At long last, a man finishes his sentence. He walks out of the prison gate with a plastic bag of belongings. "Free". So free he has nowhere to sleep that night. Within a year, two in three men who can be found in that position are back in custody. For those released to a settled address, it's closer to one in three.
That gap is one of the most important facts in British criminal justice, and almost no one talks about it. We argue without end about sentence length, about rehabilitation, about the philosophy of punishment. All very much in need of correction and recalibration. Meanwhile a profound predictor of whether a released prisoner offends again turns out to be something almost embarrassingly plain: whether he has a bed.
HM Inspectorate of Probation has said it outright - the shortage of housing on release is "jeopardising public protection". The point is not the offender's comfort. Every one of those re-offences is a fresh victim - a burgled house, a knife pulled on a stranger - created in part because the state put a man back on the street with no street to go to.
None of this is an argument for letting people out sooner; I want the reverse. Sentences should be served in full, and Progress would end the early-release schemes that fling violent men back onto the street years ahead of time. But the man whose sentence has justly ended, whose time has been served and whose debt has been repaid, is going to walk through that gate either way. The only question is whether we release him to a fresh start or to a doorway - and if we choose the doorway, we have in effect commissioned his next crime ourselves.
The insane part is the arithmetic. Reoffending costs the country something like £18bn a year. A single prison place costs over £50,000 a year. Set against those figures, making sure a man leaves custody with an address and a job is a rounding error - and it's the rounding error we refuse to spend.
Our instinct here must follos from how we think about prison itself. For those who can be turned around, the sentence should end in a real chance to rebuild - training, work, and no doubt, a roof over the head - so the man who has paid his debt doesn't step straight back into the only life he knows.
Lock up whoever needs locking up, for every day the court orders. But release them like a country that would rather not see them again, not like one arranging the sequel.