The television personality and criminal barrister Rob Rinder has launched a blistering attack on the UK prison system, saying it fails prisoners, victims and society.

Rinder, who has hosted courtroom reality TV shows and presented documentaries about British justice, said the prison system was repeating the same mistakes over and over. “Repeating patterns and expecting a different result is the definition of madness,” he told the Radio Times.

Rinder recently made Britain Behind Bars: A Secret History, a three-part series for Channel 4. It examined the penal system over centuries, uncovering the experience of inmates from petty crooks to infamous gangsters and murderers.

In his Radio Times interview, he said prisons’ focus should be on rehabilitation rather than punishment. “We do not address the events that led them there in the first place.”

In contrast, the Norwegian prison system sought to “understand how someone has ended up committing an offence, however violent, and help them change their behaviour. It makes economic sense and it’s common sense.”

The UK prison system failed to equip inmates with the “skills to enable them to return to society. Yet it costs about as much to send someone to prison as it does to Eton for a year. We’ve not delivered rehabilitation and, in many cases, not done justice to the word ‘punishment’,” Rinder said.

As a barrister, Rinder specialised in international fraud and other financial crime, but also took on a case involving British soldiers charged with manslaughter after the deaths of Iraqi detainees and another concerning the innocent victims of a gang shooting.

As well as his legal and television careers, Rinder has written two crime novels and a legal guidebook for consumers. He made a documentary about his family history in the Holocaust and another exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He recently presented a travel programme on Italy with Rylan Clark, which has fuelled speculation about a romance between the two television personalities.