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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

The hon. Member for Burton (Mrs. Dean), my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and the other members of the Home Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), have done the House a considerable service with their report on the ““Rehabilitation of Prisoners””. It must make a welcome change for them—a release—from having to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny on yet another asylum and immigration Bill or yet another criminal justice Bill. That seems to be their normal diet. I take an interest in this subject partly because I practised as a barrister for a number of years and represented a number of people who then went to prison and partly because the first non-governmental organisation that I ever subscribed to was the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, but most importantly, in the context of this debate, because I have Bullingdon prison in my constituency. I want to comment on Bullingdon in more detail later. We must recognise that the punishment element of prison is the loss of one's freedom. The punishment is going to prison. Prison itself should not be a further punishment. The punishment should be the removal of freedom. My hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere said that quite often, if prisoners are given good treatment, we have to deal with the type of knee-jerk reaction found in the Daily Mail or The Sun. However, we have moved on from Victorian times. We are now in the 21st century and we need to trumpet clearly the message that the punishment is the removal of freedom. We must also recognise that the average stay of most people who go to prison is 23 months. Although they may be taken out of the community for a period of time, it is not necessarily that long. At present, we have a vicious circle of overcrowding and transfers in the prison system that make it much more difficult to help to rehabilitate offenders and, as a consequence, too many of those in prison reoffend once they leave. We have not yet heard much mention of the recent report by the social exclusion unit, but I think that it shows that more than half—some 58 per cent.—of all prisoners are convicted of another crime within two years of release. Tragically, that figure is as high as 72 per cent. in the case of young men aged between 18 and 20. Those figures are tragic for us as a community. They mean that, clearly, prison is not succeeding in rehabilitating people. The social exclusion unit made several recommendations, particularly with regard to helping ex-prisoners to find jobs. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere said, getting a job on release reduces the risk of reoffending by between one third and a half. Most of the recommendations from the social exclusion unit have not been implemented. We need to hear much more clearly from the Government what strategies they have for reducing overcrowding and reducing the need to transfer prisoners constantly between prisons in the system, and what more they are going to do to help to ensure the working of rehabilitation programmes in prison. Paul Boateng is now the high commissioner to Pretoria, but when he was Minister of State at the Home Office, he said, in a Prison Service briefing in June 2000:"““Too often I hear of good projects in one prison rejected by another; of inconsistency of funding and a lack of coordination . . . I want to see some strategic developments””." We would be interested to hear from the Government what the strategic developments are. The prison population is now at a record high, at somewhere near 77,000. It has grown by more than half in the past decade, and numbers are rising by an average of 250 prisoners a week. The Select Committee states in its report that"““it is clear that overcrowding is having a hugely damaging impact on the delivery of rehabilitative regimes across the prison estate, both in terms of quality and quantity of appropriate interventions.””" It goes on:"““We are critical of the management of transfers of prisoners across the prison estate which appears to be more ad hoc and pragmatic than strategic in design. The very high levels of transfers have a direct and significant negative impact on rehabilitation measures, both through disruption caused to intervention programmes and failure to provide prisoners with the particular interventions they need, as identified through assessment and sentence planning.””" There seems to be a vicious circle of overcrowding, which leads to transfers, among other things. The combination of overcrowding and transfers makes it difficult to rehabilitate prisoners, which means that prisoners leave prison not having benefited from the experience very much, and that leads to high reoffending rates. That is crazy, and something needs to be done about it. I shall make a few suggestions. I am sure that most colleagues will think that my first suggestion is reactionary, so I shall start with that one and come on to the more liberal ones shortly. There are many foreign nationals in our prisons—some 10 per cent. of the prison population—and I suspect that that is a consequence of an increase in drug trafficking, more people involved in drug offences and so on. However, there is no justification for keeping overseas nationals in our prisons. When they finish their sentences, the burden should be on them to demonstrate to the courts why they should not automatically be deported to the country from which they came.