Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this debate and making a speech that I thought was one of the most important, courageous, thoughtful and worth re-reading of any speech that I have heard since I have been in this place. Indeed, all the speeches so far have been important contributions and well worth reconsidering. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, with whom I do not always agree, said, as she focused on rehabilitation, that those of us who do so are often accused of being lily-livered liberals. She is a Liberal and my liver is undoubtably “Lilley’s”.

I get most of my original interest in this subject from a great Christian Tory, Samuel Johnson, who, back in the 18th century—and little has changed since, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, indicated—said that prisons are academies of crime. People go in because they have not been good at their crime, and they are more likely to learn from fellow prisoners than they are to be taught or helped by anybody else to be rehabilitated and leave crime behind them when they leave prison.

My experience of the prison system is far more limited than that of most people contributing to this debate. It is limited to visiting and talking to friends and constituents who have had the misfortune to go there. They confirm the impression that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, brought home forcefully: that though we pay lip service to the importance of rehabilitation and there have been initiatives—my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier endeavoured to emphasise the importance of rehabilitation—it has not had much impact. My impression is that it is incredibly hard, physically and culturally, to change the culture of prisons, which are basically about incarceration.

I suspect that we need to set up an entirely new prison, as a pilot project, focused primarily on rehabilitation. It should be staffed, equipped and designed with architecture to make rehabilitation possible. Such a prison would put great emphasis on literacy. As one of the speakers has pointed out, illiteracy is a major problem in the population of our prisons—and certainly in the experience of my constituents who have found themselves there. The day would be designed around work, to give people work and reinforce the habit of work, so that when they return to the working world they have not lost touch with it. There should be links with employers who are willing to take on former prisons, so that jobs will be available to them. There should be training in skills suited to the individual, so that they can take up work when they leave prison.

Such a prison would tackle drugs more seriously than we do. Something that I learned when visiting a friend in prison on an open day was that most of his fellow inmates were on marijuana. He said that in the drugs wing—where prisoners are not allowed out on visiting day—they were all on heroin. I asked if you only go in there if you are on heroin. He said, “No, you go in there if you are caught taking marijuana, but once inside, you learn that you cannot wash marijuana out of your system for the fortnightly test. If you take 16 litres of water, you can wash heroin out, so they all switch to heroin once they are in the drugs wing.” If that is going on in prisons, and we are encouraging people to move from soft to hard drugs, it shows what little thought is being given to one of the most prevalent and damaging problems that causes and prolongs lives of crime.

We should also build into the system at this pilot model prison aftercare services, so that people have planned accommodation and planned work, and links, I would hope, with the charitable and voluntary sectors so that they have people to call upon for support and help. Hopefully, that would work. We would then have some experience that would then be possible to spread throughout the prison system. If not, the chances of converting existing prisons and changing the priority from incarceration to rehabilitation are, I fear, limited.