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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, it is just over two years since my noble friend Lady Linklater raised crime prevention in the context of her report, Rethinking Crime & Punishment. She is now giving us an opportunity to return to the same themes and to revisit the consensus we found then that too many people were being sent to prison for too long. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, that providing an extra 8,000 places in prison is a counsel of despair and not a solution to the problem. It has been said repeatedly that many of those given custodial sentences are people with mental illnesses or impairments, or suffer from drug and alcohol dependencies. They would be more appropriately treated in other kinds of institutions with the expertise and resources to deal with their particular problems. I am sure that noble Lords were as horrified as I was by the case of Angela Schumann, who jumped off the Humber Bridge with her two year-old daughter. Miraculously they survived, although Mrs Schumann was severely injured. Nevertheless, she was sent to prison. That is an extreme example of the thousands who are imprisoned when they ought to be receiving care and treatment. The Lord Chief Justice has said that jail sentences should be imposed only when absolutely necessary, bearing in mind that prison overcrowding is proving ““absolutely fatal”” to inmates’ treatment. Yet the courts have not listened, until very recently when there have been one or two cases where non-custodial sentences have been imposed on non-violent offenders, only to be followed by the usual tabloid hysteria. It has to be noted that some editors have contributed to the present crisis by their pressure for tougher sentencing, as the right reverend Prelate reminded us. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, also referred to the paradox of a steadily increasing prison population and reducing crime rates over the past few years. There have also been plenty of constructive proposals on how to reduce the numbers in prison without further compromising the safety of the public. Indeed, there is no shortage of proposals such as the ones outlined by the noble Lord, as well as the Prison Reform Trust’s seven-point agenda for reducing overcrowding. But we have never heard Home Office Ministers from the Front Bench properly addressing this huge spectrum of proposals which would enable us to save the £1.5 billion that we are going to waste on extra prison places and use in a constructive way instead. Again paradoxically, the effect of the ever-increasing numbers in prison is to reduce public safety. The chief inspector has said that overcrowding is having a significant impact on rehabilitation programmes and the director general backs her up. A prison officer wrote to me this week stating: "““Staffing levels are not being increased to reflect the workload at every level … the management conversations I hear are driven by the need to move people on … rather than by what serves rehabilitation or ‘reducing reoffending’—our nominal priority””." Prisoners are routinely being kept far away from their homes, as the noble Lord has reminded us, severing the family contacts that are an essential ingredient of rehabilitation. A prison head of operations has written to me about a prisoner whose wife and children live in Ramsgate saying: "““I regret that due to extreme population pressures we have been unable to facilitate a transfer on compassionate grounds to the South East””." It would be impossible to run programmes dealing with offending behaviour or drug and alcohol misuse when governors and staff are continually occupied in crisis management. But, even worse, as Anne Owers said in her annual report, this is happening at a time when constraints on public spending mean that funding for drug treatment—I ask whether this applies to alcohol as well—is 60 per cent less than was hoped for. The Prison Service has a so-called ““alcohol harm reduction strategy””, but the title is misleading because there is no money behind it. It is even more depressing that, although the Cabinet Office estimated that alcohol harm cost the nation £7.6 billion in terms of crime in 2001, the Government have made the situation worse by encouraging all-night drinking and by failing to increase duties on alcohol in line with inflation. It is generally recognised, as it has been in this debate, that drugs are linked to serious crime and that their misuse needs to be addressed both in prison and in the community. But alcohol is thought of as harmless and therefore routinely embedded in social and public life. The Government deliberately threw away the only mechanisms that would reduce its consumption—price and availability. Alcohol misuse is not tackled vigorously as a generator of crime, ill health and family dysfunction. As a result, habitual alcohol misusers form a large proportion of those who come before the courts repeatedly. Reoffending will inevitably increase, as a combination of rising numbers and inadequate funding impairs the quality of life in prisons. The chief inspector rightly calls this an alarming and potentially extremely damaging contribution. I hope the Minister will respond to her repeated warnings and those of my noble friend today.