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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on introducing this timely debate. A little while ago, Michael Howard, I think, said, ““Prison works””. Today, there seems little evidence that a period in prison does anything to rehabilitate the prison population, at least the young offenders. As we have been told, levels of recidivism are of the order of 75 per cent. The noble Baroness called that a failure; indeed, it is a disastrous failure. For young offenders, prison does not work, so surely the time has come to change how we think about juvenile crime. Juvenile crime and other serious forms of social exclusion are usually caused not by one factor but by a cluster of malign factors in the young person’s life. Noble Lords have spoken about one or two of those factors this afternoon. I will concentrate on two ways in which we could reduce juvenile offending and so reduce the prison population and release resources to give a better service to those who have to be in prison. The first point goes back into the child’s early years. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, ““Look upstream””. I agree. In 2002, I introduced a debate on juvenile crime. At that time, I concentrated on the importance of the stability, security and secure attachment of the young child in their family life in the first five years, especially in the first three months after conception—that is to say, in the womb—and during the first two years after birth. This is the time in a child’s life when he can learn to love and be loved. He begins to learn how to communicate and to relate to others. These are the building blocks from which are built a child’s self-confidence and his ability to relate to others as he progresses up through nursery school, primary school and secondary school. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, spoke of love. Every child needs to have one or preferably two or even more adults in their lives who love them and whom they can trust. For that reason, we need to do much more to reduce the number of children and young people in this country who grow up in dysfunctional families. We should not for a moment imagine that nothing can be done. A great deal can be done, if only we had the will to do it. One example is drugs, on which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, spoke. My second point is the importance of looking after our teenagers. Youth services have been massacred over the past two or three decades, as local authorities have tried to balance their budgets. Many experienced youth workers have retired, the job has become more difficult and the future looks insecure—it is not an attractive job today. Moreover, teenagers today do not want the same kind of youth service that teenagers 30 years ago wanted. There is an urgent need not only to rebuild but to reinvent the nation’s youth services. Teenagers in full-time secondary school have a lot of time on their hands. They spend only about 28 per cent of their waking hours at school, if you take into the equation weekends and holidays. Where is the balance of their time spent? Some of them go home—they are the lucky ones—but it is important that it is a welcoming home big enough for them to have space to do their homework and play. However, even such children will want space to socialise with their peers as they grow up, and they will need somewhere warm and safe to do that where there are interesting things for them to do. But for those whose home is overcrowded or where they are not welcomed, the question of where to go is much more difficult. That is especially the case if the family is dysfunctional, perhaps with problems of drug or alcohol addiction or domestic violence or perhaps where four or five siblings by different fathers are crowded into a small home with the mother’s current live-in lover, who does not like them. That is why many young people today are hanging about on the streets, and they are often those facing the greatest difficulties. They have little to do and nowhere to do it. The Government are planning to spend £1.5 billion on building more prisons. Today, I ask them to consider seriously spending just one-third of that sum on reinventing and rebuilding the nation’s youth services. If they did that, they would not need so many extra prisons; they would save many young people from a life of crime; and they would enrich the lives of many more of the nation’s young people. Surely that would be a more worthy memorial for this Government than just building more and more prisons.