[Derek]

Hmmm, whilst on a quick Google search to try and find out the re-offending rate (and failed miserably) I did come across this which is quite interesting.

http://www.publications.parliament.u...70328h0010.htm

I start with the familiar myth that we have a very high prison population. Only recently, the Minister himself was quoted in our local paper, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, as saying that we lock up more people than any other country in Europe and that we have to look for alternatives.
.
If we consider the number of prisoners that we have for each 100,000 of population, we are nearer the average, but still quite high. However, those figures are meaningless; surely the only meaningful measure of the size of the prison population is how many prisoners there are in relation to the number of crimes committed. On that measure, the evidence is startling: we do not have the highest prison population in the western world, but the lowest. Compared with the US, Canada, Australia and the other EU countries as a whole, the UK has the lowest prison population of all. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we have approximately 13 prisoners, compared with approximately 15 in Canada and Australia, well over 20 in the rest of the EU as a whole and a whopping 166 in the US
.
The fact is that the country with the lowest prison rate, the UK, has the highest crime rate—more than 10,000 crimes for every 100,000 of population. The country with the highest prison rate, the USA, has the lowest crime rate: about 4,400 crimes for every 100,000 of population. Canada, the country with the second lowest prison rate of the western countries that I looked at, has the second highest crime rate. The EU has the second highest prison rate and the second lowest crime rate
.
However, a Home Office report showed that that was clearly not the case. The “Re-offending of adults” report, published in November 2006, concluded that
“re-offending rates are lower among offenders discharged from a custodial sentence of at least a year (49 per cent) than among those discharged from a shorter custodial sentence (70 per cent)...This suggests that custodial sentences of at least a year are more effective in reducing re-offending.”

How much of this is Conservative 'Hang em and flog em' hot air is up for debate.