The Bishop of Worcester has called for a different approach in the management of prisoners, saying they have become a social class of their own.

In his role as the Church of England's bishop to HM Prisons, the Rt Rev Dr Peter Selby said the language used to categorise prisoners was unhelpful.

Speaking at the National Probation Service's centenary service at Westminster Abbey this week he said: "Clients' have become offenders' it seems; and offender' slides easily from being a statement of fact - that a person has committed an offence or some offences - into an assertion of identity; they, like the publicans and sinners of the Gospel reading become a social class, a them'.

"And the name we give to the task management' is similarly prone to mislead: what has to be managed is the task of engagement, of encouragement, of enabling growth so that the best resources to be devoted to it. It is not offenders' we manage', but human beings who have committed offences who are enabled after all to grow and flourish. "That's the vision, and no fashionable words must be allowed to distort it."

Dr Selby went on to criticise the furore which surrounded problems within the probation service.

He said: "It's not that there haven't been failures, real tragedies and real mistakes - it's that the noise destroys all proportion in a furore that wrongly believes situations are remedied by finding someone to blame."

"It is not just the constant change and re-organisation or the struggle to get enough resources for a task which, although hugely cost effective compared with custodial sentences, seems to get a smaller share of the budget. It is, more seriously, the phenomenon of social taint - the constant sense that around you are those who judge you by the people you are prepared to work with."