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Prisons and Probation

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement. One sentence stands out: ""Prison capacity planning depends crucially on projections of future demand"." In the 22 European countries that form part of the International Crime Victim Survey published by the United Nations and are studied by the International Centre for Prison Studies, the average number of people who are imprisoned is 104 per 100,000 of population. The figure for England and Wales is 152. If we were to imprison people at the same rate as the average European country, we would have a prison population of 56,856 as opposed to the current population of about 82,000. My question to the Minister is simple: why are we planning to increase the number of prison places? Why are there projections of future demand that suggest that we will need 96,000 prison places in a short period of time and, according to the report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, over 100,000 by 2014? It is just wrong. The Government need to rethink their position completely. It is not as though the prison expansion policy that we have seen over the past 10 or 15 years has made any difference to crime. In my professional life, I have seen the number of people sent to prison and the length of time for which they are imprisoned dramatically increase, to such an extent that I am incapable of giving a fair and accurate representation of what a prisoner is likely to get these days, as it is so different from the experience of most of my professional life. If the Government are suggesting that an increase in prison population has resulted in a fall in crime, I point out that, according to the International Crime Victim Survey, the level of common crime in Europe reached a plateau in 1995 and has shown a steady decline everywhere. The level of victimisation in Europe has now decreased to that of 1990. Britain remains a high-crime country. It is second among the 30 countries worldwide surveyed in the 2004-05 survey to which I have referred. Only Ireland was higher. Our victimisation rates are statistically higher than the European average: 21.8 per cent of the population of England and Wales were victims of crime in 2003, compared with an average of 15.7 per cent elsewhere. Why do the Government pursue a policy which has failed, when their own reports and briefings, produced by the Ministry of Justice, indicate what works? Alcohol treatment in the community reduces violent crime; drug treatment in the community reduces acquisitive crime; restorative justice, which does not involve sending people to prison, reduces reoffending. The Government should target already overstretched probation and prison resources at what works and not at tinkering or at producing Titan prisons, or smaller prisons which hold the same populations. Who makes the projections of future demand? Is it judges, or are judges simply pressured by the ministry to fill prison places as they are made? Is it the effect of the press, which always demands tougher punishments? What causes these projections of future prison demand to be made by the Home Office or the Ministry of Justice? There is significant fault in many of the ways in which this Government have dealt with the criminal justice system. This perhaps is the most obvious.