Hague calls for more jail terms

Prison is not always the best deterrent, says Lord Woolf

Conservative leader William Hague has called for more offenders to be locked up, despite a call from the Lord Chief Justice to cut the prison population.

Lord Woolf told the BBC on Wednesday that he felt too many offenders were being jailed.

He said many people in prison do not need to be there - a situation which is only adding to overcrowding.

He said this was hindering attempts to rehabilitate the UK's more serious offenders.

But William Hague said that a rising prison population would be the inevitable consequence of a tougher approach to law and order which he said a Conservative government would bring.

Lord Woolf: "Overcrowding is a cancer"

"I think that it may be necessary to have more people in prison, in order to deal with the law and order situation in this country," he said.

"I don't think it is being dealt with at the moment. Crime is rising, the number of police is falling and everybody around the country knows that it is an increasing problem and it must be dealt with."

Earlier, Lord Woolf told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that politicians should resist the urge to call for greater use of prison sentences.

But he insisted prison still had its place as a punishment for serious offenders.

"Overcrowding of prisons is a cancer which undermines the work of the prisons," he said.

"The problem is we have people there because of the system who should not be there, who contribute to overcrowding."

Public safeguards

Lord Woolf said attempts had to be made to find punishments within the community that were more acceptable to the public.

Such alternative punishments could actually provide better safeguards for the public, he added.

"If a person has committed a serious crime, I am strongly in favour of the person receiving serious punishment," he said.

He added that the objective of the penal system should be to reduce the likelihood of an offender re-offending on his release.

"I also do not favour sending people to prison unless it is necessary

Lord Woolf

"I also do not favour sending people to prison unless it is necessary, but if it's necessary, I'm all in favour, because society has to be protected.

"On the whole the politicians are very good about race, they don't approve of playing what is called the race card.

"I wish that they also took the same view with regard to the prison card. I'm afraid they don't.

"They do see prison as something which the public feels is an important safeguard, and so they will be in favour in the rhetoric that they use of more and more prison, but that actually is not necessarily in the interests of the public."