Prisons: Rehabilitation

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on successfully securing this debate. It is both timely and important. As his Question implies, one of the key purposes of prison is rehabilitation. Virtually all prisoners are released one day, so one key job for our criminal justice system must be to do its best to ensure that they do not reoffend. As part of that process, while prisoners are in the care of the justice system they should be safe—not just because that is right but because a dangerous and hostile environment increases reoffending. We would not be discussing this now if the system were working well. It is not.

Thousands of prison officers have been axed since 2010 and the recent turnaround and promised increase is too little too late, while we lose the institutional knowledge and experience of those staff who have left. The staffing shortage has driven the crisis in our prisons, exacerbating levels of violence, undermining officers’ ability to deal with a surge in drugs and affecting levels of prisoner care. Prisoners are spending more time in their cells and less time on useful activities that aid rehabilitation and reduce reoffending rates. It is widely acknowledged that the record levels of violence and self- harm in our prisons are largely a consequence of the significant cuts to prison staffing levels in recent years.

Overcrowding in prisons undermines rehabilitation. Prisoners are held in degrading conditions and often moved far away from families, jobs and other support networks, which are essential to effective rehabilitation. The Government previously announced a £1.3 billion plan to build 10,000 new prison places. Despite repeated questions from Labour, the Government have failed to explain how these places will be funded. Sixty-five per cent of prisons and young offender institutions have learning, skills and work activities that are deemed not good enough by Ofsted. Were this the school system, there would be a national outcry.

Our prison system is suffering an epidemic of mental health problems, with self-harm and suicide at record levels. The figure of 300 deaths in prison custody in the 12 months to September 2017 was up more than 50% since 2010. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says this is in part due to,

“failures in reaching prisoners who need general medical and specialist healthcare”.

Those 300 deaths in custody should be a matter of shame for us all. We have a duty of care to these people; they are human beings and citizens. They may be offenders but, at the end of the day, we have that duty of care. If they were workers, they would fall under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974; society would have a duty to reduce the risk to as low as is reasonably practical. We clearly fail that. Something must change, and soon. We must rid this shame from our society.