He's a very bright man, Michael Howard, but it's quite clear that he's much more concerned with grabbing the headlines and finding scapegoats, than with taking action through law that will actually improve the chance, both of preventing crime and of detecting crime, and then even more so, deterring people from re-offending, and it's most distressing to see that when research showed that a particular non-custodial method of punishment is effective in perhaps fifty or seventy or eighty percent of cases, whereas prison is not, he goes for prison, he goes for picking on squatters, he goes for picking on the defendants right to silence so that we can see more people like  er, jailed when they were innocent.