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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: I am sympathetic to that intervention. I agree entirely. I suppose that I should have said this at the beginning, but I am worried that we are talking about the rehabilitation of offenders against a background of unprecedented change and movement within the prison and probation services anticipated by Ministers, but against the background of the vision in the Carter report two years ago. When I go around prisons and when I talk to probation and prison officers, prisoners and prisoners' families, I do not see, two years down the line, the results that were expected from the major change management programme. The administrative centre was set up at extraordinary cost, but there has been little communication with the people who work in the system. I might return to the issue of the National Offender Management Service and where it is going. The Minister has an opportunity to respond on that as well. Many hon. Members spoke about women in prison. I want to touch on the issue of women and children. Some 57 per cent.—nearly six out of 10—of women released from prison in 2002 were reconvicted within two years of release. Those are the latest figures that I have. I understand that that is an improvement. It was better at one stage, but there were fewer women in prison. We now have larger numbers of women to set the targets against. What frightens me, particularly with women—although the same applies to men—is their dislocation from home and the disproportionate distance from their family and support structures at which they are held. Many are damaged individuals who have been living with domestic violence or in violent relationships, are single mothers or have been tied up with groups of people such as drug dealers, but nevertheless they are held an average of 62 miles from their home environment. That is not conducive to their resettling and coming out of prison to a productive life. I alluded to the fact that a third of women in prison find that they have lost their homes and possessions. I want Members to think briefly about the effect on a woman who finds that she has lost absolutely everything, even the family photograph of her grandmother who is dead, or any small personal possession that means something to her. If we are to concentrate on rehabilitation, the state has to consider how to preserve somebody's life. Many such women find that their flat has been cleared out by the housing authority, their life packed up in a black plastic bag, and their memories, everything that held them and their anchors thrown away. That is difficult for a sane person to deal with. However, it is very difficult for someone whose mental health is fragile. That takes me to my next point. I am greatly concerned not just about drugs and alcohol but about the mental health of our prison population. Many prisoners have mental health problems and it is obvious that the percentage is much higher in the prison population than in the general population. It is alarming to know that 72 per cent. of male and 70 per cent. of female prisoners have two or more mental health disorders. That is a frightening statistic. To put it bluntly, it tells me that we no longer treat the mentally ill in a hospital environment, but lock them up in prison. From going round some of the establishments it has been obvious to me that, despite the best efforts of prison governors, staff and those dealing with mental health issues, many people who are incarcerated should not be in prison in the first place. They are certainly not in an environment where they will get the correct interventions. I was at one young offenders institution the other day, which shall remain nameless. I was told of a young man who was so badly brain damaged and ill that no mental health establishment would take him. Although he had finished his sentence, he was still effectively in prison. That is pretty frightening in the United Kingdom in 2005. The number of staff working in mental health also concerns me. About 300 mental health in-reach staff work in and across the prison estate in England and Wales. I query whether that is enough, considering the statistics. Effectively, 50,000 people in prison have mental health issues that need dealing with. The problem is that when those inside a prison deal with people with mental health problems, they do exactly the wrong thing. Prison regimes do little to address the mental health needs of prisoners. Research has found that 28 per cent. of male sentenced prisoners with evidence of psychosis reported spending 23 hours or more a day in their cells, more than twice the proportion of those without mental health problems. If we are to talk seriously about rehabilitation, the Government have to get a grip on that. We have talked about moving prisoners around the country. The evidence that I found with the Select Committee is that there is so much churning and, because of overcrowding, people get moved at short notice. Indeed, I came across a situation the other day when six weeks before the end of a sentence a prisoner was moved 100 miles away. All the efforts that had gone into preparing them for release were destroyed. The drugs and alcohol treatment programmes in the prison system are not only inadequate but they are interrupted by the churning. The more overcrowding there is and the more that prisoners have to be moved around the country, the more interruption there is of the very programmes that will facilitate a reduction in reoffending. I would like to know how many prisoners are moving around the country at any one time. That might be apocryphal, but when the overcrowding figures were two or three away from the total capacity of the prison system a prison officer said to me, ““Well, we do not know how many are sitting in vans and being run between prisons and between courts””. So, we could well be in the danger zone without knowing it. It is a problem and it needs to be addressed. Education and training are the key. We have heard many tributes today to the Transco programme. It has been the thrust of most of today's contributions that education, training and real commercial work is where we should be looking. I have looked at the Transco programme and I cannot speak too highly of Dr. Mary Harris, who has done a first-class job. The programme is being spread out into 15 prisons, but I thought it was being spread out into a lot of industry sectors. The last time that I looked at the plans and the last time I talked to Dr. Harris, I understood that there were plans for it to be spread out. I think that the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen hit the nail on the head when he said that we might have missed the boat on this. There is evidence that many more people are coming in to work in the trades that would have been suitable for prisoners. I hope that the Minister will comment on that and perhaps set out what she thinks we could do to address the matter at this stage, bearing in mind the background. I took on board the right hon. Gentleman's request for an economic study from the Minister. He gave me the impression that he was referring to one on a national basis. I would go further and ask for it on a local basis, for the simple reason that when I visited a prison in Doncaster I was impressed with the emphasis that it put on training for skills that would be relevant to the new and expanded airport. The local economy is important when we consider which training programmes would be suitable.