This has led to a penal policy characterized by inconsistency and lack of direction and one subject to the vagaries of conviction politics, pragmatic expedients, and damage limitation exercises. While sentence lengths are going up, time served is coming down, and the development of noncustodial measures has had little success in reducing the prison population. There is great disparity, for example, between courts in the use of financial penalties. Although agencies such as the police, the prison system, and the Probation Service are subject to demands for increased cost- effectiveness, sentencers remain unaccountable for the prison resources they consume. The challenge is to devise a penal system in which courts are accountable to an external agency independent of the government. In the meantime, the onus of diverting offenders from prison is clearly on the Probation Service in England and Wales. 3 references