Criminal Justice System

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

To call attention to the reform of the criminal justice system, in particular to the effectiveness of alternatives to custody; and to move for Papers.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a practising member of the criminal Bar. I have had three interesting experiences this year. First, a man charged with murder was held on remand. Until his arrest, he was a complete alcoholic who consumed at least a bottle of vodka a day and was permanently drunk. You would not have wished to meet him in the street. He did not enjoy that way of life but he could not get out of it: indeed, he was open to attack on the evidence in his drunken state. Prison had transformed him. Now, he was sober and he made sure he avoided the drugs scene in prison. Since he was intelligent and with a sense of humour, he was given the responsibility of teaching fellow prisoners to read and write, and he was enjoying it. He had a new purpose in life. It was sad to contemplate that on his release he would have no support, no job, no wife and no money, and that the only way open to him would be the bottle and probably a dismal end on the pavement.

Another, who had held managerial responsibility in a large firm, found prison interesting. He had met people inside with such schemes and plans for making easy money that he wondered why he had spent his life working so hard for promotion within his company. When he got out, he felt he would not need to work again. The prison had asked him to help fellow prisoners complete their examination papers so that they could present good results for their educational schemes: the prison feared that it might lose funding from the Government if the results were bad. He felt, “Everybody’s doing it. Why not me?”.

The third, a first-time prisoner, told me: “That fellow Clarke was right. Prison does not work”. In his view, what happened inside was that each prisoner learnt to go up a grade in criminality: he would graduate out of prison ready for action. It was not a particularly uncomfortable regime. One elderly and homeless man who had hit a policeman over the head with his stick was held on remand. He had nowhere to go and no intention of leaving prison, if he could help it. There was no work to do inside, the food was good and delivered on time, and there was a 70 inch telly to watch the World Cup. He said that when England scored, there was very little reaction but that when Chile scored the place erupted with joy.

This is what we are paying for. According to Ministry of Justice figures, 2007-08 saw £22.7 billion spent on the criminal justice system in one context or another. Spending in 2009 on prisoners in real terms increased by 42 per cent over 1997; that is, £48,000 per year for each prison place.

Last year saw 61 per cent of prisons officially overcrowded with 25 per cent of the prison population being detained in overcrowded conditions. As the Criminal Justice Alliance has put it in its helpful briefing:

“Prison overcrowding damages every positive aspect of the work of the Prison Service. It results in prisoners being held in inhumane and degrading conditions, compromises work to rehabilitate prisoners and contributes to high reoffending rates, with 49% of ex prisoners and 61% of those serving sentences of 12 months or less reoffending within a year of their release”.

That can be compared with the reoffending rates in 1993, when Kenneth Clarke was last Home Secretary. Then there were fewer than 45,000 prisoners and reoffending rates were 53 per cent, but over two years, not one.

“Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.

A major cause of crime has been the policy of the previous Government to warehouse offenders in prisons with insufficient resources of time and money to tackle their offending behaviour; to create universities of crime, such as the one I have talked about, where they can improve their criminal skills; and to release them into the community with inadequate support—inadequate because the resources have been spent on building more prisons. It has been entirely cyclical.

The supporters of this policy argued that at least when criminals were locked up, they could not offend. The logic of that argument was that offenders should be locked up more often and for longer and longer periods. That is exactly what happened. I once complained to a very senior member of the judiciary at a function in the River Room here that when we knocked about at the Shrewsbury Assizes and Quarter Sessions in our youth, we would never have believed that the courts would impose the sort of sentences that are now routinely handed out and upheld in the Court of Appeal. His response was that although judges were not elected, they naturally responded to the pressures of the media and the direction of political travel. But reoffending is a serious matter because reoffenders are likely to commit more serious crimes.

In December 2007, I was pleased to be appointed to Lord Justice Gage’s Ministry of Justice working group on sentencing which contained a cross-section of the judiciary, magistrates, the criminal Bar, experienced solicitors and criminal justice professionals. I felt I was among friends who understood the system. I discovered that we were set up following the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, in his July 2007 report, to consider the feasibility of a structured sentencing framework, in effect a grid system, which would automatically deliver the appropriate sentence to the sentencer. It was based on the system adopted in the state of Minnesota. I learnt that the introduction of the system in that state had driven up imprisonment at a rate of 6.6 per cent annually—the numbers were on their way to doubling—but there was no prison overcrowding because more prisons had been built. The statisticians from the Home Office wanted, through our working group, to have a tool which would predict future rates of imprisonment more accurately so that more prisons could be planned in time to house the units who would be sent to them from the courts.

