The home secretary has set out a raft of measures to tackle crime and end the culture of criminality which sees many offenders released from prison to carry on with a life of crime.

Speaking on Thursday, David Blunkett said he wanted to be "tough as boots" in sentencing violent, sexual and repeat offenders but struck a less strident tone about crime in general.

"Prevention, protection, punishment; and reparation, reducing crime, and rehabilitation," were to be the government's priorities, Blunkett said.

In his first high-profile speech as home secretary outside parliament, Blunkett said: "What is sentencing supposed to do? We want to prevent people getting into a life of crime in the first place and this also involves attacking the causes of crime and the factors that disempower and exclude communities."

He argues that the current sentencing policy is not working and he outlined a combination of rehabilitative, deterrent and punitive measures mixing toughness with a therapeutic approach designed to stop re-offending .

For violent and sex offenders, Blunkett announced proposals to ensure that full sentences are served in jail with the option of extra 10-year supervisory periods if the courts believed offenders still posed a risk to the public.

"What the sentencing regime can achieve on its own is evidently more limited. But we can say that at the moment, it is not achieving what we want. Our figures suggest that around half of all crimes are committed by a hard-core of just 100,000 criminals. Sentencing is not doing much to discourage them," he said.

Sentencing must first deter, especially petty offenders, said Blunkett. He will examine proposals for acceptable behaviour contracts, which, Blunkett said, would be a "legal version of the old fashioned police constable's clip around the ear to misbehaving youth".

Breach of the contracts targeted at anti-social behaviour would lead to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders or other criminal sanctions, Blunkett said.

The government will also expand the range of non-custodial options to give a more unified application of parenting orders, reparation orders, action plan orders and detention and training orders in the youth courts.

Blunkett said that the new approach was about "giving people a chance but making them take it".

Many of the proposals outlined by the home secretary are drawn from the Halliday report published on Thursday.

The report is critical of the failure of short-term custodial sentences of under 12 months. "Short custodial sentences provide little or no opportunity to change the behaviour and problems which put offenders there in the first place," he said.

Blunkett backed Halliday's calls for "Custody plus" extending supervision in the community to the end of the sentence with the option of recall to prison if offenders breach the law. The custodial element of the new regime would be set at three or six months.

With longer sentences of over 12 months, Halliday recommends that half the sentence is served in custody with the rest served under strict supervision in the community.

"This is important in terms of protecting the public. But is also crucial because both custody and community punishment should be an experience that puts individuals back on the straight and narrow. It should help prevent re-offending by using the whole period of an offender's sentence to tackle the underlying reasons that can influence criminality in the first place - drug or alcohol problems, mental illness and depression, or chronic lack of education and qualifications," he said.

But on violent and dangerous offenders "toughness" not therapy is on offer.

Full sentences will be served at the behest of the Parole Board rather than the automatic release after two thirds of the jail term and on release offenders may face an extra 10-year period of supervision with tracking of their "movement and behaviour every step of the way".

Blunkett dismissed concerns about the rising prison population, now at a record level of 67,000, but stressed he did want prison "for its own sake".

Taking Labour's social policy approach to crime further than Jack Straw, Blunkett said that "once [offenders] had paid back their debt to society, the responsibility to support them in the real world falls to the rest of us".

He called for "a public debate on how to create a more transparent sentencing structure that would command public support and respect".

"I am pretty sure that we will be caught in the crossfire between those who see any custodial sentences as an affront to human rights, and those who want to 'lock 'em up and throw away the key'. But the public are driven crackers with frustration by such futile posturing, and I am determined to hammer out what they deserve - a reformed, common-sense sentencing system," said Blunkett.

Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, Simon Hughes, has warmly welcomed the Halliday report and the debate over sentencing, echoing Blunkett's to get it right but warning that the resources must be available to translate words into action.

"We need more effective custodial and non custodial sentences, but unless we have necessary resources in the prison, probation and community services, all the tough words will mean little.

"Liberal Democrats will take part in the debate with enthusiasm. If a permanent penal code can be the result of this review, that would be a great prize and worth working for," he said.

Shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe expressed her "regret that once again we have big headlines, tough talk, lots of spin and very little prospect of any real delivery" and repeated her call for privately run prison workshops.

"Labour's record of initiatives to tackle offending in the community has been a failure. Under their Special Early Release Scheme, over 35,000 offenders have been let out of prison early, many to offend again, some seriously. Their scheme to tackle youth crime by introducing child curfew orders has not produced a single order, and their flagship Anti-Social Behaviour Orders have been a disaster and a bureaucratic nightmare."

"They pay lip service to rehabilitation and the importance of time in prison being used for prisoners to gain vital workplace skills. However, given Labour's failure to improve the purposefulness of prison regimes, it is unclear how this will be achieved Conservatives have made proposals to establish self-financing prison workshops, which would allow a significant expansion of the opportunities for work and training in our prisons," she said.