Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity
Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Lord Timpson (Lab)
The noble Lord will be pleased to know that a victims’ representative will be appointed to the panel. That is important because the voices of victims need to be heard and we will be announcing the appointment soon.
It is a very difficult situation for victims, especially with the recent releases. Often, they expected someone to be released but it happened a few days or weeks early. I believe that the victim contact scheme is important and works very well. We need to make sure that victims engage with it, where appropriate, because they do not in all cases. The latest SDS40 releases were far better managed. We had an eight-week lead-in time, which is not perfect but is better than the earlier ECSL scheme, which was pretty chaotic. It is important that this review considers the victims in every sentence and every line of the report.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, one of the most depressing points in the Minister’s Statement is that the prison population grows by around 4,500 prisoners a year. Do we really have to accept that it will continue to grow? The Statement says it is a matter of simple arithmetic, but have we lost sight of living in a predominantly law-abiding society, with crime cut down to the bare minimum?
Lord Timpson (Lab)
When I first walked into the Ministry of Justice and was told that the prison population goes up by 80 people a week, I thought that was manageable. But when you times that by 52, and then by five, you realise the scale of the problem. There are a number of examples of similar situations where people have done things differently. While we have a big problem on our hands, we need to make sure that it becomes a big opportunity to change things, because something is clearly not working.
I will give noble Lords the example of Texas, where they decided that a number of non-violent and first-time offenders would not go to prison but would serve community sentences instead—a number of other states have done similar things. I mentioned earlier that highly prolific low-level offenders actually went to prison for longer. Texas also introduced good-behaviour credits, an incentive scheme for people to behave in prison. Crime went down by 29% and 16 prisons have closed. So we should take hope from the fact that, if we use the evidence and take our time, we can learn from other examples. However, it will take time for the increase in prison numbers to slow down: these things, unfortunately, do not happen quickly enough.
Prison Capacities
Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, amid the serious general concern about the state of our prisons, which we all share, I want to focus particularly on the risk of prisoners committing suicide. The death of anyone by suicide is a great sadness but there is a particular forlornness, a sense of failure and defeat, when someone kills themselves in prison.
The number of self-inflicted deaths in prisons last year went down slightly, from 92 to 85, and the number of deaths—1 per 1,000 prisoners—has remained roughly the same since 2018. However, as we know, the rate of suicide in prison is much higher than it is in the population as a whole and 54% of deaths that occur in prison are self-inflicted. For a range of reasons, those in prison are particularly at risk of taking their own lives. Stresses that contribute to those deaths include mental health struggles, deaths of loved ones, planned transfers to different institutions, the prospect of deportation, lack of family support and sex offender status. It is easy to see how those factors, often in combination with one another, can push people to the brink of despair.
A breakdown of the kind of person likely to kill themselves and the time they are at most risk is revealing. I do not have the most up-to-date figures, but those from previous years reveal that those most at risk are predominantly male, nearly all white and in the age groups 21 to 24 and 30 to 39. Moreover, a high percentage of suicides took place in the first 30 days in prison, even the first week, the rate being particularly high among those on remand, mostly by hanging. Arrival in prison is a particularly high time of risk. One-fifth of prisoners who take their own lives in prison do so within seven days of reception, and 39% of them die within a month of arrival. All this indicates a group of people who are particularly at risk.
What steps are taken in the early stages of remand in prison to try to identify those most at risk? Is the Minister really satisfied that those who are mentally unstable are given the opportunity to see a medical specialist?