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Prisons: Suicides

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for enabling us to have this important debate. I also remind your Lordships that I have the privilege of chairing the All-Party Penal Affairs Group. In June, 16 people killed themselves in our prisons, which is the highest number for any month on record. Last year, 95 people in prison took their lives, which is equal to the highest number for any calendar year since records were kept. The risks of suicide in our prisons are known and recorded: one-third happen in the first week of custody; one in seven happen within the first 48 hours of the cell door slamming; around two in every three prisoners who commit suicide have a history of drug abuse; one in three of alcohol abuse; and seven in every 10 have a history of mental disorder. Those things are known and the system totally ignores that evidence. I welcome, as does the Prison Reform Trust, the new programme to try to prevent suicide being phased in across the Prison Service. It involves considerable specialist training, which can only be the more difficult to achieve alongside massive and growing overcrowding. The growing shameful and shaming number of prison suicides has its roots in alcohol and drug misuse problems and a high incidence of mental disorder. But it also raises a larger question which must be answered. Is prison really the best place for prisoners with those known predictors of destructive self harm? Prison staff, however well trained, are simply not equipped to offer the specialist help and treatment that those vulnerable prisoners need. Instead of building new prisons and then struggling to isolate wings to better handle those with known needs which point to serious self-harm—overcrowding drowns those good intentions—we should build secure hostels where health and medical professionals can more effectively deal with the known needs which lie behind the offence. Surely, that is a better way of trying to reduce self-inflicted deaths and to reduce reoffending. Reoffending rates—one of the main reasons behind overcrowding—demonstrate the expensive failure of our prison system. Mr and Mrs Joe Public are not getting any value for money for the £37,000 a year that it costs to lock someone up, when more than seven in 10 offenders are back inside within two years. Overcrowding assists reoffending because it denies too many prisoners any proper chance while inside of taking advantage of schemes to deal with alcohol and drug abuse or to learn useful skills. Our prisons lock up 78,000 men and women, which is set to reach 90,000 in five years. Who are they? In July, 12,953 were on remand, not sentenced or awaiting sentence. That is one in six of the total prison population. Almost one in five of that number will be acquitted or not proceeded against and eight out of 10 of them face non-violent charges. Is that the most sensible use of expensive prison places? While the number in prison expands, the numbers of those sentenced by courts has fallen over the past decade. More people than ever before are sent to prison by magistrates and Crown Courts. Why do so many magistrates send one in five people found guilty of non-violent shoplifting to prison, which is nine times as many as in 1993? I simply refuse to believe that there are no community punishments available to deal with shoplifters. Overcrowding is made worse by short sentences of fewer than six months for all but a handful of those sentenced for non-violent theft and motoring offences. The alternative of proven, well funded and targeted non-custodial sentences is not only cheaper but also can give the offender a longer period to take advantage of the help on offer while keeping up family and social links. I suggest that the public have no idea of the problems which prison officers face—some of which have been referred to. Forty-seven in every 100 men and half of the women in prison run away from home as a child; just over one in four were taken into care as a child; one in three truanted from school; and 52 in every 100 men and 71 in every 100 women have no educational or skilled qualifications. Unsurprisingly, 67 in every 100 prisoners were unemployed when convicted. That is not to make an excuse for criminal behaviour. It is a plea to better understand the roots of offending and reoffending in order to increase the chances of finding a variety of ways in which to deal with it and to decrease the chances of reoffending. We need sensible boldness in our prisons, not tacking on the odd new shed and the odd fence here and there. No one can be satisfied at the moment with a system which expensively fails to achieve so much at such a high and rising cost. Gaol should be only for that minority of offenders who are convicted of the most serious and violent offences, with specialist secure establishments for those in need of a range of health and other treatments. Community sentences should be more widely used to address the offence and the education, training and other needs of the offender, again, to reduce reoffending and help to encourage them to become useful members of society. Earlier this week, Erwin James, who, towards the end of his 20-year sentence in prison, began writing a column for the Guardian, described to a meeting of the Prison Reform Group how he had used his time in prison to help himself and to educate himself up to degree level at the Open University. He said that most prisoners need educators rather than gaolers. I ask the Minister to think about that. He told openly a very moving story of the positive way in which he had been able to handle his sentence. The pity is that he is an all too rare person in a system more used to expensive failure than personal, social and community success.