Prisons: Rehabilitation

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for the opportunity to debate this important issue. My interest stems from being asked in 2014 by the then Minister for Prisons to review the 87 self-inflicted deaths of young people in prison between April 2007 and the end of 2013. Every one of the young people who died and whose cases we examined was someone’s son or daughter, sister or brother, partner or even parent. Each of the deaths represented a failure by the state to protect the young people concerned. That failure is all the greater when you look at the investigations into those deaths because the same criticisms occur time and again. Lessons have not been learned and not enough has been done to bring about substantive change.

My review concluded that all young adults in custody are vulnerable. Some had chaotic lives and complex histories; others had been subjected to child abuse, exposed to violence or repeated bereavement; many had been in foster or residential care; and often their lives had been further compounded by mental health issues. In the 87 cases we examined, many of the young people’s problems and vulnerabilities, including mental health issues, had been evident from an early age. Why did so many of them end up in custody?

The cases keep coming. There have been 195 deaths in prison so far this year, of which 49 have already been designated as self-inflicted and another 66 are awaiting classification. That was in the first nine months of this year alone—that is a lot of deaths—and nine of those deaths were of young people aged under 24. It is worth emphasising something for those who believe in the myth of the prisoner’s holiday camp. Let us be clear: prisons and young offenders’ institutions are grim environments, bleak and demoralising to the spirit. The experience of living in a prison or YOI is not conducive to rehabilitation. What is more, when coupled with current impoverished staff regimes, this makes the experience particularly damaging to developing young adults.

Recent reports from the Chief Inspector of Prisons suggest that despite ministerial promises of more investment and better conditions, the current state of our prisons is getting worse. When I did my review, it was clear that young adults in prison were not sufficiently engaged in purposeful activity and their time was not spent in a constructive and valuable way. In many of the 87 cases examined, the vulnerable young adults were going through a period of particular distress that might have passed had they not spent so much of their time banged up in their cells with nothing to do other than stare at potential ligature attachment points. At the time of my report, the Prison Service centrally did not know how many functional safer cells, where ligature attachment points have been removed, existed. Does the Minister have that information now? If not, why not? Nor did the Prison Service know how many hours prisoners spend out of their cells on purposeful activity. Does the Minister have that information now? Again, if not, why not?

A central recommendation of my review was that a named individual should take responsibility for the individual prisoner and her or his journey through the prison—someone who would take personal responsibility for the health, education, social care, safety and rehabilitation needs of each individual prisoner. They would have a small enough caseload that they would know the individual prisoner and deliver the right package of services for their needs. Since my review, Ministers have talked about a 1:6 ratio. Could we have the figures? What is the current ratio of officers to prisons and do the officers concerned have the opportunity to develop a meaningful and sustained relationship with the prisoners whom they are supposed to be assisting towards rehabilitation?

The other central recommendation was that much more needs to be done to support young people long before they ever get into trouble. I repeat, these are young people whose problems had been evident from an early age, so why was nothing done before—long before—they ended up in custody? If we do not get this right, we will waste the billions of pounds referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and we will not secure lives or rehabilitate individuals. We will simply make the situation worse.