Prisons

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. I welcome this debate, particularly the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. It qualifies him to join the coalition. At a time of swingeing cost reductions when every item of public expenditure is to be scrutinised carefully for cost-effectiveness, we must question the benefits of the prison expansion strategy, particularly as the annual cost of keeping someone in prison is now £45,000. This means asking some fundamental questions. Why do we need to build so many prisons? What is the purpose of prison and who should go there? When offenders are jailed, what should be done to rehabilitate them?

The prison system is seriously overcrowded. Seventy-eight out of 137 jails are holding more prisoners than they were built for, and 20,400 prisoners—a quarter of the prison population—are held in overcrowded cells. The results of all this are inhumane conditions and the risk of self-harm and suicide. It makes it harder to provide rehabilitation programmes, thereby increasing reoffending on release. Prisoners are moved part-way through education or rehabilitation courses, and many are held in prisons far away from their home areas, making it hard for relatives to visit and increasing the risk of family break-up.

So is it vital to end prison overcrowding? Is a strategy of prison expansion the right way to do this? If past experience is any guide, the strategy seems doomed to failure. The present process is like trying to run down an escalator which is moving ever more rapidly upwards, and the prison expansion strategy has absorbed ever-increasing resources which could otherwise be spent on prisoner resettlement, alternatives to custody, crime prevention and victim support, precisely what the coalition is asking for.

Most of the offenders jailed in this country receive short sentences. I shall give the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, an example. They spend no more than six months in custody. These short sentences are absolutely pointless because they make no point whatever. They are far too short for sustained rehabilitation programmes but are long enough for offenders to lose their homes and jobs, which makes them more likely to reoffend. Two-thirds of short-term prisoners are reconvicted within two years of release. We need a strategy to reduce the prison population to levels more comparable to our European neighbours. When we examine legislation, prisons should be removed as an option for low-level, non-violent crimes. Courts should be prohibited from using prison, except for dangerous offenders, unless they have first tried an intensive community supervision programme. Health authorities should be compelled to devote adequate resources to diverting mentally disordered offenders away from prisons. The number of people jailed for breach of licences should be reduced by a wider use of other penalties for breach before resorting to custody. Strong measures should be taken to tackle the disproportionate use of imprisonment for offenders from racial minorities.

The most commonly advanced purposes of sentencing are punishment, containment, deterrence and rehabilitation. Society has the right to punish offenders in order to protect the weak from victimisation, but punishment does not have to mean imprisonment. Many community supervision programmes are intensive and rigorous, make real demands on offenders and significantly restrict their liberty. Deterrence is, quite frankly, overrated. Those offenders who plan their offences plan not to get caught. They believe that they can avoid detection. Many other offenders commit their offences thoughtlessly or impulsively and, for them, rational considerations of deterrence hardly come into it.

Research has shown that the highest reoffending rates result from punitive approaches, such as the boot camps in America. The lowest reconviction rates result from regimes which work to change offenders' attitudes and behaviour. We should be aiming to provide practical help for prisoners: accommodation and drug rehabilitation programmes interact with each other because it is easier to hold down a job or sustain a drug rehabilitation attempt. We should regard the size of our prison population as a national disgrace. Instead of a prison expansion strategy, we need a strategy centred on reducing the unnecessary use of prison.

Prisons: Muslim Prisoners

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Dholakia]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the Chief Inspector of Prisons’ thematic review on Muslim prisoners’ experiences.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)]

My Lords, the Government welcome the report. We are pleased that it recognises the considerable progress prisons have made in meeting the religious needs of Muslim prisoners.

The National Offender Management Service has an ongoing programme of work to ensure that all prisoners are treated with respect and decency and that service provision is fair.

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. Does he accept that it is a matter of serious concern that Muslim inmates constitute 10 per cent of our prison population as against a representation of 3 per cent in the community? There is no evidence that this group is proportionally involved in more crime than any other racial or religious group. Will he therefore undertake to ensure that the sentencing guidelines and the sentencing variables have no adverse impact on this group? Will he also develop a strategy for effective staff engagement with Muslims in which prison staff and the Muslim community are involved?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, there may be several reasons why the proportion of Muslims in custody is as it is. I was surprised to find that they constituted 3 per cent of the population but 10 per cent plus of the prison population. Further study is needed to see whether we can identify some of the reasons for this.

