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Prison Estate

As my hon. Friend says, it is called chutzpah. Regrettably, I cannot say the same of the Government’s sorry handling of the crisis in our prison system. There is no excuse for the catastrophe facing the country. In the past five years, the Government have received warning after warning that they were going to run out of cells—warnings from the Opposition, from the Prison Reform Trust, from their own advisers, and even from the chief inspector of prisons. In 2002, the lowest Home Office projection for the prison population by this year was 87,000, which is significantly higher than the capacity that it now has. When the Home Office could have acted to provide the necessary extra prison places, it failed to do so. Last year, long after it knew that it had a looming crisis, it even sold off a prison ship, cutting prison places by another 400. Even on the current Home Secretary’s watch, the Department has been lackadaisical and slow to act. On 24 May this year, he was quoted in the press as saying:"““Protecting the public is my absolute priority.””" That is quite proper for a Home Secretary, yet I have a memorandum written by his private secretary only the day after, detailing a discussion of this crisis and considering the option of administrative release—the early release of prisoners to free cells. We know that that proposal was quashed by No. 10, but why were not all the proposals that the Home Secretary has put before us today initiated then, in May, before we had a crisis? Why do we have to have a crisis to get action out of this Government? The Home Secretary’s predecessors attempted to head off this problem by way of a combination of early release and community sentencing. To justify that, they pretended that community sentences were equally as tough as punishments, deterrents and methods of rehabilitation. None of that is true. Nine out of 10 of those who go through Labour’s flagship programme—the intensive supervision and surveillance programme or ISSP—reoffend within two years. The Home Secretary talked about more tagging: 75 per cent. of young criminals on tags reoffend within one year. The Government’s strategy for rehabilitation is not only failing outside prison; it is also being destroyed inside prison. Owing to prison overcrowding, in order to create places in individual prisons, vast numbers of transfers occur. Last year, there were 98,000 transfers between prisons among a population of 80,000. That means that prisoners are frequently uprooted before they complete courses designed to rehabilitate them and to equip them for an honest life in the outside world. As a result, under this Government reoffending rates for prison have gone up from 56 to 67 per cent. Does the Home Secretary accept that that increase in reoffending rates—the greatest in the history of our prison system—is a direct result of the Government’s neglect of this area? The various proposals that the Home Secretary has detailed might now be unavoidable, but only two—the action to remove or swap out foreign prisoners, and the re-roling of women’s prisons—are relatively low risk and low cost. Both of them should have been done months or even years ago. Using police cells will be costly and will probably also be counter-productive. The last time this Government implemented Operation Safeguard, it cost more than £10 million, tied down policemen who should have been catching criminals rather than acting as part-time prison warders, and clogged up the police cells so that there was nowhere to put criminals who were caught. Does the Home Secretary accept that that will happen again this time, and if not why not? Does the Home Secretary recognise that by accepting the transfer of category C prisoners to open prisons he is sanctioning an increase in risk to public safety? He might talk about risk assessment, but he must know, even now, that this is a very imprecise technique. Otherwise, how does he explain the rash of murders committed by prisoners on probation and parole? Does he recognise that each of his proposals will buy him only a matter of weeks or perhaps months? Even his conversion of an Army barracks will buy him only just over one more month. The programme that the Home Secretary has laid before us today might get him to just past Christmas, but what will happen then? Will there be even more inappropriately given, non-custodial sentences or even earlier releases? Does he accept that the prison capacity failure has harmed every stage of the criminal justice system? It will handicap policemen from catching criminals. It has meant that criminals who should be in prison are either not sent to prison or released too early, and even when some criminals go to prison, the process has been rendered so chaotic that reoffending rates are climbing to record levels. The Home Secretary must recognise that he cannot blame this on the civil servants, prison officers or judges. This crisis—this catastrophe—has arisen because this Government, by the policy that they have chosen to follow, have been derelict in their duty to protect the public.