reasons why I bitterly oppose ID cards – a blog you can all look forward too. From trying to pretend that ID cards were an essential part of the war on terror, Byrne has now changed tack in a bid to win us over, arguing they are of precious little importance, and will be of no import. If that is the case, why spend billions on them?

On the other hand, it could be Lord Falconer’s generous act of taking all the flak for the decision to start releasing prisoners early in a bid to solve prison overcrowding. Court cells, emergency police station cells and even portakabins masquerading as ‘custody suites’ at Hatton Cross tube station have been utilised to cope with an ever ballooning prison population. The front page of The Times tells us the Government had ‘run out of options’. Not the case. The prison population has been rising inexorably ever since Labour came to power. They have had plenty of time to plan how to deal with reaching full capacity. A prison building programme, the temporary use of redundant Government properties or former Army camps, prison ships even. On a facetious note, I see that they are shortly to retire the QEII and turn her into a Dubai hotel. A somewhat plainer fitted-out QEII could easily have served as a prison ship.

The Government’s utter incompetence over the prison population continues to amaze me. They seem to have little understanding, more less any desire to solve the problem apart from last-minute panic measures.

The problems in prisons go much deeper though. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, told MPs that the suicide rate in British prisons was now running at about two a week – I am sure many local readers will remember the mother who committed suicide at HMP Styal after being remanded in custody the other week on suspicion of murdering her son in Thornton.

Every suicide is a tragedy, but some strike home more harshly. Young Adam Rickwood, just 14, killed himself in a ‘secure training centre’ (code for Young Offender Institution) back in August 2004. I am sure he was no angel, but I question whether he – still a boy – should have been locked up with young men several years older than him, and much more mature developmentally. Much worse, he was imprisoned in Co. Durham, some 100 miles away from his Burnley home.

Now in criticising Secure Training Centres, I realise I am criticising a scheme introduced by Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary. But what might seem a good idea then, can be very different in practice. They were seen as an alternative to secure local authority children’s homes, but they have become something of an expensive no-man’s-land between social care and full criminal imprisonment. That confusion means those who run and work in STCs must be very uncertain about their roles, and what attitude to take to the young men in them. Are they there to support or suppress?

There are now 4 STCs nationwide – all opened under Labour – and despite claiming to focus on rehabilitation, because they are essentially part of the criminal justice system, they have taken on the aura of prisons. There are prison warders, the ‘residents’ face lock downs, everyone is strip-searched on arrival, and the centre is surrounded by barbed wire. If it looks like a prison, feels like a prison, then it is a prison. No doubt, given the nature of the crimes committed by some of those there, many of these measures are necessary. But are these centres to become places of first or last resort? From the account of Adam’s life, it appears his problems were behavioural rather than criminal – he excelled academically despite troubled family circumstances, but as death removed many of those he related well to, his behaviour deteriorated and he was excluded from numerous schools over time for behaviour problems, despite continuing to demonstrate how bright he was. However, it was travelling in a stolen car which prompted his sending to the STC. Within a month, he was dead. He was, and still is, the youngest person to die in custody in the UK.

So why am I writing about the suicide of a young boy back in 2004? The suicides of three boys in Northern Ireland this week brought case back to mind, as did Andrew Marr’s revisiting of the Jamie Bulger murder on TV last night. I am not some softy liberal who thinks children shouldn’t be locked up. Venables & Thompson should never be released in my view. I just think that spending £175,000 a year on one of the 274 places at an STC available nationwide is neither good value nor responsible management of troubled youths. For just £220,000 a year, a scheme in the Berkshire Downs works with 200 troubled youngsters a year, notching up many successes who might otherwise have found themselves in situations similar to Adam Rickwood.

There are thousands of 16-18 year olds who are NEETs (not in education, employment or training) – over 500 in Blackpool alone as my blog post just below indicates. Some 50,000 16 year olds leave education each year unable to read or write. Not all of them become trapped in the spiralling cycle of bad behaviour and then criminality – but some do. There are many ways to intervene before you need to start locking these people up.

Tony Blair once (rightly) called for government to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Sadly, he has never followed through on that. The number of under-18s in custody has risen 24% since 1997. Politicians still seem convinced that the public expect them to be ‘hard’ when it comes to criminals, but the public actually have a more sophisticated understanding that it is better to tackle the causes of anti-social behaviour than wait to punish those responsible for its consequences. Local communities are often very active in promoting diversionary activities. Gordon Brown’s answer is some sort of Soviet-style ‘compulsory volunteering’ for the young – he just doesn’t get it.

Where society falls down, in my view, is that in today’s secular world we no longer believe in the real presence of ‘evil’. The left have it worse because they believe that everyone can be reformed by the wondrous powers of the state. But ‘evil’ does exist, and we must learn to recognise it and punish it. The site of little Jamie Bulger being led out of the Strand shopping centre in Bootle is an image of evil which is seared into this nation’s consciousness. But is every troubled teenager evil? Of course not. When the state decides to punish people for transgressing social norms, it takes on a duty of care. Part of that duty care is to stop people killing themselves. At the rate of two suicides a week, clearly they are failing in that duty of care. How long before the next Adam Rickwood?