The papers demand "more police on the street". What about getting a few more journalists out there as well?

Perhaps it is the hot weather, or perhaps I need a holiday, but the newspapers at present make me feel unusually dispirited. For most of the past month, they have been dominated by three subjects: crime, Big Brother and football. That is what we have come to after nine exciting years of new Labour.

The Sunday Telegraph, for example, has launched a campaign to "make Britain safe". Among other things, it demands more prisons, even though the prison population is now close to 80,000. How many more prisons exactly? Writing last Sunday, Leo McKinstry proposed enough to accommodate "at least 200,000". That way, he argued, more people could be locked up for longer periods. This was bound to work because, while they were in prison, they could not commit crimes.

It is hard to dispute this logic. But I wonder if we shouldn't go a stage further. The vast majority of crime, particularly the violent crime that most exercises the press, is committed by men and boys, aged about 14 to 25, from impoverished backgrounds. If all such males were locked up automatically, not only would the crime rate plummet, we would save billions on unnecessary court hearings, with their expensive paraphernalia of lawyers, judges, juries, witnesses and social workers' reports. Moreover, as McKinstry points out, people can't claim benefit while they're inside, and "employment in the prison service is more productive than many bureaucratic, paper-shuffling jobs . . . in the public sector".

But, in all its indignation over allegedly rising crime, the press never seems to consider whether it might itself bear a smidgen of responsibility. Consider the case of Craig Sweeney, who abused a three-year-old girl in Cardiff this year, after abducting her from her home. Sweeney was used by the News of the World to show why we need a British version of Megan's Law, which gives American parents the right to know the whereabouts of paedophiles. The girl's mother had known Sweeney "since he was a lad"; he had done "odd jobs for us". Then, after a long absence, he reappeared, saying he had been in prison for GBH. In fact he had served 18 months of a three-year sentence for indecent assault on another child. Had the mother known this, she said, she wouldn't have let him in the house.

I am not sure I would want a man with a record of GBH in the house either. But why didn't the mother know the truth? Wasn't the case reported at the time? Presumably not, otherwise she would surely have heard if not read about it; certainly, I could find no trace of it in the online local newspaper archives.

Newspaper court reports used to alert communities to the bad 'uns in their midst, as well as helping create a sense of social shame among offenders. I was reminded of this when reading a new book, Copy! Boy!, by my former colleague Peter Deeley (later the Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent), who recalls his early career as a reporter for a Birmingham news agency in the 1950s. (It's self-published, so if you want to buy it, e-mail pknapton@onetel.com.) In that vanished age, a news agency might have as many as 17 reporters, whose staple work would include local courts, as well as sports events and council meetings. Few stories would get into the nationals, but many would make the Birmingham papers.

As Deeley points out, "no newspaper today would contemplate that kind of reportage". It is too labour-intensive, and local newspaper groups are now interested only in profit margins. So, in this supposedly information-rich age, we are told more and more about less and less. We know every detail about Posh and Becks and the Big Brother contestants, but virtually nothing about what the local council is up to. We know about John Prescott's groping hands, but not, unless they have done something very spectacular, about the misdemeanours of our neighbours.

The Sunday Telegraph, like other papers, demands "more police on the street". What about getting a few more journalists out and about as well?

Lock up Simon Heffer

If our jails are to accommodate 200,000 inmates, perhaps room can be found for the Daily Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer. Writing on 1 July, he argues that the Argentinians could "just walk in" to the Falklands. "Overstretched, under-resourced and bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan," our armed forces "couldn't . . . lift a finger to stop them." Heffer concludes: "Whatever is Johnny Gaucho waiting for?"

If it is a criminal offence to incite to terrorism, it must surely also be an offence to incite a foreign power to invade sovereign British territory. No doubt Heffer would face a long sentence but, since I once employed him to write for this magazine, under the satirical title "our Conservative Party correspondent", I promise to send him improving books.

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