Douglas Hurd didn’t say ‘prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse’ | Letter
Jon Silverman says that the often misattributed line was probably written by the civil servant David Faulker, but with one crucial difference In his letter about ever-lengthier prison sentences (18 August), Nik Wood makes two familiar mistakes in attributing the quote “prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse” to Douglas Hurd. In fact, the line appeared in a white paper published in 1990 by Hurd’s succes
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- #1580
- First seen
- 21 Aug 2026, 17:05 UTC
- Last checked
- 21 Aug 2026, 23:20 UTC
- Version history
- 1 version
- Current fingerprint
1088927b7535...0236db
Publisher layer
Recorded article metadata
- Publisher
- The Guardian
- Country
- England / United Kingdom
- Source published
- 21 Aug 2026, 16:43 UTC
- Source updated
- No update timestamp supplied
- Byline
- Guardian Staff
- Section
- Prisons and probation
Jon Silverman says that the often misattributed line was probably written by the civil servant David Faulker, but with one crucial difference In his letter about ever-lengthier prison sentences (18 August), Nik Wood makes two familiar mistakes in attributing the quote “prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse” to Douglas Hurd. In fact, the line appeared in a white paper published in 1990 by Hurd’s succes
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1
Douglas Hurd didn’t say ‘prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse’ | Letter
Jon Silverman says that the often misattributed line was probably written by the civil servant David Faulker, but with one crucial difference In his letter about ever-lengthier prison sentences (18 August), Nik Wood makes two familiar mistakes in attributing the quote “prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse” to Douglas Hurd. In fact, the line appeared in a white paper published in 1990 by Hurd’s succes
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1088927b7535...0236db- Capture SHA-256
e8c47b9b1566...316bef
Interpretation layer
Labels with declared origins
Publisher categories are copied from source metadata. Machine signals report observable wording or format and do not determine truth, intent, ethics, or wrongdoing.
- machine content-type Reported news observable-rules-v1 / 70% rule confidence
- publisher category Law rss-category
- publisher category Prisons and probation rss-category
- publisher category Society rss-category
- publisher category UK criminal justice rss-category
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Evidence layer
Capture provenance
- Capture ID
- #913
- Observed
- 21 Aug 2026, 17:05 UTC
- HTTP result
- 200 / parsed
- Raw payload
- 470,112 bytes, private gzip evidence
- Collector
- news-ledger/0.1
- Public boundary
- metadata and excerpt