The slammer

Lots of publicity about prison over-crowding, now that the notional capacity figure of 80000 has been reached.

I've been a probation officer for nearly 27 years. When I started, there were under 40000 prisoners in the UK – less than half the current number. For someone to be sent into custody from a magistrates' court in those days was relatively unusual. That was seen as the job of crown court judges, and magistrates were expected - and keen - to use community sentences.

Now it is very common for magistrates to jail offenders, seemingly riding on the inexorable wave of encouragement to “get tougher” from both the two main political parties.

Prison can indeed be tough, especially for the first-timer and particularly in the first few days. But for those serving short sentences, it is emphatically not a place of rehabilitation. It is more a human warehouse where people are brutalised by their experience, and frequently learn very negative lessons. I have lost count of the number of offenders who have told me they developed their hard drugs habit in prison.

What this Government have got right is the introduction of indeterminate sentences for dangerous offenders, who now should only be released once they are judged safe enough. In the past, this sort of sentence only applied to lifers.

In other words, prison should be for public protection, and not punishment for low risk of harm offenders. For this group, community sentences are much more appropriate and potentially more successful, as well as being enormously cheaper.

Swoop Club

Every winter's evening, starlings flock to roost in the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels. Nothing unusual about birds roosting except, in this case, the numbers involved. It is said that about 3 million gather at dusk, swirling and swooping over a large nature reserve between Glastonbury and Bridgwater.

We went to view the spectacle on a clear and windless evening. It really is a sight you have to experience, as it is impossible to give an accurate sense of it in words.

Imagine the sky being thick with black dots, suddenly dimming the light as they pass overhead. Think of the whoosh of hundreds of thousands of wings beating simultaneously. Hear the sound of a million or two starlings chattering together, once they have settled in trees or on reeds.

It is an amazing experience, and one that is perhaps not publicised extensively for fear of the effect of an overwhelming increase in visitors. For the location is deep in the Levels, reached along bumpy single-track drove roads with a completely inadequate single car park at the reserve.

The event starts with the arrival of the first thin lines of birds. Then it quickly builds up, with massive flocks arriving from all directions, and merging together to form giant fluid helix patterns in the sky. The starlings' aerial flightpaths all seem locked on this one location. We wondered how far some had come.

The birds gather to provide commual warmth and protection from predators. Then in the morning, the daily commute starts back to their day-time haunts.