Prisons

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, I suspect that I may be a lone voice in this place today, but it would not be a debate without listening to both sides. I was the president of the Police Superintendents' Association when the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, said quite powerfully that “prison works”. He was, of course, right—but he was also wrong. He was right in the sense that if you incarcerate someone for committing a crime, that clearly prevents them from continuing to commit crime against the public during their period of incarceration. It might also work as a punishment and deter the prisoner from continuing to offend—because, presumably, he did not like the experience. It could also deter others outside from committing crime because they do not wish to suffer the same fate. He was also right proudly to boast that crime fell dramatically during his period of tenure at the Home Office. However, Michael Howard was wrong, as noble Lords have expressed well this afternoon, in the sense that experience tells us that large numbers of people who are imprisoned return to crime when they are released from prison.

Where we are failing is in the rehabilitation of prisoners while they are locked up. This requires resources and costs a lot of money. I have talked to many criminals in my 35 years of policing, probably more than many others in this House, and of one thing I am certain—they do not like going to prison. On the other hand, they are all volunteers. We are not in prison; they are in prison. It is the old choice they have: if they commit the crime then, of course, they do the time. But it is not a pleasant experience, as I am sure we all appreciate. Any imprisonment is an unpleasant experience. I think that we could make it more unpleasant by clamping down on the use of things like drugs in prisons and the use of mobile phones to plan and perhaps prepare to commit crime when prisoners come out—particularly for the professional criminal. Those things are tolerated to keep the lid on law and order within prisons.

The first duty of any state is to protect its citizens, both from without and within. That is why I was somewhat surprised and shocked when I heard the Lord Chancellor, the right honourable Kenneth Clarke, pronounce that he was not in favour of short prison sentences. I agree that a short sentence does not allow training and rehabilitation, but it sends a very powerful signal to a recidivist bully or anti-social lout that his—and it usually is a him—behaviour and response to the courts will not be tolerated. I have often heard it said that it is not the prison sentence that deters but the fear of being caught. Again, I do not accept that. In the area that I policed, in the north-east of England, crime was rampant in the early 1990s. We arrested, time after time, the same offenders, took them to court and they were released time after time on bail and continued to offend. Arresting them did not seem to have a great effect. If anything was proof that fear of being caught without a proper sentence was not a deterrent, that was it. The public got fed up with anti-social behaviour in the late 1990s, which was why the anti-social behaviour order was brought in. That results in imprisonment only if all the conditions of the order are continually broken.

The public are fed up to the back teeth with what they see as soft options for people who ruin the lives of victims. The nub of it is that generally such behaviour does not touch the lives of Members of this place, but it hits people on housing estates and people in deprived communities, who are trying to eke out an honest living for themselves and their families. We owe it to them to use prison in a sensible way, as a final deterrent for those who refuse to comply. We need to use prison and to change the rules for those who do not know any rules.