Prisons: Violence

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his insights from what he learned in Abu Dhabi. The Government are looking at all sorts of different indicators for why violence occurs in certain circumstances. Plainly, keeping people locked up for longer than necessary can provide a significant exacerbation of what is a tendency to violence anyway. As I say, there is no one single cause. The problem with psychoactive substances, which at the moment are a very significant cause of the violence, is that the drug or drugs not only precipitate violence in the individual, but promote an unpleasant subculture within prisons whereby debts are incurred in the buying and selling of drugs, which then promotes violence between prisoners. Therefore it is multifactorial. However, what the noble Lord says should of course be very much part of the general response to the challenge that prisoners present.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I am interested in what the Minister says and apologise for being a moment late—I was chairing another meeting. Within the last parliamentary working week, including the weekend, two sets of people have come to me to talk about violence that they are experiencing in prison and about which they can do nothing. One case involves a woman whose child was killed by a paedophile in a famous case. She is being harassed from prison by the person who killed her son and is being told that nothing can be done about that. The second is a case I am trying to pursue, so I will not say too much about it, in which gangs in two of our major London prisons are running extortion rackets. A woman is paying to protect her son, who has not only been badly beaten up twice—there has been no incident report—but severely radicalised while in prison. I have two questions. First, what is the management doing in our large prisons where there is gang influence and where the gangs are able to work with gangs outside to terrorise families, and secondly, what are we doing to ensure that where telephones are available—and there are reasons why they should be—they are not used inappropriately to harass families outside?

[Lord Faulks]

The noble Baroness will understand why I cannot comment on individual cases, particularly when all the facts are not yet known. However, she makes a general and important point. It is perhaps significant that the problems in prisons do not come entirely from within prisons, and it is most important that prison governors work closely with the National Crime Agency and local police officers and that their intelligence reaches beyond the prison gate and walls. I have to say that from my understanding that is not consistent across the country as regards its effectiveness. However, the noble Baroness identifies an important point which we feel should be more realistically achieved once there is greater governor independence and there can be this link of intelligence which will prevent the sort of situations that she describes.