LONDON—Prime Minister Tony Blair scrambled to avert a political crisis on Friday after judges freed two convicted paedophiles in response to a government warning about full prisons.
Home Secretary John Reid had written to judges asking them to send criminals to jail only if necessary because of a lack of cells.
The release of two paedophiles prompted Blair to deny Reid had ordered the courts to free dangerous criminals.
"Yes, there's pressure on prison places. But if somebody's a danger to the public, there's no question where they should be. They should be in prison," Blair told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
A judge in Wales on Thursday said he had taken Reid's note into account before letting a man, convicted of downloading child pornography, walk free. On Friday, a second judge said the overcrowding warning forced him to release a man on bail pending sentence for sex offences against a teenager.
"If this case had been here last week, it would have been over by now and he would have been in Exeter prison," Sky News quoted Judge Graham Cottle as saying at Exeter Crown Court.
Politicians are not supposed to be involved in sentencing in Britain and the judges' decisions to cite Reid's views were widely described as extraordinary.
The furore is the latest embarrassment the Home Office, the law-and-order ministry whose mismanagement scandals have torpedoed the careers of several high-flying politicians in the Labour Party.
Adding fuel to the controversy was the resignation of Rod Morgan, head of the Youth Justice Board which oversees the detention of minors. He said he was quitting because the youth justice system had become "swamped" with minor offenders.
The prisons' crisis could wreck the political ambitions of Reid, seen as one of the few credible challengers to Chancellor Gordon Brown to succeed Blair, who has said he will step down as premier later this year.
It also hurts the government among the centrist voters Blair has assiduously courted during 10 years in power.
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