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Because the criminal justice system is increasingly focusing solely on punishment, large numbers of short-term prisoners are leaving jail with little support and few prospects outside, argues Alison Taylor.

Judging by the high rate of suicide among offenders soon after they leave prison, it seems that, a handful of committed organisations aside, few really care what befalls ex-prisoners. They are, to a great extent, regarded as expendable.

Developed societies are, by their very nature, competitive. In the UK, the distribution of wealth and access to resources is both uneven and greatly inequitable. Death and taxation are very much the only certainties: everything else, particularly employment for life, is in a state of perpetual flux. Hence, people feel deeply vulnerable and become prey to collective neuroses about perceived threat, among which crime, and especially crimes against property, rank high. The end result is increasing intolerance and a blood lust for revenge against the wrongdoer.

The Labour government promised to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", but succeeded only in creating an explosion in the prison population while doing nothing to address the issues of deprivation and inequality that lie at the heart of much antisocial behaviour. Prince Charles' Prince's Trust has now been promised £50m a year of public money to help steer disadvantaged young people away from crime and into constructive activity. This may seem a lot, but it is little more than a drop in the ocean, and likely to benefit only a small proportion of the youngsters most at risk. More pertinently, policies and investments to promote the welfare and well being of our young people are the responsibility of government, not of charitable organisations, however highly placed.

In the past decade, the prison population has increased from some 44,000 to more than 70,000. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, recently stated that overcrowding has already reached "intolerable" proportions, and warned of the very real risk of riot and disturbance unless early measures are taken to reduce numbers. He is pressing the judiciary to "confine the use of prison for those offenders for whom there is no alternative", but, to all intents and purposes, there is no alternative.

The over-stretched national probation service has to concern itself with control, punishment and public protection; rehabilitation and support are bottom of the list. The criminal justice system as a whole leans its great weight towards punishment alone. There is a belief in the existence of a "criminal class" which must, for the sake of society, be neutralised if not eliminated. In such a climate, notions of reform, of rehabilitation of the offender, receive short shrift.

In the early 1970s, I was deputy head of a large bail and probation unit that also offered, when beds were available, parole placements for long-term prisoners, many of whom were no more capable than a small child of coping with a world they found utterly intimidating. They were needy and fearful, inept in all practical matters, required high levels of extended support to maintain their freedom and often spoke of the temptation of offending simply to gain re-entry into the safe "inside".

Imprisonment enforces psychological adaptations on the individual. While loss of liberty is the actual punishment, "doing time" is supposed to give time for reflection upon one's wrongdoing. Long-termers have the benefit of knowing where they will be for years ahead; short-termers are in limbo. They are usually the perpetrators of petty offences to which the system responds by using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, leaving their already fragmented lives smashed to tiny pieces. They are the drifters, the care leavers, the homeless, the inadequate, the social casualties, who enter prison with little and emerge without even notional support. Left to sink or swim, more often than not, they sink.

In the probation unit, a high proportion of the young offenders were graduates of a care system that to this day, persists in failing countless thousands of youngsters. In the criminal justice system need exponentially outstrips resources, yet for some young offenders at least, the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 should be picking up the shortfall. There is not a word in that legislation about support for prison leavers.

Alison Taylor is a novelist, a former senior child care worker and the winner of the 1996 Community Care Readers' Award