). The usual prison sentence is now four months longer than twenty years ago, and the use of community sentences has nearly halved despite being cheaper and more effective than a short prison sentence at reducing offending. The government has begun to make use of electronic tagging conditionally to release short and medium-term prisoners earlier than would otherwise have been the case. If this scheme is extended, and the current prison building programme continues, then system overcrowding would be eliminated and the Service would have the room to manoeuver that it had briefly in the early 1990s (Smit & Dunkel, 2001). Significant differences between the male and female prisoner populations. A higher proportion of women prisoners are on remand