For some reason, we’ve never been able to take rehabilitation seriously. Our primitive instinct for retribution always seems to win out over any desire to improve the wrong-doer.

So let’s have three cheers for John Healey, the adult skills minister, who announced on Wednesday that the Government is putting pound;20 million into prison education, and, as evidence of its good intentions, has set up a prisoners’ learning and skills unit.

Historically, ministers have been unwilling to spend money up front on behalf of the future, since another set of politicians - perhaps even another party - are likely to reap the rewards. Nursery education, notoriously, has suffered from this short-termism, in spite of convincing evidence from America that cash spent on the under-fives can save the criminal justice system shedloads of money 15 years later.

Research in this country also shows that early education has the most beneficial effect on the most disadvantaged children. Yet the first piece of education legislation passed by the 1979 Thatcher government was to relieve local education authorities of their duty to provide nursery schooling.

Tony Blair’s governments have put more money into early-years education, it’s true, but ministers gloss over the fact that most nursery places are still part-time. Deprived children need far more than two-and-a-half hours per day if education is to play its part in enriching their experience and teaching them the skills they need to cope effectively with the modern world - which includes keeping out of the hands of the law.

The Thatcher governments were even more mean-minded over prison education, which was treated shamefully. The prison education service was disbanded, classes were contracted out to FE colleges, and spending was cut.

The prison population continued its inexorable rise and now stands at 72,000, compared with 44,000 in the early 1980s. Many of the people who make up this enormous total - the biggest in Europe - have been in jail before. New research from the social exclusion unit, due to be published shortly, suggests that 58 per cent of released prisoners are back inside within two years. And on average they will each receive three more convictions within the following two years.

The unit’s report on strategies to reduce reoffending recommends that prison be seen as an opportunity to improve the life chances of offenders. They should be encouraged to participate in activities which could make reintegration at the end of their sentence more successful. I say “reintegration,” but many weren’t properly integrated into mainstream society in the first place. Three-quarters leave prison without a job, and nearly one in three has no home to go to. Half of all prisoners have a reading age of 11 or younger, and have the maths skills of a seven-year-old. Whatever the good resolutions they have made in prison - and many do intend to go straight - it’s hardly surprising that crime is the only profession many of them can aspire to.

It’s a devastating waste of human life to say nothing of the misery caused by the crimes these men (and they are mostly men) have committed. Prison education is the last throw of the dice: the final attempt by the state to intervene positively in the lives of people who never had much going for them. It deserves a lot more commitment, strategic thinking and money - and it looks like at last it might get them.