Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Bishop of Wakefield Excerpts

Friday 21st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Wakefield]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, and for the opportunity to take part in the debate. I also look forward to a number of maiden speeches, not least that of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who follows me.

Clergy suffer from stereotyping at least as much as any other profession. Saturday nearly always brings me the greeting, “Your busy day tomorrow, padre”. Still more does Christmas elicit from many: “Just coming up to your busy period, father”. Whatever the truth of this, Christmas and Easter present regular and essential moments for clergy. For me, with two prisons in my diocese and one in my see city, it is the regular service at Wakefield prison. I am there like clockwork every year at those great feasts.

Why do I visit the prison? Prisons play a part in the way that we organise human society. They are witness to myriad failures in our living together in human society. Christmas even more than Easter is a moment for each of us to be caught up in the wider human community: be it the family, the office party, the local town service or, in our case, the Huddersfield Choral and the “Messiah”. Christmas spells community and humanity. The Christian story professes God's presence among us as one of us, so Christmas is a good time to reflect on the failure of community and the nature of humanity.

I begin my contribution to this debate there because it is the flourishing and fulfilment of our humanity—or, sadly, in the case of many prisoners, the lack of such flourishing and fulfilment—that lie at the centre of our dilemma. The need for custodial sentences points to a failure or weakness in our humanity, both in individual men and women and in society as an organic whole. Such failure or weakness points to the tragic element in human nature. No realistic penal theory ignores this element in the tapestry of our experience. In a seminar in this place on penal reform earlier this week, we were reminded of a poignant phrase of the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who reflected that the line of good and evil cuts through every human being.

This realisation points us to a deeper truth about the significance of people and personhood. Put baldly, it is that people matter. This unmusical Anglo-Saxon concept is a key element in any theory of justice. Many years ago, I read an essay entitled Why Mattering Matters. If anything matters, people matter. Retributive justice is an unpopular concept for some liberal penal theorists. However, it contributes to that positive sense of taking seriously every individual and community of people. People are punished because we take them and their culpability seriously. People matter.

However, mattering requires of us more than crude theories of retributive justice might suggest. Mattering requires of us more than simple vengeance, or similar human reactions and responses. It requires of us more than simply balancing evil. Instead, it says something much richer about our personhood. This speaks directly to the reasons for, or purposes of, custody. From its introduction onwards, the recent Green Paper, Breaking the Cycle takes the issue seriously all the way through. Although protecting the public and preventing crime remain at the centre of the Green Paper, rehabilitation, transparency and accountability are listed as key principles. This, as other noble Lords have hinted, suggests a radical shift in attitudes and policy that is welcome.

Of course, it would be both unfair and inaccurate to suggest that there has been no restorative work in prisons. Over the past years, various attempts have been made to enrich and develop such work. Sadly, much of the effort in this direction has been blunted by lack of finance and resources. Doubtless we all give thanks for the educational and developmental work with prisoners that has already been achieved.

Nevertheless, despite all the good work, imprisonment does not only protect and punish. In the end, the use of custodial sentences cannot but diminish the person as well. In diminishing the individual, it diminishes society. It does so in two ways: first, by extracting the individual from the community, and secondly, in diminishing the individual, it reduces that person’s potential contribution to our wider culture. This diminishment impoverishes us all and, most dangerously, reduces the person’s, and ultimately the wider community’s, self-esteem. I hardly need say that the collapse of either individual or community self-esteem is one of the most serious corrosives of our broader humanity.

None of this denies the continual need for custodial sentences. The public need protection and, if people matter, offenders should be punished. However, issues of mattering and diminishment direct us immediately to the questions of spent and unspent convictions that lie at the heart of the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. Issues about disclosure of spent convictions are key here. Appropriate handling of disclosure or nondisclosure can mean a move towards renewed self-esteem and a growing potential for a person’s flourishing and fulfilment, thus moving towards a proper, esteemed humanity.

This means an unlocking of an individual's potential, which has significant effects on the community. My plea is for a realism about the tragic element within our humanity, clearly demonstrated in the propensity of all of us being unable to live by the light given to us. Therefore, it should be a proportionate and directed realism. This points ineluctably in the direction of proper appropriation of a clear policy on rehabilitation. The Green Paper indicates how much wider society can benefit from such a shift, but it also takes on a proper care for the individual offender. I cannot overemphasise the need for urgent action here, however. After all, the earlier paper, Breaking the Circle, was published as long ago as 2002, and it is a matter of some shame to us all that financial considerations may have meant that it has received low priority.

In a well rehearsed fragment of John Donne's 17th-century meditation, we should all remember the sentences:

“If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”.

Imprisonment is a kind of death. If people really matter, then prison will remain tragically necessary. It is there to protect and punish, but after death there must be the possibility and reality of resurrection—I use the terms figuratively, of course. I wholeheartedly support the noble Lord’s aims. We must counter diminishment with the opportunity to nurture a full, esteemed humanity, spent in diminishment but rich in aspiration.