Prisons

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

I endorse everything that the two noble Lords who have spoken have said. I will not repeat the statistics given by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. In his recent speech, the Secretary of State spoke of the situation as impossible and ridiculous from his perspective as Home Secretary in the early 1990s. It is good to know that the Government are wishing seriously to address the situation, which on their own admission they regard as impossible and ridiculous, in the growth of the prison population.

In his recent speech, the Secretary of State asked how this has come about, but he did not really offer an answer, apart from an assumption that foolish policies have progressively flowed into a sort of mission creep, as reflected in the ever-increasing prison population. No doubt many factors have been at work, but let me offer an underlying cause. Since 1979, we have had what might be called the progressive Americanisation of our society, a process which has brought many benefits. Individual freedom has been encouraged particularly, but not only, in the economic sphere. Things changed somewhat under new Labour, especially in relation to levels of public spending, but the underlying ideology of economic and personal freedom remained largely intact. There have been many benefits from this political philosophy, but the difficulty in basing a society too much upon economic and personal freedom is that it tends to produce exaggerated winners and losers. Over time, the losers easily accumulate into a growing underclass where low-level or medium-level crime is endemic and where criminal gangs can flourish. That outcome has for a long time been very evident in America where the prison population dwarfs our recently inflated levels. We are now beginning to see this in the UK with prisons—full of relatively minor offenders and repeat offenders—too easily becoming academies of crime. The figures for inmates with drug problems are another illustration.

The way forward must be to address the subculture of crime associated with the growing emergence of an underclass. In the longer debate on Thursday, two of my episcopal colleagues will say more on the subject of restorative justice and the role that it should play. However, let me make one broad point in this short debate. Many of those in the crime-ridden underclass have a very low sense of dignity and self-worth. Many come from broken homes and abusive childhoods. That comes home very strongly when you talk to people who are in prison, as I have frequently done. The solution—or part of it—must include a proper recognition of the innate dignity of every human being including, and in some sense especially, those whom society chooses to imprison. On my visits to prisons, I have often felt that the prisoners, for all that they were there to be punished, were not always treated with the dignity that they nevertheless deserved. The refusal to give them the vote is an illustration of that. In my time as a bishop, I have been in a young offenders’ institute where the staff regularly swore at the young people who were imprisoned there. That seemed to be something that the whole system just accepted as a normal feature of prison life, and the governor hardly seemed to be aware of it. I choose that as an example.

Recognising and upholding the dignity of every human being, even when they are being punished by society, is a real mark of civilisation. We are more generally lawless today in some respects; the danger is allowing those whom we imprison to become scapegoats for the rest of society. That cannot be part of the solution. Whatever we do, we have to uphold the dignity of those we choose to imprison.