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Good evening. It was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who as well as being one of the greatest writers and thinkers who ever lived, was an ex-con, who said you can tell how civilised a country is by the way it treats its criminals.

On that basis, Britain looks positively barbarous. We bang up more of our population than any other European country in mostly Victorian jails,

now so overcrowded the government's hastily trying to cut the numbers before they burst at the seams.

One plan that emerged this week was to stop sending people to jail for less than a year.

And the argument, apart from the pressing need to

cut overall numbers, is that short sentences don't work. The majority re-offend, rather more than

those serving longer sentences. This opens up big questions about prisons that are further

from resolution than they've ever been. Who's prison for?

All criminals or just the violent and dangerous?

What's prison for?

Should the emphasis be on retribution or rehabilitation?

To deter others from crime or protect society

by locking away those who threaten it?

It's a polarised argument. Reformers see prisoners

a kind of collective vengeance that tends to lock people into a life of crime. Their opponents feel

society must have strong sanctions against criminals that a huge amount of crime is committed by a

remarkably small number of offenders that it's vital to take out of circulation.

Are prisons doing more harm than good?

That's our moral maze tonight, the panel Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The historian Tim Stanley, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, and James Orr,

Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. Tim, Tim Stanley, broadly speaking from society's point of view,

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