CONVICTED drug abusers should be offered shorter jail sentences in return for quitting their addiction, a meeting in Oxford was told last night.

Sir Stephen Tumim, the former chief inspector of prisons, told an audience at St Edmund Hall that most serious crime was committed by people craving drugs.

He said: "Something like 70 per cent of burglary and robbery is committed for the purposes of paying for drugs and that is a terrible factor of our society.

"I think our prisons have got to be even tougher than they are now in cracking down on drugs. Treatment should be part of the penalty."

Sir Stephen was speaking at a meeting of Smart - an Oxfordshire drug action group. He wants to see a built-in programme of rehabilitation where prisoners "know they are likely to get out earlier if they co-operate with the treatment".

When asked how the Government would pay for his scheme, Sir Stephen, now Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, replied: "If we can get them off drugs we are saving vast sums of money."

Among the invited audience were top judges and reformed drug addicts and former Foreign Secretary and Witney MP Lord Hurd.

But former crack cocaine and heroin addict Stephen Smith, 22, of Cowley, Oxford, condemned Sir Stephen's plans.

Mr Smith spent years in prison for robbery and theft and has only recently quit his addiction.

He told the Oxford Mail: "It is easier to score drugs in Bullingdon Prison than on the Cowley Road. There is not enough done with people who have used drugs and come out. "

He added: "In prison you are given no responsibility. When you come out you go immediately back to your old ways - the ones comfortable before you went to jail - and that is to drugs."

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