Prisons

Philip Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that important point. In Justice questions yesterday, the Minister with responsibility for prisons, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), said that he was in discussions with the Department for Exiting the European Union about the matter. We need to hear more about the progress of those discussions.

The Justice Secretary frequently points to the emergence of new psychoactive substances as a major factor in the current crisis. Does she know that in Scotland, where prison policy has been stable for some years and where staffing has remained constant, violence has not rocketed as it has across the rest of the prison estate? Scotland has NPS issues, too, but it did not axe staff in vast numbers.

Our prisons are overcrowded. Armley prison, in my city of Leeds, holds nearly twice the number of prisoners that it was built to house. Wandsworth, Swansea, Brixton and Leicester are not far behind; they are all full to capacity with another 50% on top.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Richard Burgon]

This will be the final time that I give way, if that is okay.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he knows that I hold him in very high esteem. Lady Chakrabarti, the shadow Attorney General, said recently that she wanted half the prisoners in the UK prison estate to be released immediately. Is that Labour’s official party policy? My constituents would be very interested to know.

[Richard Burgon]

I am certainly not aware of any such policy announcement being made. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are making some strange gesticulations. It is not Labour policy to release half the prisoners. Why on earth would that be the case?

We need a lasting way to manage the prison population. In November 2016, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, appeared before the Justice Committee. Not surprisingly, he was questioned on the prisons crisis, and he offered a view on what could be done:

“The prison population is very, very high at the moment. Whether it will continue to rise is always difficult to tell, but there are worries that it will. I am not sure that at the end of the day we can’t dispose of more by really tough—and I do mean tough—community penalties.”

Prison has always been seen as a punishment. A person breaks the social contract that governs much of our relations with one another, and they may be imprisoned. Members from across the House rightly see prison as a fitting sanction, and it must be right that when a convicted person is a danger to the public, they are kept away from the public until such time as they no longer pose a threat. A significant minority may never be safe to release. But we must ask whether prison is the right place for some of those who offend. We should always reflect on that, because if we do not, we find ourselves in the position that the Government are in now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

In any case, we are setting up a parliamentary scheme so that we can work more closely with prison officers and give them the kudos they deserve, because they do an incredibly important job, often behind walls. As part of the reform programme, I want to see prisons reaching out more into the local community and working with local employers. As the shadow Secretary of State said, ultimately, the vast majority of people in prison will one day be on the outside and be part of the local community, so we need to work on that.

While we are putting in place the long and medium-term measures to get additional staff in to reform our prisons, we are taking immediate action to improve security and stability across the estate. That includes extra CCTV, the deployment of national resources and regular taskforce meetings chaired by the prisons Minister. He holds regular meetings with the Prison Service to monitor prisons for risk factors, and that allows us to react quickly to emerging problems and provide immediate support to governors, on anything from transferring difficult prisoners to speeding up the repair of damaged facilities.

Hon. Friends have talked about psychoactive substances, which have been a game changer in the prisons system, as the prisons and probation ombudsman has acknowledged. In September, we rolled out to all prisons new mandatory drug tests for psychoactive drugs, and we have increased the number of search dogs and trained them to detect drugs such as Spice and Mamba. We are also working with mobile phone operators on new solutions, being trialled in three prisons, to combat illicit phones, and we have specific powers to block phones too.

[Philip Davies]

I am disappointed that my right hon. Friend has not mentioned the impact on the behaviour of prisoners of automatic release halfway through sentence. If someone is sent to prison for six years but knows that by law they will be released after three, irrespective of how badly they behave in prison, surely their behaviour in prison will be worse than if they know they might have to do the full term if they do not behave. Is she not going to address that issue?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Clearly, if people do not behave, they will receive additional days. That is an important part of the levers that governors have in reforming offenders.

I was talking about security issues. We are also working to deal with drones, rolling out body-worn cameras across the estate and dealing with organised crime gangs through a new national intelligence unit.

