Prisons

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

The number of questions being shouted out by Government Members makes me wonder whether they know what they are presiding over. There are risks with sending people to prison, particularly for the first time. [Interruption.] There is laughter from the Government Front Benchers, but the situation in our prison system is not a laughing matter. They should take this debate seriously.

We throw people into the prison river, and the currents sweep them towards more drugs and more crime than they experienced outside. If rehabilitation fails, it is a failure to protect society. I must ask what the Justice Secretary is doing about imprisonment for public protection sentences. She urgently needs to come up with a scheme to release those whom it is safe to release. She should consider how that can be done—perhaps by releasing those people on a licence period in proportion to their original sentence.

In November last year, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) published the interim findings of his review into the treatment of and outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system. The stark findings of the review have implications for our prisons. For every 100 white women handed custodial sentences in the Crown court for drug offences, 227 black women were sentenced to custody. For black men, the figure was 141 compared with 100 white men. BAME men were more than 16% more likely than white men to be remanded in custody. Those figures ought to be of concern to the Justice Secretary, and she has a duty to find out why that is happening and what can be done about it. The findings are troubling in and of themselves, but such disproportionate sentencing adds to the strain on our prison system.

Rehabilitation is essential to any serious criminal justice system, but we are not yet getting it right. Most people who are in prison will one day leave prison, so if we are to protect the public and keep our communities safe, rehabilitation must be properly funded and taken seriously by politicians as an aim. It must not be treated as a soft option. Between January and December 2014, 45.5% of adults released from prison had reoffended within a year. Of those released from a sentence of less than 12 months, 60% went on to reoffend.

When the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell introduced the transforming rehabilitation programme, the probation service was reckoned to be performing well. Many stakeholders issued a warning against the breakup of the probation service but, as with many Ministry of Justice consultations at the time, the public were simply ignored and the proposals pushed through regardless. Community rehabilitation companies received negative reports last year in Derbyshire, Durham and London.

[Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Burgon]

I will give way for the final time.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Durham used to have the best probation service in the country, which did an amazing job of trying to rehabilitate prisoners, but it has, alas, fallen by the wayside because of the Government reforms. Does he agree that it would be nice to see Government Members taking some responsibility for what has happened to our prison and probation system? It is an absolute disgrace that it is failing in such a way.

[Richard Burgon]

What has happened to the probation services in the area and region that my hon. Friend represents is indeed a travesty. The privatisation of the probation service has been a disaster.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

As the Secretary of State will know, many women in prison have severe mental health problems, having been subjected to much abuse in their lives. Why is there so little about women in the White Paper? What is she doing to implement the recommendations of the Corston report?

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are working on a strategy for women offenders that includes looking after women on community sentences as well as custodial sentences. I want more early intervention to deal with issues that lead to reoffending, such as mental health and drugs issues, and we will be announcing further plans in the summer.

We are investing in an additional 2,500 staff across the prisons estate, but we are also changing the way we deploy those staff to ensure more opportunities to engage with offenders, both to challenge them and to help them reform.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), and I thank him for the interest he showed in the Durham prisons while he was prisons Minister. However, I profoundly disagree with his view that the privatisation of prisons is the answer to the problems that they are facing.

Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), I have three prisons in my constituency: Durham prison, a community prison with about 1,000 prisoners; Frankland prison, a high security prison with more than 800 prisoners; and, more unusually, a women’s prison. There are not many of those in the country. I also have a youth offender institution. I am therefore in a pretty good position to have direct, first-hand knowledge of what is happening across all aspects of the prison estate, and the picture is not a good one.

Prison budgets have been reducing since 2010; they have been cut by almost a quarter since that time. Up to last year, savings of up to £900 million were made, with another £91 million of savings being requested from prisons this year. At the same time, the prison population has not really fallen, and most of the cuts have been to prison staff numbers. There has been a reduction of more than 6,000 since 2010. This has had an enormous impact on the ability of our prisons to run effectively. As we have heard this afternoon, welcome though it is that the Government are recruiting another 2,500 prison officers, it does not make up for the shortfall or the cuts since 2010. Of course, the Government will have to recruit many, many more than 2,500 to get back to the number of prison staff that we need.

What has been the impact on our prisons? Deaths in custody are up by 14%, self-harm is up by 21% and assaults are up by 13%, with assaults on staff up by 20% and serious assaults on staff up by 42%. I do not know about the prisons Minister, but that is not a record that I would want to stand up and defend. In such circumstances I would want to come to the House to say, “We recognise that there are real problems in our prisons, and these are the measures that we shall take as a matter of urgency to get our prisons back on track.”

A White Paper does not really cut it, so one of the things I want to hear from the prisons Minister in his winding-up speech is what he will do as a matter of urgency to tackle some of the problems facing our prisons. As I have only a minute for each of them, I will quickly run through what I think he needs to do.

Far too many women are inappropriately sent to prison, such as Low Newton women’s prison in my constituency. Some 52% of women in our prisons have children, and lots of those children end up going into care when their mother is inappropriately put in prison, often for quite short periods. I would like to see a clear Government strategy to deal with women prisoners and direct them to other forms of custody. I look forward to hearing the plan for women offenders that the prisons Minister and the Justice Secretary said they would come forward with later this year, particularly as it relates to cutting the prison estate so that more women are given sentences in the community or other types of custody, rather than being sent to prison.

At Durham, a community prison, the rate of recidivism is really high. Measures are needed to cut recidivism and, in particular, to continue investing in education, skills and work experience. We know from the monitoring reports and the inspections that not enough attention is paid to education and skills, and it is really difficult to maintain high levels of education when numbers are being cut. That is an area that the Government need to address.

In some respects, Frankland prison presents the biggest challenge to the Government. Its prisoners have very complex needs, and we know from the monitoring reports that it is crucial that the Government continue to resource, for example, the centre that aims to turn around violent behaviour in the prison population.

All those specialist services are at risk if prisons are not properly staffed and resourced. I want to hear what the Minister will do quickly to resource our prisons more effectively and to ensure that recidivism is reduced and that alternatives to prison and custody are adequately resourced for men and for women.

[Several hon. Members rose—]