Prisons: Rehabilitation

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on securing this debate—it is clear that many of us here care about it—and on his masterly delivery of his introductory speech. I have never been to prison, but as a green campaigner I can obviously never rule it out. There are many issues here that I would like to pick up, but today I am going to talk about an initiative where, although I think the Government have potentially got the right idea, some adjustment could improve it enormously. It is a scheme that places probation officers inside the prison; it has proved a success and is now being rolled out across the country. Their clients get to attend meetings regularly and can plan their rehabilitation properly. I understand that such meetings outside prison can fail because the client may not attend. In addition, the probation service loses money if they do not attend, so they do not report meetings that do not take place and we do not know how many such meetings actually happen and how much rehabilitation can be offered.

There are the 2,500 extra prison officers being employed and their remit is going to include 45 minutes a week of one-on-one time with prisoners to establish a relationship. It is hoped that they can communicate problems and issues and identify any help that the prisoner might need. However, these prison officers are not trained in relationship building: it is simply not part of the prison officer culture. That is why there needs to be a connection between what the prison officers are doing and what the probation teams are aiming to do. To give prisoners a sense of there being a future—a way forward, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, described it—there has to be the hope of a better life. There is a need to bring the two cultures closer together: the probation officers’ soft skills and the security-oriented approach of the prison officers.

Prisons are currently, as we have heard, overstretched and collapsing due to a perfect storm of austerity, induced early retirements and the emergence of the drug Spice. It is easy to see how security can take priority over relationship building and rehabilitation, but without these things prisons will be harder to control, ex-offenders will become offenders again and the prison population will continue to rise. I urge the Government to give training to the new prison officers so that they can become part of the solution and not part of the problem.