It's like a game of pin ball where prisoners merely touch a prison and need to be moved away swiftly

Anne Owers Prisons chief inspector

Short-term prisoners, including the street robbers ministers are targeting in summit on Wednesday, are worst affected by overcrowding, said Ms Owers.

That overcrowding problem is also having an effect on safety, she said in an interview for the ePolitix.com website.

"The initial reception processes, which are really important for preventing self-harm, for doing de-toxification, for getting proper needs assessments, are getting overwhelmed," she said.

'Only fire-fighting'

The prisons inspector is calling for a new national strategy to link jails with each other and with probation.

Ms Owers was pessimistic about the prospects of prison staff being able to be proactive about rehabilitating and resettling prisoners.

"I think with the kind of rises that we are looking at in recent weeks and months in the prison population - rising at the rate of a small prison a week - then the Prison Service at the moment is fire-fighting," she said.

Anne Owers says resettling offenders must be at the core of prisons' work

"It is simply trying to maintain a minimum service and in order to do so must bus people around the country.

"It's like a game of musical cells, or even in some cases more like a game of pin-ball where prisoners merely touch a prison and need to be moved away swiftly to accommodate the next lot."

Ms Owers said it was short-term offenders - including many of those involved in street crime - that often suffered the most from overcrowding.

That may worry the government, which on Wednesday is holding a summit about tackling the rising problem of street crime.

Ms Owers continued: "Those sentenced to less than one year don't have to have sentence plans when they're in prison and they don't have to have supervision outside prison.

"And so what we're doing is recycling people back into the community without proper interventions and within a very short time they've committed a crime and they're back again."

Community prisons

The prisons inspectorate has underlined the need for proper programmes to resettle prisoners when they are set free.

That had met a positive response from the government and the Prison Service, said Ms Owers.

There were pockets of good projects but these needed to be at the core of what prisons' work, she continued.

That includes the idea, proposed in the wake of the 1990 Strangeways riots, of community prisons.

Ms Owers explained that such prisons took people from local communities, worked with them or sent them elsewhere on programmes, and received them back before resettling them into their communities.

In the interview, she also called for a more flexible range of sentences for judges and magistrates to use.

Those could include community programmes with tight supervision, hostel accommodation which can help offenders with drug problems or enable mothers keep in close contact with children living nearby.