Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Jane Ellison Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

I welcome the continuing focus of Ministers on tackling the country’s appalling levels of reoffending, which we have heard a lot about. I want to focus my comments on the need to tackle drugs dependency among prisoners, not least because to reduce reoffending is to reduce the number of victims, a point to which many hon. Members have returned.

For many low-level offenders, turning them away from crime back to the law-abiding majority depends on a system of rehabilitation that works. The one that we inherited is clearly flawed. Reoffending rates for short prison sentences of less than 12 months had increased to 61% in 2008.

The statistics linking drug addiction among prisoners and reoffending rates are stark. Evidence submitted to the “Breaking the Cycle” Green Paper stated that, from a sample of offenders, 62% of those who had taken drugs in the four weeks prior to custody were reconvicted within a year of leaving prison. That compared to 30% reconviction rates among prisoners who had never used drugs. If we want to address recidivism, tackling drug taking in prison must come incredibly high on the agenda, not least stopping prisoners getting a habit inside, on which we have heard some horrendous statistics.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), I welcome the pilot programme of drug-free wings in our prisons. We have all said that we would prefer that the need for them were the exception rather than the rule, but the reality of our prison system is that people go to extraordinary lengths to smuggle illegal drugs in. The Ministry of Justice’s own survey last November found that 19% of offenders questioned had tried heroin for the first time in prison, so it is a vital subject to tackle and an abject record that we have inherited.

I very much welcome the fact that the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office are showing joined-up thinking on this. The Home Office’s drug strategy 2010 document sets out clearly the need to tackle the counter-productive influence of drugs in prison, boosting intelligence capabilities and security technology in prisons. Those are both key factors in dealing with the problem. Both the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice have highlighted the need for integrated support to help drug-reliant offenders.

This Government are taking a proactive approach to rehabilitating and supporting prisoners addicted to drugs, both illegal and prescription. Some who are released do not want to go on to commit other offences but their reliance on substances is the route to reoffending. Many of them want to free themselves from drugs but instead slip through the net. One is a constituent who wrote to me earlier this year who was coming to the end of an 18-month sentence. After a course of painkillers in prison, he became addicted to significant doses of diazepam. He was desperate to get off drugs before he was released. He knew that if he was released addicted, he would be drawn back towards the same circle of people and propelled back into crime. I was able to help him, but he told me he had exhausted all other avenues of getting help, and that cannot be right. He subsequently found help in the community with an ex-offenders charity. He is now training in a useful skill, and even hopes to start a small business. That is a positive story, but I fear it does not apply for far too many people. Many people are simply released still addicted to drugs and in a vulnerable state, and are then sucked back into the same criminal circles, making it almost inevitable that they will relapse.

There is clearly great benefit in taking a proactive and multidisciplinary approach to tackling this problem. If drug recovery wings are successful, I hope that the pilot will be rapidly expanded, particularly as they have proved to be especially successful for women. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye that we should aspire to have drug-free prisons, and there are some good examples from around the world. The Sheridan correctional facility in Illinois was reopened as a purpose-built drug rehab prison in 2004 and has had some very encouraging results over the last eight years. The reoffending rates of the prisoners released from there are between 20% and 50% lower than for those released from traditional facilities in Illinois.

Reducing reoffending rates and tackling drug addiction have both a clear economic benefit, as has been discussed, and a clear social benefit. We want fewer victims of crime, and we want to help offenders get clean and go straight, and get a job, pay their taxes and keep their families together. I welcome the Secretary of State’s approach on this matter.