I do not recognise units. Like all practitioners, I see people with all their faults—grave or less grave, usually the product of poverty and deprivation, poor education and collapsed home lives. I became something of a nuisance on the committee, intervening too often and with too much emotion. Although I was not actually asked to do so, I resigned. Without any input from me, however, Lord Justice Gage and his working group roundly rejected the formulaic, Orwellian approach of the statisticians and recommended the setting up of the Sentencing Council.

We now have a Lord Chancellor who also knows what he is talking about. I have no doubt that he knocked about the Assizes and Quarter Sessions of the Midland Circuit in his youth. We wholly welcome his call for “intelligent sentencing”. We fully support his drive to switch resources into,

“rigorously enforced community sentences that punish offenders”,

at the same time as helping them to get off drugs and alcohol and into work. Perhaps we may be permitted to emphasise that he has adopted everything that his coalition partners, we on these Benches, have been saying for years. I fell out of bed when I heard the Lord Chancellor say on the “Today” programme that the key question was “What works?”.

The political rhetoric of the past 20 years has distorted the pursuit of a rational strategy for the effective use of resources. The rabid article in today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, in addition to being ludicrous and more defamatory than even my noble friend Lord Lester would wish in his defence of freedom of expression, illustrates precisely how criminals are demonised. In the eyes of that contributor they are beings from another planet who must be locked up or society as we know it will fail.

We must no longer talk about which political party is harder or softer on crime and criminals; we must ask what is the most effective use of scarce resources to reduce offending and reoffending. The Justice Committee of the House of Commons, in its report Cutting Crime: The Case for Justice Reinvestment, called for a policy to drive down prison numbers to a safe and manageable level—perhaps two-thirds of the current prison population based on the 1991 recommendations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and on comparable figures from other western European countries.

Of course serious and violent offenders must be locked up to protect the public—no one would dispute that—but the majority of those locked up today do not fall into that category. Here is the challenge for the Sentencing Council: how can sentencers be given a better understanding of what works to reduce reoffending and offending, and thereby ensure justice and public protection? That should be its aim. The policy announced by the coalition Government means a wider use of restorative justice for young people and as a response to low-level offending. It benefits the victim as well as the offender. It means the development of drug and alcohol treatment programmes within community sentences. It means identifying and treating mental illness in offenders, as recommended in the review of the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, with its policy of diverting people with mental health problems from the criminal justice system to more appropriate treatment in the community.

In August 2009, a prisoner serving a short sentence for possession of a knuckle duster in his car said to his social worker:

“I would like to have a psychiatrist, a psychologist, have a word with me regularly, on a regular basis, to see if there’s somewhere underlying like where I have a problem that I haven’t seen. If I’m at fault myself in any way, I’m open to all kinds of suggestions”.

That was Raoul Moat. He had no such treatment.

The policy that we are putting forward means investment in prisoner education, to improve literacy, to develop skills and internet technologies which will lead to jobs on release. It means the effective resettlement, employment and housing of prisoners, with advice in prison and “through-the-gate support” on their release. It means the abolition of the iniquitous indeterminate sentence for public protection as recommended by the Chief Inspectors of Prisons and of Probation—a sentence which is fundamentally flawed in principle, unworkable in practice and, above all, unjust.

Others in this debate will speak of the specific problems of women offenders, children and young adults and I shall not venture into those areas. However, there is light: there is before us the hope of a progressive and radical reform of penal policy, comparable to the enlightened era of Roy Jenkins, our former leader in this House. I am sure that his watching shade will nod approval to our aims.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and all noble Lords who have contributed to this wide-ranging and fascinating debate. We have covered many topics, particularly in relation to the problems of women and young people in prison. We have listened to the plan of action of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, which I commend to the Government for their consideration. We have heard from people with great experience of all sides of the criminal justice system. I also commend my noble friends Lady Hussein-Ece and Lord German for their maiden speeches. I have known the noble Lord, Lord German, for more than 30 years. He is a great addition to the Welsh voices in this Chamber and we look forward to hearing more from him. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, with her great experience in local government, will have a great deal to say.

The Minister called for rationality in criminal justice policy. That is what we need. That is what we have been after. We want to get away from the red mist that arises among newspaper editors and sometimes the public. It creates a climate of fear. We live in a country that does not need fear of crime. We should be able to deal with the problems that arise; we should cope and not for ever be worried about the risk that somebody will do terrible things to us. It has been a great debate. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion in my name.

Motion withdrawn.