The Tories yesterday pledged £1bn over four years to tackle crime, with tagging and lie-detector tests for sex offenders and building more prisons at the top of their list.
Annabel Goldie, Scottish party leader, said US-style policies such as lie-detector tests and a "three strikes and you're out" approach to sentencing were advocated, and the Conservatives would act immediately to build another prison in Scotland.
"We know that the majority of crime in this country is drug-related," she said.su "If we are serious about reducing crime, then we have to launch an assault on drug abuse too."
The law and order manifesto pledges to hire 1500 extra police, crack down on youth crime, end automatic early release, get tough on persistent offenders, and invest £100m a year on drug rehabilitation.
Since releasing sex offenders and housing them is a source of "public anxiety", the manifesto proposes giving them truth tests and tracking them by satellite technology.
Persistent offenders handed their third jail sentence would serve additional jail time proportionate to their previous sentences.
All prisoners would have random drug tests and searches, and all drug dealers would be tried on sheriff court indictment at least to indicate the seriousness with which the crime was viewed.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article