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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: The Minister shares responsibility with Baroness Scotland in another place. No insult was intended to the Minister; I was not quite sure which of the two had the main responsibility in the Department. There is no doubt that the Minister has a job on her hands, as has Lady Scotland. The evidence for that is in what I consider to be one of the most comprehensive reports by the Home Affairs Committee for some time. The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) is to be congratulated—I merely echo the words of other hon. Members when I say that—on the scope and breadth of the report and the depth in which the Committee has examined the issues and problems affecting prisons. In common with a couple of my hon. Friends, I also started my career in prisons. As a young articled clerk I was dispatched off to Brixton nick, as we used to call it in those days, to visit clients of ours who had fallen on hard times. I am afraid that many clients of the firm to which I was articled ended up spending much longer periods of time at Her Majesty's pleasure. What struck me 12 months ago when I was given the brief of visiting prisons is that they have not changed that much. That is quite frightening. I appreciate that it is mostly dictated by the physical nature of the prisons—the fact that so much of the estate is made up of old-fashioned Victorian establishments. However, there was a definite feeling of déjà vu when I walked into the first of the prisons that I visited. There was a lot of déjà vu when I entered Holloway—although I was particularly impressed by some of the work being done there, not least the work to deal with mental health problems. The report, to which the Department responded in March, makes pretty uncomfortable reading. There is no doubt that although great strides are being made in some respects, there are enormous problems, and the Government need to tackle them before there is a catastrophe—although the current offending rate is itself a catastrophe. As my party's spokesmen on the subject, I want to say that too many people take a neanderthal approach to the subject. They say, ““Prison works. Lock them up. Throw away the key.”” They forget, first, that those in prison are human beings, and, secondly, that there is a cost to society. If anyone says, when I come up with ideas for rehabilitation or keeping people out of prison, that I have gone soft and am left-wing and wet, it is not true. It costs more than £37,000 a year on average to keep a man in prison. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but every prison place that she has had built since 2000 has cost £99,839. That is a significant cost to the taxpayer. To those costs must be added the cost in human misery and family break-up, the cost to victims of crime, and the cost to the economy as a whole. I am not going soft when I suggest that perhaps we should not lock too many people up, or that we should do something with them when they are inside. I do not subscribe to the views of people who say ““Shut them in a room, take away their television, don't give them education; they must pay their debt to society.”” They are paying their debt to society by being inside a prison. I do not think that anyone in this Chamber would want to spend more than a few hours inside any of our prison establishments. In England and Wales we have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, with 145 people in prison per 100,000 of the population. That is more than France, which has a rate of 91 per 100,000, and Germany, which has a rate of 96 per 100,000. According to the most recent figures that I have, which are for 2003, the average age of those sentenced to custody was 27. More alarmingly, nearly one quarter of our prisoners are 21 or under. As we have discussed, the number of women in prison has doubled over the past decade. Before I came into the Chamber, I checked how many female prisoners were in our establishments on 11 November, and it was 4,599. That is a considerable figure, compared with previous years. More frighteningly, Home Office research shows that approximately 66 per cent. of those women are mothers. In that respect, the point that I tried to make in an earlier intervention is very pertinent. It is estimated that more than 17,000 children each year see their mothers put in prison. When we separate them from their mothers in that way, there is a risk that they will end up on the conveyor belt to crime. One of the social characteristics that identifies people who finally end up in prison is that they are victims of family break-up, and, in this case, it is the state that has broken up the family. With more than 17,000 children a year affected, we are very much preparing the seed bed in which we will grow our future prisoners, and we should not be doing that. Prison has a poor record in reducing reoffending. Three out of five prisoners, or 61 per cent., are reconvicted within two years of being released. The frightening thing is that for young men and boys under 21 the reconviction rate stands at 73 per cent. That means that we have put a phenomenal percentage of people in prison, done nothing with them and then allowed them to come out and return to their life of crime. Everyone who has spoken in the debate has mentioned the serious problem of overcrowding. At the end of August, 81 of our prisons—57 per cent. of the estate—were overcrowded, 13 were at more than 150 per cent. of their certified normal accommodation and 11 had populations over their operational capacity. The situation has not got better; indeed, it has got worse. As I said when I intervened on the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen, 75,187 people were in prison when the Government responded to the report in March. By 11 November, that figure had increased to 77,683—an increase of 2,496. Usable operational capacity stands at 78,341, and that means that there are only 658 places left, which is quite alarming. Far from home detention curfew being used to free up capacity in our prisons, there has been a drop in the imposition of HDCs; there were only 3,178 on 11 November, compared with 3,417 in March. If we compare the prison population now with that 12 months ago, we see that there is an enormous difference. In November 2004, there were 75,023 people in prison. In the Minister's March response, the figure was 75,352, so the prison population was holding steady. I had discussions with various people in the prison sector, who were all a bit surprised by that. They could not understand why the figure was holding steady; they had expected an increase and did not know why there had not been one. Of course, the increase has now kicked in in spades, judging by the figures on the Home Office website. The overcrowding of the prison estate is very much linked to the issues of reoffending and rehabilitation. If the system is overcrowded and has no capacity, and buildings are used that are not fit for purpose or have been patched up rapidly—that has had to happen as the prison population has increased—it does not provide an environment in which modern interventions can be made in prisoners' lives to enable them to go outside and become useful members of society. The Minister plans to build more prisons, which I thoroughly commend. What sort of innovative thinking is she putting into that? I have looked at examples of new prison builds produced by the Design Council. They are not perfect, but they have a particularly interesting concept. The current prison system—I know that I am generalising—is 80 per cent. about security and 20 per cent. about learning, but the Design Council was looking at designing buildings that would create an environment 80 per cent. about learning and 20 per cent. about security, because some of the security problems in the old hospital-style prison system can be designed out of buildings. The Home Secretary addressed the all-party group on penal affairs in the Moses Room the other day. I went along and was pleased to hear that he had a vision. He started by saying that he intended to re-examine the entire prison estate. I would like the Minister to put some flesh on the Home Secretary's vision, which was welcomed by all parties in both Houses of Parliament—Members of both Houses were there—because it is yet another vision. I hope that the Minister will forgive me, but I am slightly tired of visions; I have been hearing about them since the Carter report two years ago, and I do not see that vision being translated into action on the ground.