On training, we are committed to developing effective communication between prisoners and staff. We have already taken a number of actions aimed at ensuring effective staff engagement with Muslim prisoners. During my briefing, I was shown a card issued to all staff on how to engage with Muslim prisoners. It very much emphasises a respect for their faith and how it should be handled within the prison.

Political and Constitutional Reform

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

That speech has been made in this House and the other place many times over the last 200 years, though not by me. I have always taken the view that constitutional reforms are carried through by Governments that believe in them and put them with vigour to both Houses. My noble and learned friend gives the recipe for inaction that we have always had—Speaker’s Conferences, royal commissions and inaction. This is a radical programme to deal with a problem that we are all aware of. I was a member of the Maclennan committee before the 1997 election. I remember our high hopes that the incoming Labour Government would move forward. Unfortunately, after three or four years they completely ran out of stem on steam on constitutional reform.

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords—

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

There is no specific culling on the basis of Welsh or Scottish devolution. There is an aim, as far as possible, to get the same size of constituency. Saving money and moving forward with devolution are not mutually exclusive. We have already pledged that we will move forward with the referendum on more powers for the Welsh Assembly—something that the Government are committed to and which is part of this broader pattern of political reform.

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

I think the figure is about 80,000. I am not sure whether I am going beyond my brief in telling the noble Lord that, but it does not take a great deal of high mathematics to work out that 600 into the electorate is about 80,000.

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords, from this side of the coalition I thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for repeating the Statement on political and constitutional reform. Coming so soon after the reform of the criminal justice system announced last week, this is most welcome and the Government ought to be congratulated on it. Does the Minister accept that the previous election, fought on the first past the post system, did not deliver a strong, stable or decisive Government—so much for that system? Some in government have indicated that they do not wish to play an active role in the referendum campaign. What is being done to encourage them to participate? The referendum and the involvement of political parties will have resource implications. What discussions are being held with the Electoral Commission and others to ensure that funds are available for that campaign? Will the Minister encourage the media to take an active role similar to that adopted in the leadership debates so that the electorate are better informed about the new system being proposed?

Prostitution

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord Dholakia]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will review the law on prostitution so that people who work together in a house for their own safety are not thereby subject to prosecution.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Dholakia, and with his permission, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

Queen's Speech

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia]

My Lords, this debate gives us an opportunity to look back at the criminal justice system when the Conservatives were last in power. Ken Clarke was the Home Secretary, and one fact remains: at that time, the prison population was about 44,000—the figure cited earlier by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. The legacy that the Labour Party has left us is that the number in prison exceeds 85,000. Therefore, we must ask ourselves where within the criminal justice system we have produced that discrepancy. More women, more children, more people from ethnic minorities have become a regular feature of our present system.

I welcome the opening statement of the gracious Speech. The coalition programme is to be based on the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility. I certainly welcome the Bill to restore freedoms and civil liberties. I am glad that identity cards are to be scrapped and unnecessary laws repealed. So far, so good. But the big picture—the safer society—cannot be complete until we look at the crisis facing our present system of justice, which reflects the prison population that I mentioned. There are difficult measures that the coalition must tackle. Equally, the legislative programme cannot be cast in a tablet of stone; we must be able to tweak it to take into account concerns that we have failed to deal with in the past.

Some suggestions may look very attractive at first glance, but we must also ensure that in the legislative momentum, we do not create more problems than we solve. For example, on police authorities, we need to ascertain further details about proposals for directly elected individuals including the content of the proposed model. For example, what are the checks and balances to ensure that the commissioner’s power cannot be abused? What is the timing and process of implementation? Ultimately, what is the expected outcome of change?

In essence, we have to get this right. We must never forget that police authorities provide a strong, transparent and robust local accountability structure which reflects the diversity of local communities. We need to be absolutely sure that we do not tamper with their independence and accountability. I am sure that we will need further consultation with appropriate bodies, including the Association of Police Authorities, on such matters.

