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Prisons

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for securing this important debate on a royal commission on prisons. It is most timely, particularly as we are about to embark on a course of action that will fundamentally change prison policy as it has been followed by all Governments since the Second World War. We are going to increase our prison capacity to a level which takes us quite out of the west European view of the place of imprisonment in society and more towards the level of the countries which have only recently moved to a democratic form of government. We are also envisaging moving towards vast places of incarceration—carceral villages—each holding 2,500 prisoners and a large number of staff. Since time is short, I will restrict my remarks to the increase of prison capacity and the decision to spend what I believe is an additional £2.3 billion to take us to 96,000 prison places by 2014. The Secretary of State for Justice told the Royal Society of Arts on 26 March that there is no case for a royal commission because we now have Select Committees. Of course, he is right. In fact, the Justice Committee in the other place is currently conducting an inquiry into whether the enormous sums spent on criminal justice are an effective way to spend so much money. On 13 May, the chairman of that Select Committee, Alan Beith MP, asked the Secretary of State for Justice: "““Have you not””," already, "““pre-empted the entire argument and discussion by committing yourself to the Titan prisons and, thereby, really foreclosing large, vast amounts of public expenditure and a commitment to a very large number of prison places without the opportunity of considering whether this money might stop more crimes if it were spent elsewhere in the system?””." The Secretary of State responded simply by saying that we need a substantial expansion in the number of prison places. Yet, only a few months earlier, he is on the record as saying that, "““you have got to have a rational debate about the number of prison places that need to be provided””." The report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, on which the decision is based provided no detailed analysis and no weighing of alternative policy options. We are suffering here from a serious lack of analysis of evidence, of proper research and of consideration of the possible benefits of different options. Therefore, there is a vacuum, which a standing royal commission of some sort needs to fill. Such a royal commission might look at, among other things, the following questions. Compared with 17 other OECD countries, our spending in the UK on safety and public order functions is the highest. It is markedly higher than in France and Germany, and higher even than in the United States, yet our spending on health is the third lowest. Is that a sensible allocation of resources? A royal commission might also look at the impact on crime of a high use of imprisonment. It would have to conclude that there is no evidence of a clear relationship between levels of imprisonment and crime rates. Countries with high imprisonment rates are not safer than countries with low imprisonment rates. All the evidence suggests that spending on imprisonment beyond the level necessary to protect the public from serious harm is not cost-effective. If a royal commission were to consider all the evidence, it would conclude that the huge expansion being planned could have seriously damaging consequences. It is likely to move money away from the existing prison regimes in all prisons. It could reduce the resources that are channelled to those agencies that can keep offenders out of prison and could solve some of the problems that get them there in the first place. The policies that that we are now following are not based on evidence. They emerged from an unhealthy competition between politicians to use the number of people in prison as a symbol—a symbol that says, ““We care about crime. We want people to be safe. Building more prisons is how we respond to the natural feeling that people should not get away with harming others. Sending more people to prison is how we respond to the fact that poor people in disadvantaged areas suffer most from crime””. Giving the public more use of prison in response to those legitimate concerns is a false promise, because imprisonment for the lower level perpetrators, the sick and the addicted brings no safety to those who suffer from crime. Someone needs to say, ““We must stop spending our public money so profligately with such high commitments far in the future on something that does little social good and leads to much social harm””. Instead, we need to look at the evidence on how to spend that money on what we know is more effective. A highly respected royal commission studying and reporting on the use and practice of imprisonment could be a great help to politicians, to get them out of the profligate path that they are taking us down.