THE LATEST twist in the prisons fiasco demands swift reform of the way they are run.

For two things are plain from the fact of hundreds of hardened criminals - all of them multiple offenders - being given early release from jail.

The first is that the suddenly-activated 30-year-old statute that permits this is stupid.

The government must repeal it at once.

The second is that the Prison Service, already notorious for its foul-ups, is on too loose a leash.

That must be so when, first of all, the Home Secretary did not, it seems, know that prison officials had implemented a dust-covered rule - uncovered by lawyers in his own department - and begun giving prisoners these ludicrous discounts on their sentences.

And, when next it emerges that more than 500 of them have been let out - more than six times the number the Prison Service admitted to last week - it begs the question of just who knows what is going on and who is in charge?

As we see, the apologetic prisons chief Richard Tilt is still at the helm - but evidently only because Home Secretary Michael Howard cannot afford the political embarrassment of sacking him so soon after his predecessor was axed.

Yet, surely, the fault lies in the glaring communications gulf between operations and policy, created by the Prison Service being run as an agency at a remove from the Home Office - a gap which has enabled the Teflon-coated Mr Howard to evade responsibility for this and past jails chaos.

But the government is responsible for the set-up - for allowing a vital part of the criminal justice system to be run in such a disengaged way that it is free to blunder to such a horrendous extent.

And by virtue of that fact, and that it was his own lawyers who sparked the ludicrous issue in the first place without his knowledge, the carpeting of Mr Tilt and his apologies are not enough - something has to stick at Mr Howard.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.