Mr Clarke argued that this made his efforts to reform the penal system and cut reoffending even more important.
Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has blamed the "broken penal system" for the riots that erupted across England last month.
He was only 25 when he crossed the Atlantic, dispatched by the French government to study America's penal system.
Mass incarceration has not always been a hallmark of the American penal system.
FORBES: The Failure of the American Prison System is a Failure of Justice
But it was one of the first under Colombia's new accusatory penal system, which took effect on January 1st.
High rates of incarceration have resulted in prison overcrowding and state governments facing the costs of a rapidly expanding penal system.
The Northern Ireland Prison Service also said it was committed to implementing the findings of the Owers report into the penal system.
The defence minister, Rodrigo Lloreda, went a step further last week, announcing that he was ready to alter the military penal system.
The states are ceding many blocking powers, but in return for new ones from the federal level, particularly in higher education, the penal system and civil-service law.
They include those of Memorial, the association set up in the late 1990s to retrieve and make known the full truth about the Soviet penal system and its victims.
After the Organisation of American States' human-rights commission condemned conditions in Brazil's cells in 1997, the federal government announced plans to give grants to the states (which run the penal system) to build new jails.
Speaking on the Today programme in advance of a major speech in which he will outline his plans for reform of the "failed" penal system, Kenneth Clarke said that it needed "a much better record of rehabilitating" offenders.
BBC: Clarke: 'Time to get back to more intelligent sentencing'
Mr Zapatero's troubles began in late December when the Basque assembly voted for the Ibarretxe plan, which seeks to introduce Basque citizenship, an independent judiciary, a penal system, devolved responsibility for social security and the power to sign international treaties.
In the past week, John Brennan, your counterterrorism expert, has been under fire for remarks he made in an interview in which he likened the criminal release in the United States and the U.S. penal system to that of the detainees in the war on terror returned to the battlefield, saying 20 percent is not that bad.
Let's understand for a second that -- I don't know what Senator Graham or Senator Bond said in 2005 when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an analogy that if you compared the recidivism rate of detainees at Guantanamo with the U.S. penal system, the detainee rate is less for -- the recidivism rate is less for Guantanamo detainees.
The proposed reforms of the penal code and criminal-justice system will have to overcome the entrenched attitudes of judges and lawyers, also well represented in Congress.
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Penal reformers said the MPs had highlighted longstanding failings in the youth justice system as well as the need to further reduce unnecessary arrests - which they say have fallen by more than 100, 000 since 2008.
In fact, penal reformers point to the Woolf Report of 1991 as the most enlightened blueprint for improving the prison system presented to any post-war government.
The Justice Committee (at 9.30am) continues its look at the treatment of women by the criminal justice system, with evidence from pressure groups the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League for Penal Reform.
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