Politicians warned against 'prison card'

Prison hinders attempts to rehabilitate offenders, says Lord Woolf

Law and Order promises to be one of the most vigorous debates of the election campaign.

Shortly after the Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf asked politicians not to play what he called "the prison card", on the Today programme this morning, William Hague said the prison population would rise under a Tory Government.

The Tory leader said this would be the inevitable consequence of the tougher policies he is proposing on law and order.

Like many of Mr Hague's recent pronouncements on the subject, this one has has also provoked an instant row.

Lord Woolf indicated that calls for tougher prison sentences should become less acceptable - just as politicians now widely disapproved of the playing the race card.

"They 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 is not necessarily in the interests of the public," he said.

But Mr Hague said that he did not believe there were too many people in prison.

"I think it may be necessary to have more people in prison in order to deal with the law and order situation. I don't think it being dealt with at the moment," he said.

He insisted that the only time crime had fallen consistently since the war was during the last four years of the last Tory government.

Three strikes - or more

Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has run into his own bit of difficulty with his three strikes policy for burglars.

This was introduced a year ago and was intended to jail persistent offenders; but it has never been used.

Harry Fletcher, of the National Association of Probation Officers, is worried that both parties seem so keen to see more people in prison - in spite of research showing that community punishments lead to less re-offending; and in spite of the views of judges, who want to resist political pressure for mandatory jail terms for burglars.

They've broadly interpreted an "exceptional circumstances clause" - but as Mr Fletcher said, politicians aren't ready to give up on mandatory sentencing just yet.

"What I think will happen is in the next six months the politicians will come up with more ideas for locking more people up for fixed terms - and the judiciary will try and interpret these new laws by giving as much discretion as they can to the courts," he said.

He said the original 'three strikes' announcement was "political" rather than something real.

"It's a populist measure rather than a real one," he said.

The Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, Simon Hughes said mandatory sentences were always wrong because no two circumstances are the same.

"You've got to have an intelligent sentencing policy and, as the Lord chief Justice said, an intelligent penal policy. The prison card should be the political card in penal policy you ever play," he said.

"The Labour government are trying to out-Tory the Tories, and the Tories are trying to out-Tory themselves," he added.