Literacy and Drugs (Custodial Sentences)

Debate between Alan Meale and Jeremy Wright

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do not have the figures immediately to hand, but I am sure that we can get them to him. Inevitably with the regime for drug treatment, which I will come to in a moment, we need greater engagement and better results. We are working as hard as we can to achieve that.

I have talked a little about education. We are doing other things, which I do not have much time to go through, but I draw attention to the virtual campuses in 101 prisons, which provide an opportunity for prisoners to learn with carefully controlled access to a suite of web-based education and employment materials. We must recognise that we need greater scope to broaden the learning offer, to alert prisoners to job vacancies in their release area, to make the process of learning much more akin to that experienced in the outside world, and to give prisoners the experience of using IT.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham referred to drugs, and I agree that there are two priorities for the Government and the National Offender Management Service. First, we must stop drugs from entering prisons and secondly we must get offenders off drugs and keep them off drugs. He is right to highlight the fact that the demand for drugs in prisons is far greater and more concentrated than anywhere else in society. The high demand and limited supply of drugs creates prices five to six times higher than in the community and represents a lucrative market. That is why prisons are targeted by organised crime groups using sophisticated smuggling methods. Despite rigorous prison security measures, drugs can penetrate prison walls.

I acknowledge that, as my hon. Friend said, some prisoners will try a drug in prison that they have not used before, but they may have been using other drugs in the community—perhaps they have been taking crack cocaine or heavily abusing alcohol—that they substitute with that new drug.

I assure my hon. Friend that we are committed to improving the situation, and we are making progress. Particular initiatives have included an increase in drug-free prison wings where increased security measures prevent access to drugs. I am pleased that my hon. Friend, as he says in his book, supports these measures.

We are trialling drug detection technology and using technology to deny signals to illegal mobile phones in prisons, which are often associated with drug supply. We are also pursuing the roll-out of a networked prison intelligence system to help prisons to stay one step ahead of those seeking to breach prison security. As a result, fewer prisoners are testing positive for drugs than at any time since 1996. Around 7% of prisoners test positive for drug misuse when they are in custody, which is a considerable fall from the 64% who used drugs in the four weeks before custody.

My hon. Friend talked about the opportunity to test when someone goes into custody and comes out. Those are fixed points, and I understand their significance, but he will recognise that we must make sure that prisoners do not use drugs at any time throughout their sentence, and mandatory, random drug testing is useful in that.

As well as keeping drugs out of prison, we want to deliver a rehabilitation revolution that helps to transform the lives of offenders and ensures that they do not return to a life of crime after their sentence. Reshaping treatment services in prisons and the community is at the heart of the Government’s intention to get more people free of their dependence, ready for work, and with somewhere to live. Our objective is to move towards a fully integrated, recovery-orientated system that supports continuity of treatment within and between custody and community. That includes piloting 11 drug recovery wings focused on abstinence, and connecting offenders with community drug recovery services on release.

My hon. Friend will recognise the importance of ensuring that whatever is done with drug treatment in prison, it is important to have continuity through the gate to what goes on in the community. That is also the case for prisoner education. We want to ensure that all our plans recognise that through-the-gate facility.

I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution not only to today’s debate, but to the more general discussions of these issues. I look forward to engaging further with him and others, and I hope that he will be encouraged by the plans we are developing and will shortly introduce.

[Sir Alan Meale (in the Chair)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) on using not only his time, but the time left over from the previous debate.

Question put and agreed to.