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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, the events of the past few days have clearly demonstrated an uneasy relationship between the Home Secretary and the judiciary. Like it or not, it cannot be good for our criminal justice system. There are two elements at the root of the present prisons crisis. More than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created since the Government came to power—almost one for each working day—and there is the more punitive treatment of offenders by the judges than ever before. The Home Secretary has now seen the light of day, and is recommending more use of alternatives to custody, and I shall concentrate on that. In doing so, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, former chairman of the Youth Justice Board, and to Rod Morgan who followed him, for showing how positive measures can effectively help in diverting young people away from the criminal justice process. An important contributory factor to the overall crime rate is reoffending by released prisoners: 66 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of release. However, there is something much deeper than that: it is estimated that ex-prisoners commit around 1 million crimes every year in England and Wales, which account for 18 per cent of all offences. Therefore, if we could make a significant impact on reoffending rates, that could, in turn, make a significant dent in the overall crime rate. However, it is very difficult for prisons to reduce reoffending when they are overstretched and overcrowded—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. During the past 10 years, the prison population has resembled a fast-moving escalator. The overall number of prisoners rose by 41 per cent and the female prison population nearly doubled. That was not principally because of rising crime, but because of rising punitiveness. A decade ago, courts imprisoned 18 per cent of offenders, but now they imprison 28 per cent and sentences have lengthened. The result is that the proportion of our population behind bars is greater than that of any other major western European country. In consequence, the Home Secretary is faced with a record prison population of 800,000—a figure that is rising—an overflow of more than 400 prisoners in police cells and up to 150 men moving back into an unfit wing at Norwich prison. As we all know, that crisis led the Home Secretary and the noble and learned Lords the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney-General to make a joint statement to the National Criminal Justice Board pointing to the need for restraint in the use of imprisonment. As the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chief Justice pointed out, it is perfectly reasonable for Ministers to draw the courts’ attention to the current shortage of prison accommodation and it is right that courts should take that into account when sentencing. However, the crisis is largely of Ministers’ own making. During the past 13 years, ever since 1993 when Michael Howard became Home Secretary, successive Conservative and Labour Home Secretaries and shadow Home Secretaries have vied to outbid each other in public statements demonstrating their supposed toughness on crime. The courts have responded to the more punitive climate by passing harsher sentences. If a policy of restraint in the use of prison is right—and I believe that it is—it should not just be a short-term stop-gap policy. It should be a permanent feature of criminal justice policy. There are many ways in which the prison population could be reduced without reducing public protection. In July, in another place, the Home Secretary told MPs: "““It is clear to me that there are people in prison who should not be there. They range from foreign nationals to vulnerable ""women to those for whom mental health treatment would be more appropriate””.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/7/06;col. 473.]" If the Government think that many people in prison should not be there, they should not tell the courts just once, they should keep on telling them. That means that Ministers must send out a strong, sustained and consistent message arguing for the reduced use of prison. That message should be reinforced by legislation requiring sentencing guidelines to take into account the capacity of the prison system. That approach would require political courage, but the alternative is to continue lurching from crisis to crisis in the prison system, which, as the events of the past fortnight have clearly shown, is nothing short of politically disastrous. One element of the solution must be to tackle the ““revolving door”” of short-term prisoners. At any one time, 8,000 prisoners are serving sentences of less than 12 months, a point that was well made by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale. Such sentences do little to protect the public because containment periods are short. The time spent in prison is too brief for serious rehabilitation, but long enough for prisoners to lose their homes and jobs, which makes them even more likely to offend. Seventy per cent of short-term prisoners are reconvicted within two years of leaving prison. Many of those prisoners would be better dealt with by intensive supervision in the community. Supervision programmes which challenge and change attitudes to offending help offenders to restrain aggressive and impulsive behaviour, develop employment-related skills and overcome addiction problems, and are more likely to reduce reoffending than other forms of punishment. As long as offenders continue to be imprisoned for short sentences, much more should be done to give them help with resettlement. The Government recently indefinitely postponed plans for custody plus whereby short-term prisoners would have been supervised by the probation service on release. If custody plus is now off the agenda, the Home Office should instead commission a resettlement service from voluntary organisations for short-term prisoners to reduce the number who keep going back to prison. Another group of mainly short-term prisoners are those on remand, who currently number 13,000. Many remand prisoners could be safely granted bail if suitable accommodation and support were available for them. I understand that the National Offender Management Service is currently working on a proposal to commission more support services for this group. I welcome this development and hope that it will be implemented as rapidly as possible. The Government should take steps to reverse the rise in the female prison population, which now stands at 4,400. The Chief Inspector of Probation has criticised some probation areas for failing to provide alternatives to custody tailored to the needs of women offenders. We need to see strong and proactive steps to ensure that every area does that. A significant proportion of the female prison population consists of poor women from developing countries who have been bribed by drug barons to smuggle in drugs and who have received very long sentences. The impact of drug trafficking on victims is appalling. But drug ““mules”” are also victims of injustice because sentencing guidelines for these offences do not allow courts to take into account offenders' personal mitigating factors to the same extent as they can for almost all other offences. We need to stem the flow into prisons of people who have breached community supervision, for example by missing or being late for appointments. Recalled prisoners now make up 11 per cent of the population of local prisons. There should be a graduated scale of punishments for breaches, with prison used only when non-compliance has continued after less severe penalties have been tried. It is a continuing scandal that 70 per cent of prisoners have two or more mental health disorders and that 5,000 have serious and enduring mental illnesses. The number of juveniles in prison doubled in the past decade to 2,500. The Government should dust off and implement a proposal which they published more than a year ago in their draft Youth Justice Bill. That would have prevented courts from jailing juveniles unless they had first tried an intensive supervision and surveillance programme. We should consider extending a similar provision to adults. The Government should take steps also to reduce the disproportionate number of prisoners from racial minorities. Currently, the minority ethnic population constitutes 25 per cent of the prison population, but only 9 per cent of the general population. We need to look at the reports which demonstrate the extentto which discriminatory practices feature from time to time in some of our courts. The Home Office aims to build 8,000 more prison places by 2012. But the Government cannot build their way out of the crisis. Since Labour came to power, it has provided 20,000 more prison places, yet we have more extreme overcrowding than ever before. Unless steps are taken to cut the prison population, courts will simply fill new prisons with even more prisoners, providing no relief for currently overcrowded jails. It is like trying to run down an escalator which is moving ever more rapidly upwards. It is time to stop the escalator.