Home Secretary "won't tell judges what to do"

Straw tells The World This Weekend of the advantages of community sentencing Dur. 1'32"

Straw Backs Community Sentences

But Mr Straw insisted: "I'm not going to tell judges what to do. What I want is an informed debate about what are the most appropriate sentencing arrangements."

Britain's prison population currently stands at more than 60,000 and is growing at the rate of several hundred a week.

Asked on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend how he intended to tackle the problem, Mr Straw pointed out that "it costs four times more to hold someone in prison than it does to give them a community sentence."

"The number of community sentences has gone down over the last few years. Public confidence in community sentences is lower in this country than it is in many comparable European countries."

"If we can improve the effectiveness of community sentences, make them tougher, then sentencers will feel better about using them."

Mr Straw said he had been dealt "a very bad hand" by the previous Tory government. This had left him with little choice but to employ expedients such as HMP Weare, the prison ship moored off Portland, Dorset, and private prisons, to accommodate a population rising much more quickly than had been projected.

In the short term, his job was to find places for the offenders being sent into custody by the courts. But in the longer term he had to try to ensure "greater safety for the public" and community service orders had a significant role to play.

The idea of them is to prevent further offending by re-integrating criminals into society through unpaid, often socially useful work of between 40 and 240 hours in total. They may be made by courts on offenders aged 16 or over.

The Home Secretary said he was not shifting from his pre-election view that private prisons were "morally repugnant".

"In a better world the incarceration of prisoners should be handled by the state," said Mr Straw. "But when I used those words I also made it clear that we could not wave a magic wand over the existing private contracts."

The rapidly rising numbers were increasing the pressure to "find places as best we can", necessitating the further use of private finance arrangements.

Mr Straw added, however, that he was hoping to devise new arrangements with the private sector which would involve privately-built prisons being managed by the Prison Service, rather than companies.