The number of prisoners released after serving short sentences for burglary and theft who are then being recalled to jail has almost quadrupled in four years.

Officials in the Home Office are so concerned at the figures that, for the first time, they are investigating the reason for the surge in recalls.

Unpublished Home Office statistics show that the “revolving-door” syndrome, in which offenders are constantly in and out of jail, is at its worst for prisoners given short jail terms.

Forty per cent of prisoners sentenced to between one and four years and then automatically freed halfway through their jail term are recalled to prison for reoffending. But the Home Office is unable to say what crimes they have committed because it does not assemble the details of crimes for which offenders are recalled.

The figures provoked an argument last night over whether the rise is because of more reoffending by released prisoners or the result of tough enforcement action against those breaking the terms of their release.

Cheryl Gillan, the Conservatives’ prisons spokeswoman, said that the figures showed that attempts to rehabilitate offenders while in prison had got worse under Labour.

“The number of criminals reoffending has risen rapidly in the last eight years,” she said. “Four in ten prisoners released from short sentences now end up back in jail for committing new crimes.”

Today’s figures appear in a report by the Prison Reform Trust which shows that record numbers of prisoners freed from jail under probation service supervision are reoffending or breaking the terms of their release. Overall, the number of offenders being sent back to jail after being freed under supervision, on parole or on a life licence has trebled in four years.

Between 2000-01 and 2003-04, the number rose from 2,337 to 8,103.

For those serving between 12 months and four years — offenders including burglars, thieves and muggers — the figure is even higher, almost quadrupling from 1,637 in 2000-01 to 6,415 in 2003-04.

The report also found that the number of prisoners convicted of crimes such as murder, manslaughter and rape who have been released on life licence and subsequently recalled to jail almost doubled in one year. In 2003, 44 prisoners released on life licence were recalled to jail compared with 26 in the previous year.

Many former prisoners are being recalled to the 139 jails in England and Wales because of a government drive to make the probation service enforce the conditions attached to the early release of prisoners.

The rules have been tightened, with the Home Office insisting that local probation services meet national guidelines about when action is taken to return offenders to jail.

Criminals who breach their early-release conditions, by failing to keep an appointment or committing another offence, can be recalled to jail.

Enver Solomon, the author of the report, said: “The untold story of the record prison population is the large number of offenders who do not pose a threat to the public but are being dragged back to overcrowded, overstretched jails at great expense to the taxpayer.”

His report calls on the Government to relax the national guidelines on when a prisoner should be “breached” for breaking licence conditions and make them less punitive.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, accused the Home Office of setting up ex-prisoners to fail. She said: “Arrangements designed to be tough and fair are too often turning out to be punitive and unjust.

“The startling rise in the numbers of people returned to jail for missing appointments or otherwise messing up their licence conditions is expensive and counterproductive.”

But the Conservatives seized on the figures to accuse the Government of failing to tackle high levels of reoffending by prisoners.

The overall reconviction rate of prisoners has risen since Labour came to power. Official figures show that, of all prisoners released in 2001, 61 per cent had been reconvicted within two years compared with 58 per cent when Labour came to power in 1997.

For adult prisoners, the reconviction rate was 58 per cent, rising steadily from 54 per cent when Labour came to power.

Overcrowding in jails and the record prison population of 75,877 have hampered rehabilitation work. Ambitious psycho-logy-based courses aimed at changing offenders’ behaviour have also not proved as successful as initially expected.

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