Prisons (Substance Testing) Bill

David Johnston Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

I will be brief. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan). One does not need to be here long to know what a formidable Member of the House she is, and I hope we will see her back here soon. Most of the public are rightly horrified when they hear the stories of drugs and violence in our prisons, but we have to deal with the world as it is and they are a very real and present threat. Drugs affect the physical and mental health of our prisoners and are getting prisoners into debt, which in turn leads to situations of bullying and self-harm. We do not yet have a direct correlation between these psychoactive substances and the violence that we have been seeing, but, given that they make people more aggressive, I think most of us would think that it is at least a factor. Inside prisons, just like the world outside prisons, drugs place huge strain on our medical services and on our education and employment opportunities, too.

Of course, prison is for punishment, but unless we want people to come out, commit another crime and go straight back in, it has to be for rehabilitation, too. Asking our prison staff to rehabilitate people who are misusing psychoactive and other substances in prison is tying at least one hand behind their backs.

We have some stark facts about the problems of drugs in our prisons. Between 2014 and 2019, the proportion of people who said that they got a drug habit in custody doubled. In 2015, Her Majesty’s inspectorate said that psychoactive substances were the most serious threat to having a safe and secure prison system. In 2016, the Mount Prison closed an effective treatment programme due to a massive influx of these psychoactive substances. What we have to do, in my judgment, is support the Government’s prison drugs strategy on controlling those factors of supply and demand, and I welcome the 10 prisons project. However, this Bill is doing a very specific thing to try to update the testing system, because, quite naturally, the production of these drugs and the altering of the chemical compounds in them, far outpaces the system that we have for testing. It is right that we give our prison staff the tools they need to identify both those who are evading punishment but also those avoiding treatment. It surely must be in all our interests that we give prisoners the best chance of a successful life once they have completed their sentences.