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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I apologise for omitting to thank the Minister for allowing me to barge in on his meeting yesterday. I thank him very much indeed. He was very forthcoming and it was helpful, but I think we are now coming to the crunch on agreements. The Minister said that custody must be necessary. If it is necessary, it should follow that it is the last resort. He said that 24 people had been assessed by the courts as dangerous and that 1,000 people had been locked up. That indicates to me that at least some of those 1,000 should not have been locked up because they were not assessed as dangerous. We should try to keep people out of prison. We know—it has been established by research after research—that prison is, on the whole, not curative. It is rather like being sent to Eton and Oxford to learn how to do crime. I know that the Conservative Party has an old Etonian as its new leader but we do not, I hope, as a country, have to follow him in the Prison Service as well. We must try very hard to keep people out of prison. Subsection (1)(b) of the proposed new clause, which refers to, "““the risks the offender poses to the public are so serious that, notwithstanding””," covers the issue. I should like to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 3) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 72; Not-Contents, 112. Schedule 1 [Further provisions about youth rehabilitation orders]: