Andy Burnham could have kept dangerous people behind bars if he had a little bit of wit, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

"I'm gonna have to go. I don't know, I'm gonna go stealing again. I'm gonna go back and say help me this time."

So he is going to go back to stealing. Isn't that completely obvious?

The Government could have changed this scheme. It could have kept dangerous people behind bars.

It could have made people served their sentences if it had had a little bit of wit.

There is, I believe, a newly built prison where they haven't managed to employ enough prison guards to protect it, so it's not full. So there are spaces that aren't therefore being occupied.

But it's more than that when they talk about spending hundreds of millions on turning a former army base into a place for illegal immigrants to go in Piddington, which we all know about.

Jacob Rees-Mogg reacts to Labour's early release scheme

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Why can't they do that for prisoners if in a few weeks you can find lots of spaces for people who've come into the country illegally?

Why can't you do something to lock people up to keep the country safe?

Because the truth is that prison works.

That if you look back to the period when Michael Howard was Home Secretary, the former conservative leader, he introduced a policy of increasing sentences, putting people behind bars.

And low and behold, crime has been falling. If you keep bad people in prison, they can't go stealing. That's the point of it.

And it seems to me a Government that's been in office for two years, instead of thinking through a proper way of dealing with this, has gone to letting people out early.

But it's worse than you think, because actually it's part of a new strategy where people do a third of their sentence in prison, a third tagged and a third free.

They have decided that prison doesn't work, and they wrap it up as an excuse for letting them out early because of overcrowding.