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Prisons

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on once again giving us the benefit of his experience in bringing this Motion before the House. The noble Lord, Lord Borrie, referred to his experience in the 1970s when he served on the Parole Board and when the prison population was about half what it is today. I recall as a recorder the last enlightened period of prison management. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, was the Home Secretary and did his best to drive down the prison population as opposed to putting it up. I well remember his advice. Many people were opposed to the direction in which he sought to drive policy. We must ask ourselves whether society feels safer today with 82,000 people in prison than it did in the 1970s. Is our security any better when the proportion of the population in prison is, as my noble friend Lord Dholakia and the noble Lord, Lord Neill, pointed out, so much higher than in our European counterparts? Is London safer than Paris or Copenhagen? One has only to ask the question to realise that the number of people in prison does not make for a safer or happier society. One of the reasons for that—I am sure there are others—may well be that if you double the number of people in prison, you also double the number of people who come out of prison. They come out with the wasted lives to which the noble Lord, Lord Judd, referred—lives that have been wasted because no attempt has been or can be made in prison to address their social problems of illiteracy, mental ill health, drugs and so on. I recall a client of mine saying that it was easier to get drugs in prison than in the outside community—they were freely available. Despite everything that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has said, I do not think things have improved since then. The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, put his finger on it when he pointed out that prison cannot work in the present situation because overcrowding destroys any chance of tackling these social problems. My noble friend Lady Linklater drew attention to the tragedy of prisoners’ families; the fact that, every year, tens of thousands of children lose a parent. Those children grow up to be the criminals of tomorrow: that is something that is frequently forgotten. Lock up more people and you create greater social problems among the families who are left behind. What is the solution? The noble Lord, Lord Rosser—very bravely, if I may say so—has been the only noble Lord to support the status quo. He tells us that things are better now than they were, and that he does not see a need for a royal commission. The noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, was doubtful about the benefits of a royal commission, because of the history of royal commissions that sat in the past. He wondered whether we should revisit the advisory council for the penal system which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater pointed out, produced wonderful reports in the 1960s that led to community sentencing and so on. The noble Lord also wondered whether a permanent sentencing commission might be the answer. I immediately thought of the sentencing commission promised by the Prime Minister in his legislative programme—his pre-Queen’s Speech that we heard recently. The proposal for a sentencing commission was endorsed by the Lord Chancellor, Mr Jack Straw, in another place. What is this talk of a sentencing commission? They are putting forward into the legislative programme a sentencing commission on which the working group is still consulting. I declare an interest as a former member of that group. Such was my position, I felt that I could not remain a member, and anything that I say about it is derived from documents in the public sphere, in particular the consultation document that the working group has issued. Noble Lords might think the term ““sentencing commission”” raises the prospect of breaking the cycle, bringing down numbers and bringing in reforms—but not a bit of it. It is derived from the report in June last year of the noble Lord, Lord Carter. In Securing the Future, he proposed a major new building programme to increase capacity to a net 96,000 places by 2014, and recommended that long-term measures should be taken to avoid continuous and expensive prison building. The Titans project, which many noble Lords have criticised, was derived from that report. The noble Lord sought to link resources with sentencing. At first blush, that seems sensible; but on examination it is not. The proposal that the working group put forward in its consultation document—it does not support it, but has merely put it forward for consideration—is based on the Minnesota or New Carolina system in the United States. A grid system has been introduced so you know what a sentence is going to be and time is added on for previous convictions and mitigation ceases to be important. The system produces something the Home Office might like: it forecasts within 2 per cent of target. But in Minnesota it has put up the prison population annually by 6.6 per cent since 2000 which, although I am not a mathematician, suggests that prison numbers double in the space of seven or eight years if that percentage rate of increase continues. The sentencing commission the Government are considering and on which the working group is working does not in any sense address all the problems that noble Lords have talked about today. That is why I support the concept of a royal commission as put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. There are important questions to be asked. Who should be in prison? Should it be the 1,000 women being held on remand, as the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, told us? Should it be young people, whose futures are made even bleaker by their time in prison? What sort of offence should send people to prison? That is the first question: who should be there? The second question is: what is the right balance of occupancy that enables prisons to be used in a creative way and that offers the possibility of rehabilitation? If we are overcrowding prisons to the tune of 113 per cent, which means that three people have to share a two-man cell, there is no opportunity for that work. The royal commission could address that issue. What resources are needed? Are they needed to build more prisons like the proposed Titans or should they be used constructively to enable people released at the end of their sentence to become involved in society? The noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, referred to the essential need for jobs and housing for prisoners when they come out, as well as families that are still intact. My noble friend Lady Neuberger referred to the critical question of mental health and all those who are locked up when really it is treatment that they need. The issue is politicised and has become increasingly so throughout the 1990s and into this decade. We have to have an independent view so as to bring some sense into prison policy. That is why we shall back the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in this crusade.