Cheaper and more effective to look after our kids than to lock them up

Locking up more people is a populist ploy that doesn't cut crime. We would focus on rigorous community sentences instead, says the Liberal's shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne.

Writing in The Guardian, Chris Huhne says that important matters of public policy are based on evidence and research, rather than political whim. Why, then, is the field of criminal justice uniquely and scandalously divorced from this obvious rule?

We now spend 11 times more on locking children up than on projects to stop them sliding into crime in the first place. Yet incarceration just increases the likelihood of turning them into serious adult offenders. There are more people in the colleges of crime we call our prisons than ever before. More places are being built. Sentences are getting longer. But it is not working. Reoffending remains sky-high. Nine out of every 10 young men sentenced to a first short custodial sentence get out of prison and commit more crime. Yet the politics of fear dictates that both the Tories and Labour are pledging to send more people to prison for longer just because it sounds tough. Liberal Democrats would not build more prisons. We are the only party brave enough to suggest that rigorous community sentences are more effective than short prison sentences.

Read the rest of Chris Huhne's article in The Guardian here