Prisons: Rehabilitation

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that prisons and young offender institutions are safe and able to meet the rehabilitative needs of those imprisoned.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, “appalling” was the word used by the Prisons Minister about what was happening in Birmingham over the summer. It is a very interesting expression: it was in “an appalling state”. There had to be an enormous amount of effort moving prisoners around out of Group 4’s prison. We cannot deny that. The five prisons run by Group 4 have a relatively good record on rehabilitation. There are pluses and minuses. On average, if you are in a Group 4 prison, you will cost the state about 25% less than if you were in an ordinary prison and about 45% less than if you were in a public/private investment programme prison. If you look at Group 4 and what it has brought to the table, on average it has increased the quality, to some extent, at a cheaper price.

We must commend the Government and Group 4 and thank the Prison Service because, if it has done one thing, it has kept our boys and girls locked up. It is pretty good at that. You have 83,000 very clever, thoughtful people, who on average are very astute, and you have managed to keep most of them banged up. That is an enormous achievement and we should thank Her Majesty’s Government for it. The problem is, of course, that since 2010 we have lost more than £500 million of investment in prisons. This year, we have had a 26% increase in attacks by prisoners on staff and a 19% fall in staff numbers in this difficult area.

What do we do with our young men and young women, our children, who fall by the wayside and get involved in crime and wrongdoing? In a civilised society, you do not just bang them up. If it was just about banging people up, we would have the best record in western Europe. We have a lot of people banged up— more than anywhere else in western Europe. We should congratulate the Government because, if you were to ask a victim what they would like to happen to the person who mugged them at the ATM, some would say, “Execute them,” and some would say all sorts of things. If you said, “Look we can’t do anything, but we can bang them up”, that person would probably—I certainly would—say, “Bang them up, hurt them, take them out of their family, make them suffer for what they have done to me”. Let us be honest: an eye for an eye works in certain circumstances. But then you have an even bigger problem, because the person goes in bad and comes out worse.

When they come out, because the investment in their transformation has been niggardly, small and shrinking over the years, you have a rather difficult situation. They often end up homeless, lost and broken with their family. They often end up a drain on the rates and the taxpayer. What we save in keeping them in a cheap jail is immediately destroyed because we have to pick up the cost socially and in other areas. If you take somebody who comes out of prison with no future, no education, no social training and no way forward, then you can probably look on them appearing in the public record again and again over many years. And they might end up costing over £1 million.

So what can the Government do about it? There has been a doubling of the prison population since 1993. We must remember that our friends on the Labour Bench introduced 3,600 new offences in the course of their time in government, so one reason why there might be more prisoners is that there are more reasons to bang people up. But let us not get into a party-political squabble. Since 2006, we have halved the number of community sentences, but we know that community sentencing works pretty well, and we know that short sentences do not work well—they are almost an introduction to a university of crime. Yet, since 2006, we have cut the number of people and look for an answer beyond custodial sentencing. We cut the link and the possibility of restorative justice and getting somebody who has been a naughty boy or a naughty girl to participate in the community. We have done that and brought in more short sentences, even though we know that they are not working.

We can play around with the facts and figures and throw around percentages. We can do all those things, but I am not here to do that. I came into the House of Lords to dismantle poverty. That means looking at the causes of poverty. Where does poverty come from? What can we do about poverty? If we take the boys and girls who were banged up and magnetise them and then get a big map of the UK and we magnetise the various cities where most of the crime, poverty, indolence and social failure is and we threw them up in the air, they would come down in particular pockets. We would have a social crime map of the United Kingdom. What are we doing as a nation, as a Government, as a political system to question the predictability of failure if you come from Moss Side? I bet a pound to a penny that there will be more criminals from Moss Side than Knightsbridge, although there is a different kind of criminal in Knightsbridge, obviously—they will not hit you with a stick, but they might get their hands on your pension. But we will not go into that because I do not want to be geographically snobbish.

Why do we always worship at the altar of today, and tomorrow is going to be another day? It will look just like today but worse. We need a Government who are involved in the full process of stepping back and saying, “Where do the problems come from? Where do the social illnesses come from?”. I heard the end of the NHS debate. Is it not wonderful that we could form a new super-government department made up of the NHS that would have prisons and unemployment in with it? Because they all figure together. They all bounce off each other. When on average 70% or 80% of people who end up in prison have mental health problems, is it a question of crime, social preparation, parenting, the street that you live in, or having a mum and dad earning at most £6, £7 or £8 an hour, who are run ragged and cannot give you the kind of guidance and opportunity you need to move away from crime?

We need not just a few clever little tricks; we need to rethink crime. We need to rethink prisons as opportunities for transforming naughty boys like me, who may even end up in the House of Lords. Thank you.