WHAT DOUGLAS HURD NEVER SAID

When you look into it, it's amazing how many famous quotes were never said, or at least not those words,  not by that person.  Einstein particularly.  A vice of the Internet.

This one annoys me so regularly that I'm correcting it here. Douglas Hurd when Home Secretary famously said, 'prison is merely an expensive way of making bad people worse'.  No, he didn't.

The 1990 White Paper, '"Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public' - actually published under his successor, 3 months after he left office - said: "Nobody now regards imprisonment, in itself, as an effective means of reform for most prisoners….. For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation and retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse."

The misquote is often associated with the semi-fact, that 'community punishments are more effective than prison at reducing reoffending'.  I'll return to that.