A PACKED audience at Stroud’s Old Town Hall heard the chilling phrase ‘Recreating Bedlam’, used by Eric Allison, quoting Frances Crook of the Prison Reform Trust to describe what is happening to the mentally ill in our prisons.

Eric is the Guardian’s prisons correspondent, also an ex offender, and was a member of Member of the Bradley Commission (on people with mental health problems or learning disabilities in the criminal justice system).

He was speaking to Positive Justice Gloucestershire’s annual Prisons Week public meeting, on the subject of ‘Mental Health in Prisons’.

Eric used his own experiences to give a fascinating and inspiring talk on the current crisis in our prisons.

He first went to prison in 1957 as a young offender aged 14.

This was to a detention centre, intended to be a ‘short sharp shock’, which would deter him, from a life of crime.

It had the opposite effect.

Of the 120 young people with him at that time only one appeared to have any obvious mental health problems.

Over the years, before landing the job with the Guardian in 2003, which is how he gave up his criminal career, he saw the numbers of mentally ill people in prisons rising.

Now the majority of those in our prisons are suffering from a variety of mental health problems.

The biggest rise occurred in the late 1980s, when the old asylums were closed.

The idea was that they should be replaced by ‘care in the community’.

In fact they have been replaced by lack of care in prisons.

Most of these sick people pose no threat to society and need medical treatment not punishment.

There would be an outcry if cancer patients were to be treated in this way.

Prisons have seen their staff cut by 20 per cent since the coming of the coalition government, and most of these have little or no training in the care of the mentally ill.

It was a gloomy picture that Eric painted, and the wide range of questions showed that his audience shared his concern, and wanted to do something about it.

Suggestions ranged from the need to change the whole basis of our society, to one of far greater equality, to football clubs for disadvantaged young people.

Early intervention in schools and young people’s facilities were also stressed, both similarly suffering from the policy of austerity.

The audience were inspired by Eric’s passion on behalf to the sick people we lock up, but we left feeling pessimistic about the possibility of change.

What sort of a society are we to treat the sick and vulnerable in our society in such a way?