Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2019

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Judd

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I may follow the noble and learned Lord on the resources point. Prison is an extremely heavy user of resources. It is not possible to have a political argument about the stance a party wants to take on the use of prison while ignoring those substantial resource implications. Those resources are denied to other things which will stop people committing crimes or make it less likely. Here, we are confronted with one piece of a quite large jigsaw puzzle. It is one measure which will go alongside the sentencing Bill and the rhetoric which effectively urges judges and magistrates to pass longer sentences. All these things act together to create sentence inflation. Not merely will we then have the 2,000 extra places by 2030, which the Government’s own impact assessment says is the central estimate of the effect of this statutory instrument; we will have all those other increases as well. All of that claims money which is effectively denied to probation and to local authority services, which are necessary if we are to steer young people away from crime. Therefore, it is money diverted contrary to the interests of public safety.

The impact assessment refers to “crowding”. This is Ministry of Justice code for what the rest of us call overcrowding, but we are apparently not allowed to use “over” any more. Overcrowding is not simply prisoners living in uncomfortable conditions because there are three to a cell; it is having more prisoners than one has the staff or facilities to rehabilitate. That is the consequence of prisons having more people in them than they are supposed to have. You do not rehabilitate your prisoners because you cannot do the courses, and you do not have the custodial staff to take people to the courses they are supposed to be taking. You even sometimes have instructors unable to do their job because the prisoners cannot safely be brought to carry out the courses. We will increase overcrowding by this series of measures.

There is no claim in the impact assessment that there will be a valuable deterrent effect. We all know that there will no such effect; people carrying out the offences that we are talking about do not calculate whether they will be released at half or two-thirds of the custodial part of their sentence, so that is not even claimed. However, there is of course the admission that shorter periods on licence could affect reintegration. The points that a number of noble Lords have made add up to a pretty strong case against a measure for which a serious positive case is difficult to put forward.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very reassuring debate because the experience and wisdom that have been brought to bear are a wonderful antidote to much of the ill-informed commentary in the popular press.

I want to make a couple of brief points. First, a lot of imaginative, dedicated work goes on within the Prison Service, but the pressures, accentuated by repeated cuts over recent years, have made that work difficult to pursue, not least in the sphere of education. Do we see as fundamental to our penal system the challenge of rehabilitation or do we not? In my view, rehabilitation makes utter sense economically because it is the only way of ensuring that the amount of reoffending is reduced; but, of course, in a civilised society it makes sense in terms of winning people back to a decent role in society and an ability to contribute to its well-being. This suggests that a priority in the penal system must be for the whole culture and purpose of prison officers and prison staff to be ultimately and directly the challenge of rehabilitation. It is not a warehouse function; it is about enabling people to become better people, positive people.