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Prisons: Population

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Henley, I am not unduly bothered about what time I received it, although it was after 2.30 pm. Those of us who have spoken in debates in this House on prisons knew that sooner or later the Minister would make the type of Statement that he has made today. I am sad that the Justice Minister, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, now finds himself in the middle of a crisis situation that is not of his making. We have been complaining about the unacceptably high prison population. This is the worst record that the Government have faced. The situation will continue because there are not enough spaces for all prisoners; and Operation Safeguard, under which prisoners can be kept in police or court cells, has been implemented and will be the task for some time to come. The population continues to rise faster than prisons can be built, but the more prisons you build the quicker they will be filled until we look at the causes underlying the trend. The Home Office’s estimates suggest that the prison population could top 100,000 by 2012 unless a long-term strategy is put in place to stabilise and then reduce the prison population. The cost of housing prisoners will continue to soar. What is the estimated cost of housing prisoners in police and court cells? The Minister has still not answered some key questions that we have posed in previous debates. Should mentally ill people be in our prisons? Is such a high remand rate to custody acceptable? Should children and women be incarcerated to the extent that their population has doubled in the past 10 years? It would be helpful to know how the Minister intends to deal with prison governors who are in dispute with his department. It would be helpful to know what emergency plans there are for dealing with prison officers’ associations, which are expressing concerns about supervising inmates in courts and police cells. Will the Minister confirm whether there is any basis for the report by Alan Travis in the Guardian? It states that special arrangements have already been reached with the Courts Service for six centres to be used and that the Minister is trying to negotiate for two more Crown Court centres to be used for prisoners who are in effect queuing to go into jail. Court cells are even less suitable than police cells. They are not designed to hold prisoners overnight. They are simply there for prisoners to sit in during the day while they wait to go into court. A typical court cell is little more than half the size of a Victorian-built prison cell, and when a mattress is placed on the floor the ends curl up against the wall. The cells are usually subterranean or on corridors with no natural light. Surely those inhuman standards cannot be tolerated. It is difficult to see why cramming more and more prisoners into police and court cells has previously been seen as a preferable option. The inescapable conclusion is that prisoners’ welfare and safety have been sacrificed to avoid critical headlines in tabloid newspapers. Early release would be a sensible short-term response to the immediate crisis. In the longer term, we need to determine measures to reduce the use of imprisonment. Legislation should remove custody as an option for lower-level crime and require sentencing to take into account a prison’s capacity. That must be reinforced by sustained government efforts to persuade the courts and the public of the benefits of using prisons more sparingly. I note that governors will make wider use of prison rules on release on licence. Can the Minister indicate the number involved? Who will supervise the licensing condition? Who will monitor progress? Are we providing adequate resources to the Probation Service, which is now overstretched? The Statement, whichever way you dress it up, is a clear indictment of our criminal justice system, indicating that it has failed, and it will take a long time to restore public confidence in how we deal with prisoners in this country.