Hon. Members have also talked about mental health. We are investing in specialist mental health training for prison officers to help to reduce the worrying levels of self-harm and suicide in our prisons. The early days in custody are particularly critical to mental health and keeping people safe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I want to confine my remarks to the subject of fixed-term recalls, which I wish were much more widely understood by the public and in this House. They represent one of the biggest outrages of our prison system, and yet hardly anyone knows anything about them. Most people believe that if someone is let out of prison early—whether halfway through their sentence, a quarter of the way through the sentence on a home detention curfew, or at some other point before they actually should be let out—and they reoffend or breach their licence conditions, they should at least go back to prison to serve the rest of their original sentence. Unfortunately, that is often not the case. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the public believe that offenders should serve the whole of the sentence that they were given by the courts in the first place. In a survey carried out by Lord Ashcroft, 82% of those asked thought that prisoners should serve the full prison sentence handed down by the court. That, for many, is not rocket science; it is just common sense.

Fixed-term recalls were introduced to reduce the pressure on prison places in 2008, and many people do not know about what is going on. A fixed-term recall is when the offender breaches their licence or reoffends and is returned to prison not for the rest of their prison term—not even for most of it—but for a mere 28 days. When fixed-term recalls were introduced, they excluded certain offenders. However, when my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) was Lord Chancellor, he relaxed the rules by way of a change to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in a bid to reduce the prison population still further. As of 3 December 2012, fixed-term recalls were made available to previously denied prisoners: offenders serving a sentence for certain violent or sexual offences, those subject to a home detention curfew and, most shockingly, those who had previously been given a fixed-term recall for breaching their licence in the same sentence. Now, I do not think that many people out in the country know that, but I certainly know that many people will not like it.

Fixed-term recalls do not happen just occasionally. They were given to 42% of all offenders who were recalled in both 2013 and 2014 and to 28% in 2015. That is an awful lot of people going back to prison for only 28 days instead of the rest of their sentence. Those 28-day recalls relate to sentences of one year or more, so we are talking about the most serious of offenders. Recalls of 14 days apply to shorter sentences, but they are a much more recent concept.

The more I investigated 28-day fixed-term recalls, and as more figures have been released, more disturbing things have become clear. In 2014, 7,486 prisoners were recalled for just 28 days. Of those, 3,166 had been charged with a further offence. That means that 3,166 people were charged with a further offence when they should have been in prison in the first place and then escaped serving the rest of their original sentence despite committing this further offence. The vast majority had 15 or more previous convictions. Burglary is the most common original offence for which a fixed-term recall is given for a breach or a further offence. Over half of all those given this pathetic slap on the wrist were people who had committed a very serious crime. They were also given to people convicted of manslaughter, attempted homicide, wounding, rape and robbery.

Perhaps the icing on the cake in this whole sorry state of affairs is that, in 2015, 816 offenders were allowed more than one fixed-term recall on the same original sentence for another breach or offence. In just three years, 3,327 of the most serious offenders in our prisons were released from prison, breached their licence, were returned to prison for 28 days, released again, were returned to prison for just 28 days for a further breach of licence and then released again. That is a complete failure of policy and is completely indefensible. I raised fixed-term recalls in Justice questions yesterday, and the Minister’s reply about risk was very interesting, but this is a sad joke. As far as I am concerned, these people should not have been released early in the first place but, having been released, there should be no other option but for them to be returned to prison for breaching their licence, especially for reoffending, for the remainder of their original sentence at the very least.

Finally, the weak response to reoffending is becoming so well-known in the criminal community that some people are taking the chance of getting recalled knowing that the punishment is pathetic. It is like a 28-day, all-inclusive mini-break. Worse still, some prisoners who have been released deliberately try to get themselves back into prison to give themselves enough time to see how their criminal operation in prison is carrying on while they are out, knowing that they will only be there for 28 days. That has been confirmed in research by Manchester Metropolitan University, which stated that prisoners had reported being able to earn £3,000 in just 28 days by bringing in drugs. One prisoner said that

“everyone keeps going and coming back in on these recalls with more drugs.”

This is an absolute farce. The criminals are laughing all the way to the bank while nothing is being done to stop this nonsense. When will the Minister get a grip and end this fraud on the public?

[Several hon. Members rose—]