"Bread and water is all you’ll get," warned my mother when I was a child, as she exhorted me to stay out of trouble and, by extension, out of prison.

Television programmes of the day showed foreboding Victorian jails and while I never had a larcenous bone in my body and was never likely to receive a custodial sentence, I always had this visage of profound privation front and central in my mental picture library.

Spin forward through the decades and after 40 years as a jobbing journalist, I had my eyes opened. My beat was crime and the courts and I saw day and daily how the accused, shell-suited, tattooed, pierced, feckless hordes of dross, played the system at our expense.

I also found myself visiting every jail in Scotland. While I will never hear a word against my sainted late mother, she spun me a good line, because jail is nothing like she described it in her tales of foreboding for my soul if I was ever incarcerated. Quite the reverse.

After seeing how prisoners lived, I realised that I had a far harder time in the Army. During the invasion of Iraq, like thousands of other British soldiers, I lived outside for three months and had no creature comforts, existed in constant fear of being killed, and endured the daily nagging pain that I had reinforced the misery by volunteering for it. Prison is a much softer option.

The Scottish Prison Service labours under the risible misapprehension that prisoners should be rehabilitated while inside. One assumes this process takes place while inmates laze around in centrally-heated cells watching television in a drug-induced haze.

The SPS fails to understand that most law-abiding people couldn’t care less if prisoners are rehabilitated or not. It also fails to understand the central core of the issue: that prison isn’t about the prisoner, it’s about people who aren’t criminals being safer when criminals are off the streets.

And lo, in the brief interregnum when the new government can blame the old one for all sorts of crises, we see that because jails are so full, they’re letting criminals out early. What kind of message does that send?

Yes, serious, violent prisoners will have to see out their sentences, but it’s the small fry, whose recidivism really impacts communities, who are getting out to reoffend after serving a tiny proportion of their tariff.

This tells you that the rights of prisoners are far greater than the rights of victims. And that is wholly and profoundly wrong.

There is a simple solution. The government should undertake a programme of building new jails, which are spartan to the Victorian extent that nobody will want to return, and fill them. And if the demand persists, build more.