Jail sentences of less than a year should be scrapped as the prison system struggles with overcrowding, slashed budgets and an abject failure to rehabilitate so-called “short-timers”, prison governors will demand on Tuesday.

“It is in nobody’s interests for these people to be wrenched away from home and then spat out from prison with much the same problems weeks or a few months later,” Paul Tidball, president of the Prison Governors’ Association, will argue in a speech on Tuesday.