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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness on making it possible for us to have this debate. The current rate of reoffending not only blights lives and damages communities, but it also costs taxpayers an estimated £11 billion a year. That is on top of the £770 a week it costs to keep someone in jail, after which around seven in every 10 reoffend within two years. If the public better understood how much money is wasted on locking up those who do not need to be there, they would demand immediate change. Of course those who are guilty of serious and violent crimes need to be locked up. But why is it that, although crime is falling, there is a record number of people in our prisons? We send more people to prison—and return them there—than any country in western Europe. Why? I believe that there are two main reasons. First, while people are in prison, nowhere near enough is done to tackle some of the issues which helped to put them there: mental health problems, drug and alcohol abuse, joblessness and homelessness. Secondly, sentences do not make enough use of a range of community sentences. More people are being sent to prison who simply do not need to be there. Those who end up in prison are people with the highest levels of disadvantage; for example, they may have been in care, excluded from school, be without skills and jobs or be homeless. Perhaps most worrying is the number of people in prison with mental health problems. Around five in every 100 of the general population have mental health problems; in the prison population, it is an astounding 70 in every 100. No wonder Mr Geoff Dobson, the distinguished deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust, said this week that the Government, "““fails to recognise the use of our jails as a social dustbin””." Unless and until cash and trained personnel are put in place to deal more effectively with these roots of crime, the Government simply will not achieve their goal of cutting reoffending by 10 per cent by 2010. There is nothing new in any of this. I have been taking part in these debates for more than 30 years, but successive Governments gaily build more prisons in the vain hope of reducing overcrowding. It is rather like widening roads to ease congestion. In both cases, the traffic increases. Why do sentencers send 50,000 people a year to prison for less than six months? It is partly a response to the ill informed clamour of some sections of the press, but mainly I believe it is because sentencers do not have enough faith in community sentences. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, who is such a distinguished trustee of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, for sending me a copy of the report on work done with Crown Court judges in the Thames Valley to give them real and rewarding experience of community-based alternatives to prison. I understand that similar work is now being done with magistrates. There are many excellent community-based schemes around the country, but the Probation Service in particular needs the money and the manpower to build on success and to spread it. The report on neighbourhood action to reduce reoffending published by the Coalition on Social and Criminal Justice sets out many examples. The Merseyside probation service team worked with the city council and the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service to give five teams of offenders the job of removing materials which might be taken for Guy Fawkes bonfires. The number of such anti-social behaviour bonfires fell in that year by 44 per cent. The same probation service team, along with the city council and the local BBC radio station, helped offenders to make planters from recycled wood, which were then sold for £10 a time and gave offenders new skills leading to an NVQ. A scheme for those released from Deerbolt Young Offender Institution, run by the Depaul Trust in Durham, cut reoffending in half by helping with housing, training and work. Perhaps the best known work is that of National Grid in some prisons to help train offenders for the jobs it needs done outside. Its work should be copied by other major employers in both the private and public sectors because they too benefit from lower reoffending rates. As the coalition’s report stresses, more use has to be made of local community facilities to offer ex-offenders housing, training, jobs and treatment for addiction. It is the lack of these things which helps to propel ex-offenders back inside, and community-based alternatives to prison can help the public to understand that they are not a soft option. Offenders get that in too many prisons now, where overcrowding cuts rehabilitation and education work and leaves them lying on their beds for most of the day. I want this Government to give more attention, cash and trained personnel to schemes aimed at rehabilitation alongside punishment. Cutting reoffending can rebuild lives, lower crime even more, prevent families and communities suffering grief and damage, and save the taxpayer money. I want the Government to give the lead to help achieve these results.