Looking down from her study at a concrete-and-graffiti London, Baroness Stern, Secretary General of Penal Reform International (PRI), Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS), recently appointed member of the House of Lords, struggles to explain how she became a defender of society's "outcasts", its "deviants".

"This prison career just happened to me," she says. "There's no logic, there's no blinding flash. I didn't meet anyone. I just got into a field that brought me into contact with prisons and prisoners and I got stuck."

For nearly 20 years, as director of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO), she ran an ongoing campaign to improve the lot of ex-prisoners. Some regarded her as a great campaigner, others as a great troublemaker. In a tortuous way - possible only in Britain, she says - she became part of the great and the good, gaining a CBE and then a seat in the House of Lords.

But, during this time, Stern's great aim, her overarching campaign, was to cut down on the number of prisoners languishing in Britain's jails.

And in this she failed. Over her time at NACRO, the prison population increased steadily. In 1977, when she became its director, there were just over 40,000 prisoners in England and Wales, and just under 5,000 in Scotland.

Today, more than 65,000 prisoners in England and Wales, more than 6,000 in Scotland, and around 1,600 in Northern Ireland find themselves in one of the UK's 160 prisons - behind bars, "banged up".

Prison reform: difficult to shake loose
Rights for prisoners just isn't popular, she explains. It's not an issue that governments regard as a vote-winner. "There's a great capacity for society's cruelty and punitiveness to come out when it's dealing with its deviants. If there are people who are less popular than criminals, I can't think who they are."

Actually, she thinks that after a decade of keen opposition to her beliefs - that prison doesn't work, that there are alternatives to prison - it's quite amazing that the prison reform movement even exists.

The achievement - her achievement - is that the prison reform movement still succeeds in catching the interest of the political classes.

It's not unlikely that the need for endless struggle was what attracted her to the cause of prison reform in the first place. The unending nature of the campaign is also what keeps her going.

Once anyone samples the complexity of the prison system, it becomes difficult to shake loose, she says. It's hard work. It's fascinating. You get trapped.

Breaking conventions
Given Stern's readiness to go against the grain, to risk personal ignominy, to be a breaker of conventions, perhaps even to identify at some level with the law-breaker, it's not surprising that she's keen to pin down what turns somebody into a campaigning troublemaker.

Background made a difference, she says. The way her parents brought her up certainly prepared the ground. While political campaigning wasn't in the blood, it was all around her.

As she talks about her childhood, the genteel north London upbringing, the public school (which, significantly, was one of Britain's few nonconformist public schools for girls), Bristol University, Stern flaps her hand in a dismissive way at the Millennium Dome and the gleaming glass towers of the City of London, just visible on the horizon through her study window.

Born in 1941 to German-Jewish refugees, she was brought up on stories about how not everyone shared her comfortable, middle-class life, and on stories about the Holocaust.

"There was a very strong awareness of the toiling masses and the oppressed. That was part of how everybody saw the world. It was absolutely part of the upbringing.

"My mother would have told me from the time that I could understand how lucky I was to be alive, to have food, to have shelter."

The knowledge of what had happened to her relatives in Germany - those not fortunate enough to escape the Nazis - and the legacy of the Second World War, its displaced peoples and privations, played a major part in turning her into a campaigner.

"The carnage of the war was unprecedented, unimaginable. Humanity sunk to such depths that everybody's perspective was that a better world had to come out of those ashes." As a student, then, in the seditious Sixties, it seemed natural to try to make a difference.

Becoming a radical
But weren't they the swinging Sixties? Her world wasn't Carnaby Street. It certainly swung - but with protesters' arms and policemen's truncheons.

The Sixties' Vivien Stern - she was only made a life peer in 1999 - sounds like the archetypal angry young student. She marched to Aldermaston to protest at the deployment of nuclear weapons. She protested against US involvement in Vietnam. She protested against racism, and against social injustice.

