Cherie Booth today backed calls to reduce the number of offenders in jail and to close some of the country’s prisons.

She also endorsed the replacement of short-term prison sentences with community-based punishments.

Ms Booth, QC, said: ”This is actually a significant time to consider what should happen in our penal policy because we are now in a situation where vital choices have to be made against future public expenditure when money is going to be short. Certainly less money than in the past.”

Ms Booth said that more widespread use of community sentences would help to reduce the use of prisons and allow for reinvestment of resources into local communities to cut offending.

She was speaking at the launch of the report of a two-year inquiry into English prisons set up by the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Ms Booth was president of the Commission on English Prisons, which said today that closing prisons and cutting the number of offenders in prisons would save money and help to reduce reoffending.

The final report criticises the criminal justice “hyperactivity” of the final years of John Major and Tony Blair’s governments.

“Penal policy and the criminal justice system as a whole have been primarily responsible for driving up numbers. We have experienced over 15 years of intense criminal justice hyperactivity.

“This intense and punitive political activity has had the effect of encouraging a more fearful and insecure population. It has raised unrealistic expectations about the role prison can play in securing a safer society."

It says that jails in England and Wales had become “warehouses” where people with mental problems and those with drug and alcohol addictions are “dumped”.

Despite calling for a reduction in the current 83,328 people in jail and the closure of some prisons, the report did not provide any figures for a smaller prison estate.

Ms Booth insisted that prison remained the right place for some people. “We understand that some people need to be in jail. It is not about stopping that,” she said.

She said she hoped that the report would be a “road map for long-term and fundamental reform”.

The two-year study said that people should consider whether they wanted to live in a "tolerant, pragmatic, forgiving society".

It added: “The alternative is more of the unrestrained and irresponsible penal excess that is storing up an avalanche of future problems for society while spending ever-increasing sums of public money for the privilege of doing so."

The National Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation, should be dismantled and prison budgets devolved to local communities, the report said.

Local prison and probation budgets would be devolved so that money could be reinvested in community projects that tackled the causes of crime, it added.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said that prison was a “central part” of government policy and would always be.

He said: “While we disagree with some of the commission’s findings, we do agree that, for those who have committed less serious offences, community punishments are highly effective, with a lower reoffending rate, than short custodial sentences.

“But prison is a central part of our policy and always will be. It plays a critical role in punishing and reforming and is the right place for the most serious, violent and persistent offenders.

“By describing prisons as ’vast warehouses’ the report both distorts reality and overlooks the superb work of prison officers and other staff who work so hard to protect the public and help offenders to change their lives.”

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