We’re heading for bust again in our teeming, disordered and unstable prison system. Figures just out show that despite several bursts of emergency releases we are nearly back to square one, with only 1,000 male adult places left. Something needs to be done and the independent review of sentencing led by former Tory Lord Chancellor David Gauke has been tasked to tell us what.

The interim report has used December’s prison figures to illustrate how parlous the lack of cell space is. We’re only in the middle of February and already the population is nearly 1,500 higher than it was at the end of last year. A welter of data was deployed to make the case that we are imprisoning more people for longer in awful conditions due to what Gauke calls “penal populism”. This means that there are too many criminals in the UK’s prisons because generations of politicians have wanted to seem tougher than the last on crime. This arms race of “toughness” is “incoherent” and lacks a strategic dimension, says Gauke.

In fact, average sentence lengths across all crimes have remained broadly static for the last four years. Sentence lengths for less serious crimes dealt with in the Magistrates courts have actually decreased. Where there has been a substantial increase in time handed down by a judge, it is generally led by the most serious crimes such as murder, sexual violence and robbery. These are crimes that have a huge impact on public trust in the criminal justice system, which is already under fire. The rather condescending reduction of those concerns to “populism” might play well in progressive criminology but it’s unlikely to persuade voters to opt for Labour next time round.

There’s also a rather lazy favourable comparison between recidivism rates for those on community sentences and those in prison custody. This is in support of the not-unreasonable argument that cheaper punishment outside the prison walls trumps incarceration. But as other commentators have pointed out these aren’t like-for-like measurements. One of the obvious reasons for the UK’s worrying reoffending rates in adult males released from short custodial sentences is because they are there because they are serial offenders. This is how they operate and breaking that cycle is extremely difficult. This wasteful circularity does need addressing but tinkering with sentencing guidelines is unlikely to achieve the desired outcome.

Nor is neglecting the role of severity in its value to victims or wider society. Retribution isn’t mentioned once in the report. “Punishment” is of course, but the more personal dimension of revenge by the state on behalf of someone harmed is every bit as important to a cohesive society as rehabilitation and deterrence. Even short sentences, eventually given to those who have often repeatedly failed community punishments, can give tortured communities respite. They aren’t useless tools of crime control as the report suggests.

Only a fool would argue that our present penal policy is working and it is right that Labour is trying to get to the bottom of what is wrong. No doubt the final report in the spring will have important findings and recommendations on ways to reduce prison populations without compromising public safety.

But the focus on “fiscal discipline” feels too much like an accounting exercise with a pre-written conclusion: “A large prison population is bad because it’s expensive”. If people deserve to be in prison, then that’s where they should be — regardless of how many cells are available. The public wants bad people locked up and for a long time. A report will not give Labour political cover for reducing sentences and appearing soft on criminals.

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Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.

NotThatBigIan

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

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