Prisons

Lord McNally Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I have already said in the margins of this debate that we really need at least five hours to cover the issues. I shall start with the point just made by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. There have been decreases in crime. I shall leave it to the criminologists to decide the reasons for that. I am sure that one of the factors, not only in this country, but in most advanced countries, is that we have gone through a period of considerable increases in prosperity, and there is a correlation between periods of prosperity and levels of crime, but I would rather leave that to the academics. The point was made earlier that when criminals are in prison, they are not free to commit crimes. I once attended a lecture by a former prison adviser to Ronald Reagan who estimated that the right prison population for Britain to guarantee that all the crime-committing criminals were off the streets was about 180,000.

What has caused the Lord Chancellor to raise this issue is that there is concern that prison has produced a whirligig of people going in and coming out which needs serious debate. That is why I welcome this debate and the others that will follow it—indeed, there is another on Thursday. The Lord Chancellor deliberately provoked the kind of discussion that we hope will bring forth ideas about our approach to these matters so that we can see if we can find something better. I am not here to say that the previous Administration did nothing right in their 13 years. Indeed, they did a lot of good things. We would be wrong if we did not face up to the fact that prisons produce more criminals and therefore there is a reasonable desire to look at rehabilitation and alternatives to prison.

It is impossible for me to cover all the issues. There are two points about ex-servicemen, and both have been made. There are a worrying number of ex-servicemen in prison, and there is a need to look at this issue. I understand that prison in-reach promotes the wide range of help and support available to veterans, but we should do more. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I have thought for a long time that we should do far more to recruit ex-servicemen into the probation service and the Prison Service because many of the skills taught in the modern military are readily transferable. When I have read of some dreadful case of a young social worker going to deal with a problem family and being unable to gain access to a vulnerable child or whatever, I have thought that perhaps an ex-serviceman with a little more life experience might have got that access. That is a resource we should look at.

It is equally so with mental health. There are far too many people in our prisons with mental health problems. We are committed to improve offenders’ access to services that deal with the priority areas of mental health and learning disabilities. It was pointed out to me the other day that, even apart from mental health, the scale of illiteracy in prisons suggests that there is a linkage that may relate to the points that were made about a lack of self-appreciation. If you are illiterate, you tend to have a poor opinion of yourself in a society that depends so much on communications.

Young offenders have also been mentioned, and the how, why and what of the remarkably good figures on the drop in youth offending. However, we must follow the line of keeping young people out of the prison system if at all possible and look for alternatives. That is true, too, of women offenders. The Government are committed to looking at how to divert women away from crime and tackle women’s offending effectively. We broadly accept the recommendations of the Corston report in this area.

I am not sure whether I can cover the other points that were made in this response. I noted the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of regional clusters and directors with specific skills for prisons alongside a pruning of bureaucracy. On new prison build and the shape of our prison estate, we will have to look at what the sentencing review and what some of the initiatives launched by the Lord Chancellor’s great debate produce before we make a decision on that. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester rightly warned us about the academies of crime. I welcome the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, because it is very important that we remember the victims as well as the criminals. Ken Clarke keeps on telling all his Back-Benchers that he did not say that short sentences can never be used or should be abandoned. I urge all noble Lords to read the whole speech; it is well worth it.

I shall stop trying to respond to the specific points, because I have run out of time. We are looking at ways in which to divert funds from custody to community work. However, as has been recognised, there will always be a need for prison, either because of the seriousness of the crime or the continuing risks posed to the community. Public protection remains paramount but, to echo my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor in his recent speech on criminal reform, prison is not just a numbers game. It is not about how many offenders we can lock up or simply reducing the prison population for the sake of it. The challenge that we face is far greater than simply getting the numbers right; prison must be a place of punishment but must also rehabilitate offenders if we are to stop them committing crimes again and again. About half of all crime is committed by people who have been through the criminal justice system before, which is hardly surprising given the limited available time—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, made—to work on offenders during short sentences.

What use is a short period in prison if a prisoner will simply return, not having changed his ways in the slightest? We must do more to tackle the root cause of reoffending. In practice, that means prisons that are also places of education, hard work and an opportunity for change. For example, the Government are currently exploring how prisoners could spend more of their time in productive, meaningful work. It also means community sentences that are rigorously enforced and giving offenders the chance to find a job and accommodation and become drug free.

All this sits in the wider context of our commitment to conduct a full assessment of sentencing and rehabilitation to ensure that it is effective—effective in deterring crime, in protecting the public, in punishing offenders and in cutting reoffending. We need a new, intelligent approach that often recognises the circumstances of the individual case. As has been mentioned, the Government alone cannot, of course, do that. The private and voluntary sectors must be engaged, and our aim is to empower communities to take responsibility in this area. We are looking at alternative custody projects, which provide the courts with enhanced community sentencing options. I have been interested by one such which was initiated by the previous Government on intensive probation supervision. We will look at the outcome of that, but again it is very cost-intensive.

My attitude has never been one of reform for reform’s sake, or because of commitment to some woolly liberalism. The noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, is right to remind us of the victims, but I am committed to this programme because common sense and practical politics dictate that we explore alternatives to that endless and expensive whirligig of crime, imprisonment, release and reoffending which marks out the failures of our present system. It is all too easy, as has been said, to be intimidated by the cheap populism and “bang ’em up” mentality of the popular media. Perhaps that is the advantage of having a Lord Chancellor at 70 and a Minister of State at 67; we have no long-term ambitions other than to make sure that this policy works. We will resist that temptation and, with the help of debates like this, explore alternatives to a prison system which neither successfully deters nor sufficiently rehabilitates.

Committee adjourned at 6.20 pm.