Prison Reform

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Fowler]

That this House takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s proposals for prison reform.

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

My Lords, I asked for this debate because it seems to me that the statements being made and the policies being introduced by the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, give more hope for advance in prison policy than anything I have heard for many years. My hope is that this debate, with the experience there is in this House, might contribute to that process.

Back in 1970, when I was first elected to the House of Commons, the editor of the Times, William Rees-Mogg, whom we all remember with affection, asked me to write a series of articles on prisons. Like Mr Gove, I had previously worked for the Times—you do not have to have done that, but it obviously helps in the course of penal reform. I went around the country visiting prisons. We called the series “The Prisons Crisis”, on the basis that for the first time the prison population had gone over the 40,000 mark. In those 1970 articles, which I have here, I wrote that already seriously overcrowded prisons were being stretched to bursting point, that there was no hope of replacing the string of 19th-century prisons that still remained in operation and that the pressure of numbers was placing in jeopardy the whole concept of training for many prisoners.

So obviously, when I came back to this area almost half a century later, I might have expected the kind of progress that there has been in almost all other areas of government policy, with overcrowding reduced and conditions transformed. Sadly, it has not been quite like that. On the position today, I quote not from the Howard League or the Prison Reform Trust, admirable bodies though they are, but from the Government’s own Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, the latest in a line of inspectors who have served this country very well. The chief inspector reports that the prison population today is not 40,000 but 85,000, with forecasts that, on present policies, that total will increase by the end of this Parliament to 90,000 or even more. He reports that the overcrowding that has resulted is,

“sometimes exacerbated by extremely poor environments and squalid conditions”—

his words, not mine. He continues:

“At Wormwood Scrubs, staff urged me to look at the cells. ‘I wouldn’t keep a dog in there’, one told me”.

He found:

“Conditions in many cells were unacceptably poor. Many were filthy, covered in graffiti, some of which was offensive, and furniture was broken or missing. Toilets were filthy and inadequately screened. Windows were broken. We found cockroaches in cells on C wing”.

Inside prisons generally, he found increasing violence; assaults have risen to more than 16,000 per year, including 3,600 assaults on staff. He says clearly that overcrowding is not just a question of two prisoners sharing a cell; it means that prisons simply do not have the activity places to support rehabilitation programmes, work training and education.

Perhaps worst of all, the reconviction rates are, by any standards, shaming: 45% of adults are reconvicted within one year of release. For those serving sentences of less than 12 months, that increases to 58%, and for under-18s it is 68%. Yet the cost of a prison place is more than £36,000 per year, more than Eton. Is it cost-effective to spend that amount of money to produce such reconviction rates? Surely it would be better to see whether there are better alternatives that we could introduce.

I do not wish to exaggerate my description of the lamentable state of our prisons—which in any event, frankly, would be difficult—and I pay tribute to the advances that have been made in some areas, such as some of the policies regarding women’s prisons and with young people. It should be said that, were it not for the work of the prison staff, hard-pressed as they are, we would be in far more serious and public difficulty than we are. One of the better figures in the report was that 70% of prisoners feel that they are treated with respect by the staff.

Nevertheless, the position remains that much of our prison system is a disgrace to a civilised country. Prisoners should not be locked up in their cells for most of the night and day, yet about one-fifth of prisoners spend 22 hours out of 24 in their cells. We should be retraining and offering education to prisoners, but in all too many cases we are not doing that. We should not be keeping prisoners in cells where you would not keep your dog. This all spells out not years but decades of neglect and, frankly, public uninterest. If this were any other part of the public service, there would have been emergency debates in Parliament and demonstrations all the way down Whitehall.

For someone coming back to this area, the questions are not just about how we got to this position but, above all, what now needs to be done. It is against that background that I propose five actions that need to be taken and which I believe are in line with the Justice Secretary’s approach. I do this with a certain humility, because I am aware that there are far greater experts than me in this House. After writing on Home Office issues for the Times for four or five years, I could once claim some knowledge, which was treated in the way you would expect when I went into government: I was appointed to head the Department for Transport. Finally, in my last Front-Bench post, I was made shadow Home Secretary, a position without power, and at a time when we were being “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”. It occurred to me then that if we were half as good with policies as we were with slogans, we would be world-beaters. Sadly, we are not.

My proposals are as follows. First, we should continue to state clearly that the basis of policy is that the punishment of prison is the deprivation of liberty for the prisoner. The aim is not to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the prisoner, although we too often do this accidentally, but to retrain them so that they can become useful members of society and fulfil their own potential. There is no evidence whatever that deliberate discomfort is a policy that works; we should give rehabilitation a chance.

