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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for obtaining this opportunity and for making most of the points I had intended to make in my speech. That is also a matter for congratulation because she has such wide involvement in this area that almost any source one goes to has her fingerprints on it somewhere. I am one of the few people in this country who have considerable sympathy for the Home Secretary at the moment, and I have more sympathy for the Minister with responsibility for prisons. In 1982, I was that Minister, and I found that I had inherited a prisons estate in which not one brick had been put on another in any adult secure accommodation since the reign of Queen Victoria. I had a chart in my office which showed the point at which I would have to advise the Secretary of State—Willie Whitelaw in those days—to take immediate action to secure executive release. On several occasions we got to within 11 places of that release, although we were using the bridewells, the police cells, and I am not sure that we did not use one or two prison vans. Of course my first advice was to spend a lot of money on building new prisons. That was put in train. I similarly advised Leon Brittan—now the noble Lord, Lord Brittan—in the next Administration, and that was put in train. We are back there. It has not worked. So it seems to me that there is considerable intellectual force in the idea that what we are doing is wrong and that we should do something different. There are some simple things we can tinker with in the system. I have always thought that the proportion of prisoners on remand was absurd. They are the most expensive prisoners to keep, they have more privileges than anybody else, they require more looking after, and they take staff attention away from the sentenced prisoners who should be in rehabilitative training. The Government might look through the minor offences, which are triable both ways, to see whether some of the thresholds cannot be raised to reduce the number of people remanded on their own request for trial by jury on the off-chance of getting off some sentence which they would otherwise cop. That would have an effect on the numbers. The typical thing when I last looked at that was handling goods below a certain value. Restorative justice, which has already been mentioned, is a fruitful way of reducing crime. I back up what the noble Baroness said about the Rethinking Crime & Punishment initiative that took place in the Thames Valley. That was directed only at, I suspect, Crown Court judges. All sentencers should be included. When I was chairman of the Intermediate Treatment Fund—set up by a previous Administration in a moment of great enlightenment—one of its functions was to bring together the sort of meetings now being arranged under local area agreements and local strategic partnerships. That function should be extended. There are so many prisoners and so many convicts that it is tempting to think of them as statistics—as a sort of muddy river flowing from some distant source through our prisons, whirling and re-circling in there for a long time and then drifting out into an obscure delta into society. That is not a bad analogy if you trace the river to its head-waters, to places like the north Kensington estates, where it is miraculous that anybody finishes up not involved in crime, because it is one of the few ways of securing your own safety in a gang culture. I refer the Minister—and ask him to pass the recommendation on to his friends concerned with social services as well as with the Prison Service—to a publication by the Centre for Young Policy Studies called No Man’s Land, written by an independent worker called Shaun Bailey, which gives an absolutely crystal-clear analysis of what was going on on his particular estate and the way that every factor reinforces every other factor. He had a very strong-willed, independent, single mother who was determined that he should break out of this. He was fortunate to go into the Army Cadet Force, which may sound strange, but there a colonel gave him a lot of support that a father would have done. He has seen what is happening to his community and is doing something effective about it. I cannot in six minutes expand on this, but the lesson that it drives home to me is that we are not dealing with statistics, but with individuals, and individuals can be dealt with only by individuals who know and love them. Most young children have gone wrong because they have lacked love. The child of a teenaged schoolgirl mother, who was herself the child of a teenaged schoolgirl mother, inherits no knowledge of parenting. It has to be taught, and it cannot be done by an institution. In my final 30 seconds I beg the Government to look at the voluntary sector and to vitalise it with money and not regulation, and to pass the same message to local authorities. It is the dedicated individuals who are prepared to give their lives and time because they care for these children who turn that muddy stream away from the prisons and clarify it and purify the whole of our society over the years.