Crime and fear of crime are serious issues - people should never feel afraid to leave their own homes. But sadly, it's obvious that our current approach to tackling offenders and stopping them re-offending isn't working.

According to last week's report of the Commons Justice Committee, the government's new prison building programme will cost between £3.2bn and £4.2bn, with running costs estimated at £482m a year. It costs around £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison, more than many people will earn over a year.

Yet prison has a poor record for reducing reoffending - 47% of adults are reconvicted within one year of being released. For petty offenders, serving sentences of less than 12 months, this increases to 60%. For children and young people in custody the rate of re-offending rises to 75%. Reoffending by ex-prisoners costs society at least £11 billion per year.

Following a meeting with the Sussex Probation Service, I'm even more convinced that we need to be putting more resources into probation, not into more prison building.

I was very impressed by the increasingly "joined-up" approach which the probation service is taking, where offenders aren't seen as isolated individuals, but as members of families and communities. The impact of their offence, and its punishment, are assessed more broadly within this framework.

Well managed supervision orders have the potential to break the cycle of offending. And community payback schemes can emphasise the value of being a responsible member of society, working in co-operation with local residents by asking them what improvement works they would like to see done in their local area. The work offenders have done repainting and redecorating facilities for community use locally has been a good example of this in action.

I really believe we need to break the arms race on criminal justice, where Labour and Tories try to outdo each other in the race to build more prisons.

And with the Conservatives apparently considering bringing prison boats back into use, it's now more than ever that we need to focus not simply on imprisonment, but on probation, community policing and tackling the wider causes of crime.