Criminal Justice System

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, it is my very pleasant duty to welcome my noble friend to the House as a full Member, now that she has made her maiden speech. She has told us about her background. This is one case where not only has immigration enriched society but it has also enriched our Chamber in a very direct way. She has had a very distinguished local government career and having been in touch with issues outside the House, that will have an effect on this Parliament and beyond. She knows what she is talking about. I am not sure whether those on the Front Bench will always be grateful for that knowledge and detail, but that should be cherished by the House. Very few of us would disagree with what she said in her speech as it was based on fact and the experience of those who have had something to do with the system. It is a good beginning and I look forward to hanging on to her coat tails in many a debate to come.

As with anything to do with our criminal justice system, one is confronted by the fact that the system mops up what the rest of society fails to deal with. Ultimately, the criminal justice system and the health service deal with most of the failures in our society and that is where you find things that have gone wrong. Invariably, the criminal justice system gets the first bite at this: it tends to deal with people who have failed educationally and thus in employment. It is not surprising that one discovers very low levels of literacy and numeracy in the prison system and it is not surprising that one finds an incredibly high number of people with educational problems within that group.

When I speak of dyslexics in the prison system, for once, I am not talking about a minority. Approximately 50 per cent—some estimates are higher than that—of the prison population are in the dyslexia spectrum. That means that one in two prisoners has a problem, which means that they cannot process written material and the educational process easily, and one wonders why they are at higher risk of offending. They do not have access to jobs because of interview processes and qualifications. One has to take into account the fact that they come from what used to be called a working-class background. We are now discovering that often there are entire generations of dyslexics in families: families where the idea of reading a book or passing an exam is anathema to their entire social structure. You wonder why the problem is so entrenched.

What can we do about it? There are no dyslexic deniers here today—they are usually quite a free hit. If people with such problems are coming through the system, what can we do to lessen the impact? First, we must try to identify them early. The age of 14 seems to be when young men, who end up in the prison system, have stopped their education, having refused to attend or having been excluded from school. Often they have not been identified within the school system and I am sure that, when my noble friend returns, he will acknowledge that the Government intend to implement a programme of better identification. However, even if it were implemented tomorrow, we would still have 10 to 15 years of pupils in the school system who will not receive the benefit of being identified as dyslexic or as having other special educational needs, to say nothing of the entire population outside the school system. I hate to say it but I doubt whether any system devised by man will catch everyone. We need a process of identification to give people the right kind of help throughout the criminal justice system.

Young dyslexic men may resent any kind of authority, usually because of a bad school experience, and we have found that they tend to do badly under cross-examination in court. They may have short-term memory problems which means that they cannot identify things like numbers, dates and sequences. Eloquence was displayed by the first two speakers in the debate. However, if dyslexics find themselves in court, they are more likely to be convicted more regularly than others. For different reasons, those with Asperger's syndrome also handle that process badly.

What can we do to make the entire system aware of these problems and that probably the majority of their client base has them? How will we start to address this? Will we take this on board and work it in? If we do not, we will have a slow process of a series of assessments. Prisons are very good at assessing people who present themselves. People who move around the prison system are often assessed eight or nine times for being dyslexic; they do not actually get much help beyond that. I suggest to my noble friend and to our colleagues in Government that we look at a process of identification and explanation for those who are found to be dyslexic.

A while ago, I found an excellent scheme in Chelmsford prison for those who never go to the education unit. If you have had a bad experience when being taught literacy and spelling at school, and someone says, “Go to the education unit; they’ll teach you to spell”, unsurprisingly you will avoid it. How many noble Lords who hated games at school force themselves to go jogging three times a week? Take that example and spice it up a bit. Will we have programmes in the system for identifying people with literacy problems early on? The majority with literacy problems will already have taken that on board. Can we identify them and tell them why they cannot spell or write, which is still seen by society as a way of judging someone’s intelligence? A dialogue could then be opened. When I visited the prison in Chelmsford, the warders said to me, “Do you know what has happened where the scheme works? We have cut down on the number of assaults”. The level of tension has been removed and a lot of money has been saved in reducing the number of man hours required to process assaults. Can we therefore have a recognition that this area has to be examined not because it is a special, concentrated group but because it is part of the mainstream?

If we start to address the problem properly, we may be able to make considerable savings and make it far easier for those in the justice system to access the help on offer. I suggest that this really is one of those no-brainers in theory—in practice it will require thought and a degree of prejudice-kicking measures. I look forward to hearing about them.