Prisons: Rehabilitation

Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for introducing this debate, which has demonstrated near unanimity on what the problems are with our penal system and on the outcomes that we need to achieve. Yet the ever-worsening crisis—to describe it in this way is more understatement than exaggeration—is not being addressed in practical terms. In prisons we have unacceptable and increasing levels of violence, assaults by prisoners on other prisoners, violence between prisoners and staff, homicides, suicides and self-harm. This was the central point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and it was emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, with all his experience.

Overcrowding—cell and prison capacities being exceeded, or, which is just as bad, being massaged upwards—continues to rise. Understaffing, as my noble friend Lord Dholakia said, leads to prisoners being locked in their cells for completely unacceptable periods of time—the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, made the same point. Purposeful activities—work, education and training—suffer, often because there are insufficient staff to organise movement around prisons, leading to lack of employability and more reoffending.

The facilities for addressing mental health issues and drug addiction are still poor. Insufficient attention is paid, still, to issues that particularly affect women, including those with children. Peter Clarke summarised it, in words that have been quoted in this debate, at the beginning of his third annual report:

“The year 2017-18 was a dramatic period in which HM Inspectorate of Prisons documented some of the most disturbing prison conditions we have ever seen—conditions which have no place in an advanced nation in the 21st century”.


I agree with the emphasis that the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, put on the importance of our inspectorates.

However, we are not tackling overcrowding. Prisons Minister Rory Stewart must move from expressed desire to genuine determination to cut the number of short sentences and to combat sentence inflation—something considered in July by the Justice Committee—even in the face of sections of the media and public opinion. We must release IPP prisoners kept in custody well beyond their tariff dates. We need to look at greater use of early release and home detention curfews.

Young offender institutions suffer from all the problems of adult prisons, compounded by a shortage of educational and training opportunities, as highlighted in Charlie Taylor’s review. Children with little schooling, often those who have been in care, suffer worst. Charlie Taylor’s review put education first. He summarised it as treating young offenders,

“as children first and offenders second”,

in a system,

“in which they are held to account for their offending, but with an understanding that the most effective way to achieve change will often be by improving their education, their health, their welfare, and by helping them to draw on their own strengths and resources”.

These were all points well made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. Will the Minister report on progress in implementing Charlie Taylor’s recommendations?

In the probation service, there is complete demoralisation at the failure of the community rehabilitation companies—the CRC. While the remaining National Probation Service, though underresourced, performs its function moderately well, the CRCs are failing miserably. Underresourcing, redundancies, inadequate contract management and unhappy staff have led to a failure to deliver on the Government’s transforming rehabilitation programme. Through-the-gate supervision of prisoners on release has almost entirely failed. As Dame Glenys Stacey put it:

“In those cases we inspected, only a handful of individuals had received any real help with housing, jobs or an addiction, let alone training or else getting back into education, or managing debt”.


She said:

“CRCs are too often doing little more than signposting and form filling”.

We have failed to increase the involvement of the voluntary sector and what we must now do, I suggest, is to increase co-ordination between the prison and probation services, but not by renationalising all CRCs. It is outcomes that count, not ownership. Prison services, the youth justice system, all the probation services and the voluntary sector must work far more closely together, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, argued. All noble Lords have concentrated on rehabilitation, with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester expressing that in terms of hope. Rehabilitation saves money, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, but much more importantly it turns around lives.