Secondly, we must end the overcrowding of our prisons that is defeating all our best efforts to achieve success. We should see whether the people who are in prison need to be in prison. We might review the number of women being held, as over 80% are in prison for non-violent offences. We might review the position of those being held on indeterminate sentences, not knowing when they will be released. In other words, we should allow prisons to breathe.

Thirdly, if we are to reduce overcrowding, we must reduce the number of people we send to prison. Like everybody else, I want to see professional and violent criminals, such as the Hatton Garden gang, inside prison and no longer a danger to the public. However, I do not believe that prison should be a social dumping ground for those with mental health problems and those with alcohol and drug abuse problems. We must find better ways to deal with these issues.

Fourthly, if we are to send fewer people to prison, we must re-examine sentencing and the power of the courts. One of the reasons overcrowding has taken place is that average sentences have increased. Another reason is that far too many prisoners have short sentences of below 12 months, in some cases serving only a few weeks or months. There is very little chance of doing anything constructive in that time. The better way would be to have sentences in the community that were not simply written off as a soft touch. A judge said to me that sentences must have the confidence of the judges who pass them, notably those sitting in the Crown Courts day after day.

Fifthly, and fundamentally, we should pass down responsibility as far as we possibly can to the governor and the staff of the individual prison. The prison department should lay down the strategy, but governors should be encouraged to develop their own policies. Mistakes will inevitably be made, but that should not invalidate the whole approach and the whole policy.

I started with an example from my days on the Times and I will end with another, which shows what I mean here. In 1967, when I was writing another article on prisons, I visited Dartmoor, built for the Napoleonic Wars and still going. At lunch, I drove out to have my sandwich and parked in front of the entrance to a field, and suddenly noticed, working in the field behind me, an immense man, broad and tall—a rather eerie sight. Going back, I told the governor and his top staff that I had seen this extraordinary sight. “For goodness’ sake don’t report that!” they said, “That’s Frank Mitchell, the mad axeman”, so named after an incident some years before. “You would destroy all our work”. Who was I, a Fleet Street journalist on a day trip to Dartmoor, to challenge that view? So I did not. Ten weeks later, he escaped. It did not take much; all he had to do was to walk to the car that had been provided. As noble Lords will be able to imagine, a great row about prison security followed, only months after the traitor George Blake had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs.

In that case it was very easy to attack the governor, and a dozen editorials did just that. But the fact was that Frank Mitchell had been in one form of institution or another since the age of 12. The prison’s view was that the fires had burnt out and that it was possible to reclaim a man who was not yet 30. Of course, whether that policy would have been successful we shall never know. His escape had been planned by the Kray brothers and carried out by their men and, with a nationwide hunt in operation, the Krays did what they tended to do when cornered: they had him murdered.

My point is that all too often the safe thing for prisons to do from the public point of view is keep the prisoner locked up. The only trouble with that is that if you return a prisoner untouched by any serious attempt at rehabilitation to the same environment outside, you should not be too surprised when, a few months later, he appears in the reconviction figures.

I wish the Justice Secretary well. He has a massive task but he should take encouragement from the fact that our policy over the last 50 years has been a notable failure—not good for the prisoners and certainly not good for the public, who finance this system. We badly need not only new ideas but new ideas followed by action, and that action and that need is urgent. In 1970, we faced a prisons crisis; today, we face a prisons scandal. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fowler]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for his reply, which was very constructive and will be well received. There were two significant features of this debate. First, there was vast agreement on the changes that are required. Prison is not remotely the right place to tackle mental health problems or, for that matter, drug abuse, points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, and my noble friend Lord Suri. The central issue remains the overuse of prison and the overcrowding that goes with it. That point was made by my noble friend Lord Cope and the noble Lords, Lord Dholakia, Lord Beith and Lord Ramsbotham, to whom we owe so much. More needs to be done to consider the position of women prisoners, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd. There is a range of other issues, not least the roots of crime going way back to life before prison, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and my noble friend Lord Cormack.

The second significant feature of the debate was that it just showed how much good will there is for the new Justice Secretary. I hope that is recognised. It was shown in the powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. It was shared by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who agreed—reluctantly, I think, but he agreed nevertheless—with old Tories like me and my noble friend Lord Forsyth. The noble Lord, Lord Beith, also mentioned the rather strange Texan coalition. The message of this debate is that we wish the new Justice Secretary well and now look forward to the action that is so necessary to reform a Prison Service which cries out for change. Above all, we wish him well in this vastly important job.

Motion agreed.