Literacy and Drugs (Custodial Sentences)

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

It is a great pleasure to respond to the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) on securing it.

The debate is not only important but timely, because the Government will soon be publishing our plans to make a radical change in how we support the rehabilitation of offenders. My hon. Friend is rightly concerned with that new focus on rehabilitation both in this debate and in his excellent book “Doing Time: Prisons in the 21st Century”—no doubt available in all good booksellers and an excellent stocking filler. I congratulate him. He has eloquently set out today the issues that face us in tackling offenders’ problems with literacy and substance misuse. Both are significant causes of offending and reoffending.

I agree with much of what my hon. Friend suggests, but let me respond in detail to some of the specific issues that he and others have raised in this debate and elsewhere. Let me start with his suggestion that the courts should mandate participation in literacy programmes and drug treatment. The courts already play an important role in framing the content of community orders and suspended sentences. Informed by pre-sentence reports and medical evidence, the courts can use treatment requirements to address drug addiction. They can also impose programme or activity requirements that might involve literacy courses. My hon. Friend suggests that offenders sentenced to custody should be compelled into education, that early release could provide an incentive for completing courses and that offenders entering custody with drug problems should be compelled to receive treatment.

In his book, my hon. Friend acknowledges—I agree with him—that using sentencing in that way is “admittedly difficult”. It is important to remember that drug treatment ordered by a court would be lawful, or effective, only if it happened with the offender’s consent. That is how drug rehabilitation requirements work at present.

Equally, we need a release framework that operates fairly for all offenders, whether or not they are literate on arrival in prison. That said, I want to ensure that prisoners have incentives to engage in positive and constructive activity during their time in custody. For example, I am reviewing privileges in prison and the rules that currently apply to them. In this and other areas of policy, I want to ensure that we have a system that encourages offenders to engage with the support we offer, as my hon. Friend said.

On literacy, my hon. Friend mentioned his experience as a barrister dealing in criminal law—an experience I share, so I ought to declare my interest as everyone else in the debate has, although the last time I received any legal aid fees was even longer ago than he did. From my experience, I am aware, as he is, of the difficulties that many prisoners have with basic reading and writing. Many prisoners also experience a range of other barriers to learning, whether they be mental illness, poor thinking skills, communication difficulties, sight and hearing problems or previous negative experiences.

We are placing a strong focus on assessing prisoners’ learning needs and when a literacy need is identified, it will be addressed as a matter of priority. My hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) mentioned other learning difficulties, dyslexia among them, and was right to identify that as a significant issue among the prison population. We make every effort to identify that as early as possible, and learning providers in particular have a responsibility to do so.

Other things are being done to target prisoners with literacy problems, and to incentivise them to address those issues. We are working with education providers to develop engaging and motivating courses to target resistant learners particularly. Those courses will be marketed by prison staff as part of the prison induction process.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham talked about the Shannon Trust, and he is right to recognise its significant contribution. I fully support its work, and have met its staff for discussions, and I am sure I will do so again. We are committed to the use of peer mentors to support reading schemes such as its Toe by Toe project, and my officials are looking at how prison staff can better support its work. My hon. Friend is right to identify peer mentors as a significant step forward in dealing with prisoners who do not, as he said, want to admit their literacy problems.

[Guy Opperman]

Does the Minister accept that there is a potential role for long-term prison inmates—prisoners in prison—to be peer mentors to other prisoners who have just arrived and need literacy or other courses? Clearly, the people prisoners trust most are other prisoners, and that is no disrespect to individual staff.

[Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I agree. That is absolutely right, and it is very much what happens now, although we would like it to happen a lot more. The Toe by Toe project particularly is a good example, but there is considerable scope for more peer mentoring, and for more established prisoners helping those who are newly arrived—not only with reading and literacy, but across a whole range of other things. I have seen very good examples of that, and I want to see more. Prisoners often find that working with carefully selected and trained peer mentors—they must be that—can be much less threatening than the classroom environment.

There is a problem, as my hon. Friend said, with shorter sentences, and the difficulty of addressing such problems over a short time frame. That is why we are piloting intensive maths and English courses in prisons, similar to those used by the Army, particularly to address the needs of prisoners serving short sentences.

We have also focused on vocational training and preparing prisoners for employment during their final year in prison. Those courses are closely linked to developing the skills needed by employers in the areas in which offenders will be released.

