Prisons

Baroness Stern Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Stern]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for arranging this debate. I declare an interest as an honorary research fellow at the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College, London. I, too, welcome the recent statement by the Secretary of State for Justice about a new start in penal policy. I noted the view that emerged from his speech about the value of looking at evidence, and evidence will be the subject of my brief remarks this afternoon.

In his recent speech, the Secretary of State for Justice noted the difference in prison population between what it is today and what it was when he was last in that position. He may also have noted that when he was last responsible for prisons, there was in his department a high-level research unit, the Home Office Research Unit, which was the envy of the world and whose products were read all around the world. I very much hope that the Government will restart putting such high-level and objective work into the public domain. Research and evidence are a good basis for a new policy. I want to look at three areas where evidence might be helpful, although I entirely accept that, in the end, there are political considerations. However, evidence is a helpful start.

First, it is said by some that crime has gone down but that there are more prisoners, so the first must have been caused by the second. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, it is hard to find the evidence to sustain that proposition or to square it, for example, with what happened in New York where, between 1993 and 2001, violent crime decreased by 64 per cent, while the prison population dropped by 25 per cent.

Secondly, we know from a mountain of research, particularly a study carried out by Edinburgh University over many years, studying hundreds of children and young people, that putting children and young teenagers into prison is one of the worst decisions we can make if we are aiming at a safer society. That should only be done in the most extreme circumstances.

Thirdly, I suggest that the Minister asks the researchers at the Ministry of Justice to produce a paper showing what makes people turn away from crime and change their whole way of life. I think that such research would show that it is relationships with people who are not involved in crime, it is having bonds linking them to law-abiding society, and it is helping them to change their image of themselves. A policy based a little more on evidence than on what we have seen in the past 10 years would undoubtedly produce better results and a safer society. Does the Minister have any view on the report in the press this morning that Tim Godwin, the new deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has called for money to be taken from prisons and to be given to community-based schemes for offenders?