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Offender Management Bill

I am not quite as bad as I sound. I do accept those points, and I am glad that the hon. Lady has given me a chance to revert to my eminently reasonable self. Although I strongly believe in everything that I have said, we need to take a look at prisons. Let us start by examining the reoffending rates. We are constantly told that roughly 60 per cent. of people leaving prison and 53 per cent. on community sentences will reoffend within two years. The hon. Member for Batley and Spen pointed out that 70 per cent. of people on short sentences will reoffend. Although that figure is not quoted in the report, we all accept that people going into prison for short sentences are far more likely to reoffend. There is no argument about that. Unfortunately, the conclusion of Carter and the Government seems to be that our response should be not to send people to prison at all. People on short sentences are usually moved around a little at the start. If they are likely to be released halfway through their sentence, and if they are to be in prison for only six months, the authorities take the view that there is not much they can do with them, so they will keep them quiet and make their cells as comfortable as possible—I am all in favour of that, by the way—but they will not give them the education and the vocational skills which we all agree they need. I have two prisons in my constituency, which I have been visiting for about eight years as a Member of the Assembly. I am the first to accept—you see, I do have a social conscience—that many of those who find themselves in prison are people whom we would recognise from school as the ones who spent their time behind the bike sheds smoking cigarettes, while the rest of us were doing some work. They are always quite pleasant when one goes into the prison. They have usually been dealt a few bad hands—they often come from broken homes, got in with the wrong crowd and into drugs. There is much that can be done to help such people, but we will not help them by putting them in a comfortable cell with a PlayStation and a colour television for six months and then chucking them straight back on the streets again. We must first give them vocational skills, and secondly give them the skills and the impetus to go out and find work for eight hours a day. Longer prison sentences work. None of the speakers in the debate have pointed out that people serving four years or more in prison have a reoffending rate of about 30 per cent., which is almost twice as good as the probation service’s figure of 53 per cent., and those serving 10 years or more have an even lower reoffending rate of about 10 per cent., although I accept that many of those are people who committed a one-off murder and cannot necessarily be included in the figures. The point is still a fair one: statistics show that the longer someone serves in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. Part of the reason for that is that if they are in prison for a few years, the prison authorities will try to work with them and put them on the anger management courses, the drug treatment courses and the education courses that they need in order to try and tackle the habits that got them into prison in the first place. Because Carter has not addressed any of these aspects, the conclusions that he has reached are, if not fundamentally flawed, slightly erroneous. He is saying that we can solve all problems by bringing in the private sector to deal with the probation service. I am a Conservative, as the House might have guessed, and a fairly traditional one. I will not say that we need to protect the public sector at all costs. I will not say that we need to protect the probation service at all costs, because I know some of the cases in which it has been involved and in which there has been a horrendous lack of supervision of people in its charge. One of the most shocking cases that I have dealt with over the past few years was that of a man called Craig Sweeney, who was a paedophile. He raped a child under the age of 10, for which he was sentenced to a wholly inadequate term in prison, which I think was about six years. He was then let out of prison into the care of the probation service and, while he was still in a probation hostel, he went out and committed an identical crime on another child. It was only by the grace of God that he was found in a car with that child before some worse disaster befell her. He has been given another sentence, incidentally, which means that he could be out of prison in less than six years, which says a lot about the justice system in this country.