Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on securing this debate. I welcome the Minister to his new position and look forward to working with him. I worked with his predecessor, who conducted himself with great integrity and conscientiousness, and I very much hope that the positive and constructive relationship we developed will continue.

In six minutes I can cover only a small number of points. The first part of this debate—the causes of crime and reoffending—is a herculean task in itself, but the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, treated us to a fascinating insight into that this morning. So I will focus on two areas of sentencing which frustrate the rehabilitation of offenders. First, we put people, especially women, into prison for short periods of time. I know that steps have been taken regarding sentencing in this area, but if the better development of women’s centres recommended over 14 years ago by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, had been properly implemented, it would have obviated many of the problems we see today.

If you tried to design a system to ensure that people had the worst possible chance of rehabilitation, you would take them out of their home, rob them of their identity, put them in a threatening environment rife with drugs, lock them away for long periods of the day, ensure they got little or no help with addictions, mental illness and re-education, and give them no home and no job on release. Release them on a Friday, when they are unable to get anything organised—money, accommodation, et cetera—and you have a perfect recipe for perpetuating the system. Short-term sentencing shows how amazingly successful you can be at robbing an individual of their self-respect and their former lives in a really short time—and when they reoffend, just give them more of the same: spend more money on what does not work.

At the other end of the sentence spectrum, we have those who do not know how long they are going to be incarcerated for. The duration of life sentences has doubled over the last 40 years from an average of nine years to 18 years, according to the Independent Commission into the Experience of Victims and Long-term Prisoners. Even worse, in my view, is the situation of indeterminate sentence prisoners, who are kept in prison for inordinate periods of time, long after the sentence has been abolished because of its unfairness. I will leave it to the other members of our small and select cross-party group to elucidate further on that.

I am sorry to say that the Minister is inheriting is a broken system, with any rehabilitation services trying to operate on a shoestring. We who have the temerity to point these contradictions out are branded lily-livered liberals. Well, I am a Liberal, for sure, but like many across this House I believe in evidence-based policy. The report of the Independent Commission into the Experience of Victims and Long-term Prisoners concluded that

“sentencing for serious offences has lost its way and is not working for victims, prisoners, or society as a whole.”

The report discusses the five purposes of sentencing, which are supposed to be the punishment of offenders, reduction of crime, reform and rehabilitation of offenders, protection of the public, and making of reparation. We have got the punishment side down really well—but the rest of it, not so much.

If all five purposes of sentencing are to be met—not simply locking people up and throwing away the key—we need more public awareness of what prison is actually for. We need a complete root-and-branch review of sentencing policy, incorporating all the resources at our disposal. We need the voluntary, private and public sectors all working together, throwing away the dog whistle and using evidence-based policy, doing what works, and thus serving the interests of all.