KEMI Badenoch will today pledge a massive 50,000 extra prison places to stop criminals being freed early.
The £2billion-a-year building blitz would boost jail capacity by more than half, with most of the new cells promised within one .
It would be funded partly by slashing the foreign aid budget to £1billion a year, alongside cuts elsewhere in government.
The extra space would be used to reverse Labour’s early-release schemes and bring back short sentences.
But prison capacity rose by a net total of just 482 places during the Tories’ 14 years in government.
Ms Badenoch admitted her party failed to build enough while in power, saying the places they added were “nowhere near enough”.
She went on: “We now have a plan to solve this issue and build 50,000 new prison places, the biggest prison increase since , instead of papering over the cracks, £2 billion a year in our prisons and reversing Labour’s dangerous early-release schemes.
“The first duty of government is to keep law-abiding people safe.
“Full prisons are a reason to build more cells, not release more criminals onto our streets.”
Labour chair warned that the Tories were “taking the public for fools” after their record in power.
“Now expects the British people to believe they’ll build 50,000,” she said.
“These proposals are just not credible from a party who left our criminal justice system at breaking point.”
She added that Labour is “fixing the broken system” the Tories’ left behind so victims of “can get the justice they deserve.”
Ms Badenoch’s pledge comes as in and this week.
They are part of the first wave of 4,500 criminal offenders to be released over the next year in an effort to tackle prison overcrowding.
This is despite concerns over a struggling Probation Service and delays to electronic monitoring tags.
Most will not be strapped with monitoring tags as the Probation Service struggles to fit them all.
But the Ministry of Justice has insisted those released will be under the “toughest supervision in British history.”
In the last three months, the number of male prisoners has risen by 1,700 and the Government says it has been forced to free up space in overcrowded jails and stop the justice system from collapsing.
Former Prime Minister and previous Tory administrations had presided over similar plans.
