Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, as a past trustee for many years of the Koestler Trust, which puts the arts into prisons and encourages prisoners to take up music, painting and writing, I support my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham and his important Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill.

One of the most telling results of the work of the Koestler Trust is the bestowal of the gift of hope, the possibility of redemption and the extinguishing of stigma—so, too, with the effects of the “spent” system. We heard yesterday of the appalling rise in the number of suicides in our prisons and we constantly hear about overcrowding and understaffing leading to some prisoners spending 23 hours out of 24 in their cells, denied proper exercise and time in the open air and natural light. These are not statistics of which a civilised society can be proud.

Therefore, while a Conservative Government may well feel that they are pledged to send out a message of strict punishment for criminals, they are in a spot, because they are running out of places to put them. Far better, surely, to take a lead from Norway, where prison is avoided wherever possible and an enormous emphasis on creative rehabilitation has led to a 20% rate of reoffending, as opposed to 60% here, for those with short-term prison sentences, and 70% in America.

Hope can be achieved in a number of ways, but certainly the ability to feel that a debt to society has been paid, to wipe clean a slate and to be rewarded by having an offence and sentence regarded as spent is a vital part of rehabilitation, especially in the young, whose youthful indiscretions might otherwise permanently blight adulthood. I sense all round your Lordships’ House particular concern for this aspect of imprisonment and children.

Artistic endeavour and the prospect of earning respect through good behaviour are linked, and both lead to a more cohesive society inside and outside prison. Freud described creativity as an extension of fantasy, and fantasy as a way of transcending the travails of reality. Furthermore, psychologists such as Viktor Frankl have demonstrated how in, for example, the concentration camps in the Second World War inmates who were able to conjure up a future—that is the important point—through writing, composing or painting had a greater chance of survival. I am not, of course, comparing our prisons to terrible places such as Auschwitz but I think that some of the things that we have learned from—if I may put it this way—humanity in extremis about existential thought and about hope provide useful lessons from which we should and must learn.

Surely it is vital and an attractive prospect for the Government to reduce the pressure in prisons by rewarding those who demonstrate good behaviour and a desire to move on in life. It is not a soft option but common sense to seek to foster a more redemptive criminal justice system.