[Guy Opperman]

May I take the Minister back to consent? He said that it would be difficult to impose conditions on a judicial sentence attached to custody without consent. Indeterminate sentences for public protection were introduced in that way, and it is also the case with community orders, so there is no fundamental principle between a community sentence and a sentence on licence, both of which exist with a condition attached, and a sentence of custody with an imposition of a requirement to carry out these matters. Does he accept that?

[Jeremy Wright]

The issue is practical rather than legal. My hon. Friend will recognise that to get an offender to engage properly, whether they have a drug addiction or literacy problems, they must do so voluntarily, because a compulsory arrangement will not deliver the results that we all want. That is very much the message that I have heard from the Shannon Trust, as he has.

I recognise that there are always opportunities to impose restrictions on offenders, whether in the context of community sentences or licence conditions, but we must seek to incentivise prisoners to do what we know they need to do to minimise their risk of reoffending. That will be partly by persuasion, and partly by ensuring that they are prepared to engage with the provision so that they get out of it what they need. I understand my hon. Friend’s point.

[Rehman Chishti]

Does the Minister have an assessment of how many drug treatment and testing orders were given in the last two years, and how many were successfully completed?

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do not have the figures immediately to hand, but I am sure that we can get them to him. Inevitably with the regime for drug treatment, which I will come to in a moment, we need greater engagement and better results. We are working as hard as we can to achieve that.

I have talked a little about education. We are doing other things, which I do not have much time to go through, but I draw attention to the virtual campuses in 101 prisons, which provide an opportunity for prisoners to learn with carefully controlled access to a suite of web-based education and employment materials. We must recognise that we need greater scope to broaden the learning offer, to alert prisoners to job vacancies in their release area, to make the process of learning much more akin to that experienced in the outside world, and to give prisoners the experience of using IT.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham referred to drugs, and I agree that there are two priorities for the Government and the National Offender Management Service. First, we must stop drugs from entering prisons and secondly we must get offenders off drugs and keep them off drugs. He is right to highlight the fact that the demand for drugs in prisons is far greater and more concentrated than anywhere else in society. The high demand and limited supply of drugs creates prices five to six times higher than in the community and represents a lucrative market. That is why prisons are targeted by organised crime groups using sophisticated smuggling methods. Despite rigorous prison security measures, drugs can penetrate prison walls.

I acknowledge that, as my hon. Friend said, some prisoners will try a drug in prison that they have not used before, but they may have been using other drugs in the community—perhaps they have been taking crack cocaine or heavily abusing alcohol—that they substitute with that new drug.

I assure my hon. Friend that we are committed to improving the situation, and we are making progress. Particular initiatives have included an increase in drug-free prison wings where increased security measures prevent access to drugs. I am pleased that my hon. Friend, as he says in his book, supports these measures.

We are trialling drug detection technology and using technology to deny signals to illegal mobile phones in prisons, which are often associated with drug supply. We are also pursuing the roll-out of a networked prison intelligence system to help prisons to stay one step ahead of those seeking to breach prison security. As a result, fewer prisoners are testing positive for drugs than at any time since 1996. Around 7% of prisoners test positive for drug misuse when they are in custody, which is a considerable fall from the 64% who used drugs in the four weeks before custody.

My hon. Friend talked about the opportunity to test when someone goes into custody and comes out. Those are fixed points, and I understand their significance, but he will recognise that we must make sure that prisoners do not use drugs at any time throughout their sentence, and mandatory, random drug testing is useful in that.

As well as keeping drugs out of prison, we want to deliver a rehabilitation revolution that helps to transform the lives of offenders and ensures that they do not return to a life of crime after their sentence. Reshaping treatment services in prisons and the community is at the heart of the Government’s intention to get more people free of their dependence, ready for work, and with somewhere to live. Our objective is to move towards a fully integrated, recovery-orientated system that supports continuity of treatment within and between custody and community. That includes piloting 11 drug recovery wings focused on abstinence, and connecting offenders with community drug recovery services on release.

My hon. Friend will recognise the importance of ensuring that whatever is done with drug treatment in prison, it is important to have continuity through the gate to what goes on in the community. That is also the case for prisoner education. We want to ensure that all our plans recognise that through-the-gate facility.

I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution not only to today’s debate, but to the more general discussions of these issues. I look forward to engaging further with him and others, and I hope that he will be encouraged by the plans we are developing and will shortly introduce.

[Sir Alan Meale (in the Chair)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) on using not only his time, but the time left over from the previous debate.

Question put and agreed to.