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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

I am delighted that we have this opportunity to debate the report. It is an important report, and I support all its conclusions, and the gist of what its Chairman, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), has been saying. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the impetus that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) gave to the Committee in terms of this report. When she was prisons Minister, she was renowned for the number of prisons she visited, and I am sure that the present Minister is also no slouch when it comes to visiting prisons. Given the number of prisons that the Committee visited in the course of producing this report, I like to think that we have done justice to the impetus that my right hon. Friend has given us. I pay tribute to the energy, commitment and hard work that the Chairman has put into the report and the work behind it, which I am sure hon. Members will have been impressed with today. As an Opposition spokesman, I had occasion to visit prisons, and before that I frequently visited them in a professional capacity. Every time I went into a prison I was impressed when I saw prisoners engaged in what is termed ““purposeful activity””. Unfortunately, that was often not enough. By the same token, I never failed to be anything but depressed when I saw, as I did all too often, prisoners either hanging around on wings or locked up in their cells. One of the most frequent causes of complaint to me from prisoners was the inordinate length of time that they spent banged up in their cells. I believe that there have been improvements in that regard, but much more needs to be done. It seems to me that time spent either hanging around on prison wings or simply locked up in cells is unlikely to have much rehabilitative effect. I, and I think most members of the public, would prefer to see prisoners who have to be in prison doing something constructive that will give them a better chance of staying out of trouble in the future. I am sure that all forms of rehabilitative activity have their place, including addressing offending behaviour, but the strongest and most useful form is working. As I suggested to the right hon. Member, there is a good deal of evidence to show that prisoners who work in prison and go into work as soon as they leave prison are much less likely to get into more trouble. There are no panaceas for reoffending, because in many cases prisoners have led disordered lives, have come from unfortunate home circumstances or have personality problems or other cause of their offending. However, if they get into the habit of work while they are in prison, the chances of their staying out of trouble once they come out are much increased.