---

Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: The hon. Lady said earlier that she heard the speech that the Home Secretary gave to the all-party penal affairs group, in which he said that he is looking at an estate strategy that will attempt to deal with some of the issues. There is not a one-size-fits-all arrangement. Our local prisons serve the courts, so they have the most intense churn. Prisoners are required to go to and from court hearings and so on, so those prisoners who have only a few weeks of their sentence left to serve are moved from those prisons. Can we create court-serving prisons and community prisons? We do not have a blueprint yet, so we are looking at the physical estates to see whether they can be created. Is there a place for some big prisons? Hon. Members have referred to the number of foreign national prisoners. Some of those foreign national prisoners are people who have close family links with, and long-term ties, to the UK. A substantial number of them do not have those links and are here temporarily, so I do not think it matters very much where they are placed. Obviously, we must deal with, among other issues, good order and an appropriate regime. The Home Secretary has a vision for community prisons. One reason behind that vision has featured strongly in this debate. Prison is punishment enough on its own. We can work with the prison community to solve problems in our communities. If we can organise it, part of prisoners' rehabilitation and reparation can be to provide some solutions. A bit more civic energy will sometimes be required to deliver those solutions. The Prison Service cannot do it alone. People must work with businesses, the local authority and community groups to find ways in which we can work with the prison community. We must do that while also continuing to serve the courts and continuing to keep the most dangerous offenders absolutely secure. Those are the challenges that we face in order to devise a new prison system. My hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mrs. Dean) and the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) asked about women offenders. The number of women in prison had been soaring at the time of the report. Interestingly, the female prisoner population was 4,672 on 4 May 2004. It has never been that high since. Therefore it was at its highest level around the time when the report was published. I agree with hon. Members that it is essential that we deal with women who offend in a way that works. I am pleased that this debate is happening on the day on which I have announced a review of how we deal with a particular group of women in the system. That group is one that gives us the most distress—very vulnerable women who are poly-drug users; those who have been victims of abuse; and those who are not coping well in prison and are in prison partly because they did not cope well outside of prison. We must look carefully at those women, who are at high risk of self-inflicted death in prison, to see whether we can do more. Let us not forget that we have already done quite a lot. We have established a women's offending reduction programme, which gives women offenders a special focus. We are making more than £9 million available over the next four years to set up community based one-stop shops to meet the needs of women offenders and divert them from prison so we can do targeted work with them. We are also considering other groups, such as young adult offenders, for whom we have set up a project. That is part of targeting services at the offender, because different challenges arise in reducing reoffending in each offender. We are right to recognise the importance of work to reduce reoffending, but people's families are also a powerful engine for reducing it, and maintaining family connections is important. We have spoken a little about information technology. The present prison information system does not include whether a prisoner has children, so people do not automatically know that. At the initial interview, with a good reception, governors will check and find out whether a prisoner has children, but we do not have an IT system that can record that. The challenges faced by children of prisoners are substantial. Being the child of a prisoner is one of the most predictive factors for future offending. That is a real challenge. The hon. Member for Bullingdon focused on foreign national prisoners—