The establishment of a new coalition Government gives us a unique opportunity to rethink the country’s approach to crime and criminal justice. The Government’s strategy should also include listening to the voice of people who have been on the receiving end of the criminal justice system—offenders and ex-offenders. Yesterday evening in Portcullis House, I attended the launch of User Voice—a new charity led by rehabilitated ex-offenders. User Voice is working with the Prison Service, the probation service and the Youth Justice Board to help them learn from the insights of offenders and former offenders into the best ways to reduce reoffending. Any private sector organisation knows that that approach makes sense. Commercial organisations regard it as obvious that they should consult their consumers on whether the service that they provide meets their needs. The criminal justice system should take the same approach. It should work with organisations such as User Voice to consult with offenders and ex-offenders, learn from their experiences and listen to their views about the most effective ways to help them to avoid reoffending.

The past 13 years of the Labour Government rank as a wasted opportunity to improve the state of our criminal justice system. The previous Government introduced some individual welcome changes, such as the establishment of the Youth Justice Board and youth offending teams, increasing resources for drug treatment programmes and the establishment of a new Sentencing Council. Overall, however, if we look at the state of our criminal justice system today and compare it with 1997, we can see that little has changed for the better. The Labour Government failed to end the serious overcrowding of the prison system. Today, 82 out of 140 prisons hold more prisoners than they were built for, and 19,000 prisoners are held two to a cell that was designed for one person. This country has 151 prisoners for every 100,000 people in the general population, compared with 96,000 in France and 88,000 in Germany.

Prison overcrowding increases crime. Overcrowding makes it harder for prisons to provide rehabilitation programmes for all their inmates, and this increases reoffending on release. Although the previous Government built an extra 20,000 prison places, the system remained as overcrowded as ever because the prison population increased faster than the number of prison places. The Government responded to this increase by committing themselves to a further large programme of prison expansion that required a large input of resources that would be better spent on prisoners’ resettlement, alternatives to custody, crime prevention and victim support.

Labour also oversaw an increase in custody for young offenders. In the final days of the Labour Government, there was a belated fall in the number of juveniles in custody. Despite this, the number of young people in custody is now much higher than it was in 1997. This is partly because the previous Government passed a whole series of legislative measures that made it easier for the courts to detain children at increasingly younger ages and for less serious offences. They did this despite the evidence that showed that around 80 per cent of these young people are reconvicted within two years of leaving custody. As a result, most of the Youth Justice Board’s budget is now absorbed by the cost of custody. These resources would be far more effective in reducing youth crime if they were spent on strengthening and expanding community supervision programmes.

The previous Government also did far too little to tackle the lack of help or supervision for short-term prisoners. Most imprisoned offenders receive sentences of less than 12 months. On release, these prisoners do not receive supervision by the probation service, and their reconviction rates are much higher than those for other prisoners. They are responsible for much of the high-volume offending that causes such distress to people living in high-crime areas. The Labour Government recognised the need for action, and in their Criminal Justice Act 2003 they included provision for a new custody plus sentence that would have involved post-release supervision for short-term prisoners. The reality was that this was never implemented. Nor was anything else done to fill the gap.

The Labour Government recognised the need to reform the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act but failed to take action to bring about reform. In 2002, a Home Office review group recommended that the Act should be reformed by shortening the very long rehabilitation periods. They even adopted an obstructive approach by arguing against my own Private Member’s Bill, which would have enacted the changes which they had earlier said that they favoured. Of course, I shall introduce my Bill at the next available opportunity.

In the early days of the Labour Government, I was encouraged by their willingness to set up the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, yet after 13 years of Labour Government the position of minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system is worse than it was when the Stephen Lawrence inquiry reported. The disproportionate use of stop and search is even more extreme now, and the proportion of the prison population is higher than it was in the late 1990s.

There are some very practical examples of measures that have been adopted in various countries, and we need to examine them. Everyone who has worked with offenders knows that many of them have a background of problems such as inadequate parental supervision, family conflict, parental neglect and abuse, school exclusion, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health problems—you name it. The serious economic challenges which this country faces are rightly receiving priority attention from the new Government, but the challenge of improving our criminal justice system is just as vital a part of ensuring the fabric of a healthy society as the challenge posed by our economic situation. I hope that the new coalition Government will not shirk that challenge.