After a trip to a justice museum, Broadstairs writer and dominatrix Melissa Todd considers the value of imprisonment as a means of punishment – which often means so much more than just a loss of liberty.

I visited the Museum of Justice in Nottingham this week, and can highly recommend it, even if you’re not a pervert.

Birching stools, dungeons, historic trials and hangings recreated by actors; stories that echo down the centuries, mingling a whiff of desperation met with rough justice.

To keep us invested, we were all given a convict number whose story we could pursue through the exhibits. Mine, a 14-year-old boy, was caught stealing lace and sentenced to seven years transportation; my companion learned the fate of a 17-year-old housemaid, also a thief, her sentence of death commuted at the last moment to several years’ hard labour.

Schlepping about authentic prison cells and oubliettes, your feet standing in the very grooves where the hangman’s noose would once have sent you to eternity, it’s hard not to ask - what’s all this punishment for? The question remains pertinent in modern-day Britain, which imprisons more of its population than anywhere in Europe, other than Russia and Turkey, and recently ran out of prison beds.

Yet do you feel any safer? Not sure I do.

It’s tricky to argue against prisons when public opinion inevitably screams that miscreants should be banged up or strung up. Yet prison means so much more than temporary loss of liberty; often it means loss of occupation, family, social network, everything that encourages someone to behave decently, to abide by the rules, in fear of what they might otherwise lose. Once you’ve lost everything, there’s little to fear from transgressing again, and much to gain.

The reoffending rate for adults is around 31%, but this jumps to 54% for those given prison sentences of 12 months or less. Those statistics suggest short custodial sentences actually encourage crime, which feels intuitively right: socially alienating people narrows their opportunities while teaching them new improved opportunities to reoffend. Is that really what we want?

At enormous expense, too: a place in prison costs around £48,000 per annum. Can we really think of nothing better to do with that kind of cash? Or more importantly, is public appetite for prison matched for public appetite for higher taxes to pay for it? The prison budget is around £3.2 billion. Can we honestly doubt spending that money on education and welfare would reduce crime rates more efficiently and humanely?

“Once you’ve lost everything, there’s little to fear from transgressing again, and much to gain...”

17,000 children in the UK have a mother in prison: imagine the likely cost to future taxpayers of loss of earnings, therapy bills, the burden on the NHS, caused by youngsters being motherless.

Unsurprisingly, increased risk of poverty, health and academic struggles are strongly associated with having a parent in prison, while 65% of sons of prisoners end up in the criminal justice system themselves. Often, people commit crime because they face limited opportunities, so limiting opportunities seems a daft counterintuitive way to try to reduce crime. My dad was in prison for three months for drug dealing: were he not illiterate I’m confident he’d have chosen a different path.

Throughout the history of criminal justice, a tension has existed between its three central ambitions - retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. Does prison meet any of them? Retribution, certainly, at least when we have prison cells available; deterrence, only once; and rehabilitation, it seems, not at all.

Some are incarcerated when risk to the community outweighs whatever concerns may exist about the severity of their punishment, such as serious violent and sexual offenders.

Deterrence aims to set an example to the wider community. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the punishment for drug smuggling is public beheading, and certainly their rates of drug smuggling are pretty low. But there are plenty of examples of deterrence not working - consider the high murder rates in the US, despite prisons and death rows being packed with murderers. Punishment must balance the hope of making an example of someone’s behaviour with the possibility of a criminal’s reform and subsequent return to society.

Which leads us to rehabilitation: the hope that with sufficient, quality intervention, people can change. This concept argues against the screaming headlines of the cushy lives lags lead inside, their tellies and pool tables; if you hope for people to change, you must treat them decently.

The UK is unable now to find space for every criminal a judge wishes to incarcerate, so that serious offenders are being sent away on bail, and judges are being begged to sentence more leniently to deal with the backlog.

Meanwhile, politicians enact populist preferences for longer prison sentences, without giving thought to the crumbling, struggling structures and systems required to achieve this. Their desire to be seen as tough on the crimes their economic policies helped create, the communities where crime is seen as not only acceptable but necessary, have broken an already broken system. It requires root and branch reform. For all our sakes.