Prisons and Courts Bill (Third sitting)

Richard Arkless Excerpts

Committee Debate: 3rd Sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 29th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)]

Setting a benchmark in relation to prison cell overcrowding is an admirable objective, but will the hon. Lady be so kind as to delve into the policy aspects that would make that benchmark obtainable? We would need to create more prisons, let people out or have some kind of assumption against short sentences, which we think is a good idea.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

How many people we send to prison is clearly an issue. Many argue that there has been sentence inflation in the last number of years. There are two approaches. The Secretary of State could say that she does not want to look at prison sentencing reform in the sense of either reducing prison numbers or sentence inflation. In that case, we need to build a lot of prisons and recruit a lot of people to man them. The other option is to look again at sentences and the question of whether people who are in custody should be. As a senior judge recently said, community service orders, which could be stringent, could be made more widely available. Presumably that would require the Sentencing Council to revisit sentencing issues, which of course is one of the political issues.

It would be good if the Government thought about sentence inflation. We know from the last number of years that more offences now have longer custodial sentences than 20-odd years ago when I started work. As a result, there are more people in prison. If we want to have a policy of incarcerating people, we must ensure that there are enough prison spaces and enough people there to look after them—and to deal with the rehabilitation side, because we spend £16 billion a year on reoffending. Those issues need to be looked at, and there is nothing in the Bill to address them.

I apologise to colleagues for using statistics, because sometimes people can be blinded by them, but I use them to demonstrate a point. The fact is that there has been a large rise in assaults on prison officers and inmates since 2012. There has also been a large rise in self-harm and many incidents of people committing suicide. It is not surprising that every few weeks it seems a prison riot happens in some part of the country. I know from speaking to prison officers, the Prison Governors Association and other people about how they feel really depressed when they go to work in the morning, because they do not know what challenge there might be; who might assault them or what might happen. That must be addressed.

We are asking for the principles to be crystallised in statute. When that is done in statute, rather than put somewhere in prison policies or rules, or some manual tucked away that says, “This is the right way of doing things”, people have to be aware of it. By having that in the Bill, the measures that need to be achieved are there for everyone to look at.