It was a time of optimism and growth, she remembers. Money didn't matter. It was a virtue to look for and live for "great issues". People didn't have to think all the time about material things.

"Everyone got a job and everyone could choose a job and we didn't have such great needs of things to buy as everybody has nowadays. It wasn't a virtue to have a lot of things. On the contrary, it was a virtue not to think about money at all."

After working as an English teacher, working in race relations, building up a reputation as a campaigner, a constructive troublemaker, Stern joined NACRO.

She describes it as a shock. One Monday morning, without any great knowledge of the prison system, she found herself walking through a prison gate, heard the sound of keys turning and bolts being slammed shut.

Her first feelings on entering a prison? "That it was ghastly. What a ghastly idea. What a waste of human beings. And what a terrible thing to take away people's liberty.

"And what a relief to get out, to be outside - and doesn't the air feel different once you're outside the gate? And don't you feel bad about all those who are still on the other side of the gate?"

Stern had found her vocation - her campaign.

Day-to-day campaigning
As the Seventies ticked away, running NACRO completely absorbed her energy. She found herself working at a number of levels at once. There was the general management of NACRO's ex-prisoner hostels where crisis followed crisis.

"It's a field full of possibilities. You get suicides, you get people using your hostels for a drug retailing centre or organised paedophilia."

It called for the skills of a grand diplomat. "You have this dual approach. While trusting everyone and wanting to do good, you always have to remember that the people you're dealing with sometimes have another agenda."

At the same time, she had to keep an eye on what the powers that be were up to. "One day, you discover that they're going to change the funding rules and then you have to start lobbying."

And at the same time, she had to inspire her team, keep them working when funds ran out, when all seemed lost.

"You're the figurehead, the fall guy, listener, enthuser. You travel around the country finding out what's going on, reminding people that they're marvellous. Which they are."

So what's it like running a campaigning organisation? "It's non-stop."

Changes in the political climate
But the heady, progressive era that had encouraged Baroness Stern's radicalism was already winding down. The political pendulum was swinging away from a liberal attitude towards criminals, the hope that they could be rehabilitated, to far tougher policies.

Campaigning became increasingly difficult. Simply holding the line, keeping the rights prisoners had won during the Sixties and Seventies, became difficult. The turning point, the end of the liberal ethos in which NACRO had flourished, was the appointment of Michael Howard as Home Secretary in 1993.

Baroness Stern is scathing about the policies Howard pioneered and the kind of thinking that went along with them.

"If you prisonise whole groups of people, all the people, all the young men who come from a certain neighbourhood, all the young black men from the city, all the people who have a low level of education and have difficulty in getting a job," she says, "then it will become an alternative society, it will create its own business networks, its drug entrepreneurs.

"So, you've created an illegal society. Since they can't have recourse to law if somebody breaks a contract, they shoot them.

"So everybody has to be armed and you create a wilderness. And then the rest of you feel that it's very dangerous and people start living away from those areas and putting a wall around their houses and having a security guard. And everybody ends up in a prison."

It makes her angry, she says. But it also makes her continue with the struggle. "You feel that you can't get old and die, because people just don't learn."

A campaigner's work is never done
Stern leans forward and tries to explain what this means on a practical level. "So, what can you learn from all this? You can learn that a job is never done. It's a permanent part of life, because each generation will see it differently and you'll have to tell them again why it's not a good thing."

It's not all bad. Watching that pendulum swing, Stern says that she always thought that one of her most important tasks was to ensure that lots of "young people and the next generation and the next generation after that" came into the prison reform field to keep it going.

Today, she sees the political pendulum swinging back in her favour, back towards those like her who think that there are alternatives to prison. She's watching it swing back to her fundamental values - the values of her childhood.

She says she's happy to see that young people are no longer quite so keen to work in City jobs that pay large bonuses but leave them spiritually poor.

"After the protests in Seattle, I felt a sense of familiarity, that once again people have decided that if they don't succeed in reclaiming the world, then people who really don't care about the world will succeed in eating it all up."

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