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Prisons

My Lords, your Lordships have heard countless reasons for supporting this excellent Motion, so persuasively proposed by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. Not the least of those is the all-too-apparent growing unease among practitioners and the public about whether the prison system has a deterrent effect and is fit for today's purpose. We must have an independent and objective look—a non-political look, if you like—at whether a greater use of community and restorative justice sentences would produce far better results and, incidentally, cost taxpayers much less. We have heard the extraordinary figure that we spend a higher proportion of our GDP on law and order than any other OECD country. That alone is pretty odd. However, we cannot complain that this Government have been inactive on crime. Over the past 10 years we have seen a torrent of some 50 criminal justice Bills and a positive tsunami of new imprisonable offences. We are told that the crime rate has fallen, but that is certainly not reflected in the number of people in prison, as we know. Your Lordships have heard how numbers continue to rise. The effect that overcrowding is having on staff and inmates alike is an increasingly visible cause of concern. Nor has there been any decrease in the reoffending rate; 65 per cent of released prisoners are reconvicted within two years, as we have heard. For the youngest men—I totally agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, that they should not be there in the first place—the figure is an appalling 76 per cent within less than a year of release. That is why I hope that the urgently needed policies to reclaim these youngest offenders for a satisfying, crime-free life will continue to be seen as a priority by the Government, whether or not there is a royal commission. What is needed on release is a blitz of support for young offenders from professionals, volunteers and local employers to ensure that there is somewhere for them to live, a job and/or skills training, and, above all, a mentor. The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, mentioned women prisoners. When women are in prison many children suffer as a result. It has long been accepted that a prison system designed on military lines by men for men is patently unsuited to women's rehabilitation needs. Last year’s Corston report, echoing many previous reports on women and prisons, recommended an entirely different strategy of small, local, community-based rehabilitation units. Encouragingly, the Government had accepted 40 of the 43 recommendations, but now, this very week, we had the sad announcement that they are rejecting the basic Corston analysis and we are back to square one. The Government do not seem to understand that many view as completely illogical and contradictory their acceptance of the Carter plan to build up to three Titan-style prisons. Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, said that this flies, "““in the face of our, and others’ evidence that smaller prisons work better than larger ones””." Not only does this move in the opposite direction to Corston, but it flies in the face of the Government’s own plans for far more ““localising”” of education, health and social support services and indeed their whole social inclusion agenda. Corston, once in place, would have been a logical part of the preventative strategy for families at risk that the Government have enacted and reinforced with their own, crucial, Children and Young Persons Act. A royal commission’s independent, objective view of the whole Corston/Titan conflict would itself be invaluable. So, too, is the more radical approach to prison which is beginning to gain ground and is perhaps even beginning to be discussed in some government circles. Louis Blom-Cooper, a distinguished barrister in this field, has just published a book which argues that 60 per cent of the prison population should not be there. He proposes that any future building projects should end, and that there should be a reduction of prisoners over the next 10 years to 50,000. Of course, we must always lock up dangerous criminals, but if we are increasingly saying that for most offenders prison does not work, and that many more community and restorative justice sentences should be imposed, with responsibility for those passed to the offender’s local area, then there is surely some logic to this challenging proposition.