Top judge slams "social dustbin" jails

LONDON, Oct 8 (Reuters) Britain's prisons are often used as ''social dustbins'' for drug addicts and the mentally ill and are too crowded to give proper rehabilitation, the most senior judge in England and Wales said today.

''It is no answer to put more and more people in prison,'' the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, told the Observer. Prison chiefs face an overcrowding crisis after the jail population reached nearly 80,000 this week, with only a few hundred spaces left for new inmates.

Longer sentences, high reconviction levels and more short jail terms have pushed the numbers to record highs.

More offenders should be given community-based punishments rather than jail terms, Lord Phillips said.

''It is madness to spend 37,000 pounds jailing someone when, by spending much less on services in the community, you can do as good a job,'' he said.

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, said there was only a ''very small number'' of vulnerable people who end up in prison because there is no other suitable place for them.

''Prison needs to be there to protect the public against the most serious ... offenders,'' he told BBC News 24.

Lord Phillips donned jeans and a fluorescent jacket to work with offenders clearing rubbish and weeds from an underpass on a rundown housing estate near Milton Keynes to learn about community sentences.

His experience, which included ''pretty foul work'', highlighted how non-custodial punishments can benefit the community and offenders, he said.

''I like to think that I am a liberal, but that is not the same as being soft on crime. The idea that (using) alternatives to custody is being soft is wrong,'' he said.

His comments come after both main political parties used their annual conferences to stress their tough stance on crime.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis attacked ''soft sentencing'' and said the Conservatives would jail violent offenders rather than give them a ''slap on the wrist''.

Home Secretary John Reid accused the Tories of ''talking tough, voting soft'' on crime and said the public welcomed Labour's tougher sentences for murder, violent offences and dangerous driving''.

However, packing more people into prison can lead to disorder and makes it hard to rehabilitate offenders, Lord Phillips said.

''Emergency measures of keeping prisoners in police cells are highly undesirable,'' he added.

Another option for freeing up space would be to transfer foreign inmates to their home country to serve their sentence.

A disused army barracks near Dover in Kent is due to be reopened as an open prison to help ease overcrowding.

Reid has accepted that moving inmates to open jails could lead to more criminals, according to a confidential note from a prison governor published in the Sunday Times.

The Prison Reform Trust charity this week urged the government to ''stop using prisons as asylums'' and said drug addicts should be treated in the community.

REUTERS PB BS1615