Commenting today on crime figures published by the Home Office, and initial reactions to them, Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:

“There are choices to be made: not between locking an offender up or letting him off, but between an overcrowded jail with soaring reconviction rates and a community penalty which involves intensive supervision, drug treatment and paying back.

Locking up more people is a quick fix with damaging long term consequences. Offending by ex-prisoners costs the country £11 billion a year. If we are serious about protecting the public, measures which ensure that offenders face up to what they have done and pay back to the community and penalties which involve close supervision and drug treatment work better than purposeless spells in prison.

Prison exists to protect the public from serious, violent offenders not to protect the Government from its cowardly failure to hold a consistent line on the effectiveness of community sentences for most offenders.”