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Prisons: Howard League Commission

My Lords, I do not congratulate the noble Lord on getting this debate, because that is easy. But I thank him for doing so, because it is something he might not have done. It has provided us with an occasion on which to discuss this extraordinary and important report, although I recognise what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has said about it being, in a sense, an echo of something that has been said previously. However, it is said in a different voice and has a different scale of detail. It lays much more emphasis on the most important aspect of this issue; namely, the role of the community. Seeing a right reverend Prelate behind me tempts me to say that when God asked Cain where his brother was, Cain said, "Am I my brother’s keeper?". The answer should certainly have been yes, because that is the basis of community. People are built by their homes—we have heard references to failed parents—and by the communities in which they live. They should be able to be safe in their streets, to know each other and to look out for each other’s children. That is the basic pillar on which society rests. When someone gets damaged and is not supported by the system, they are taken out of their community, put into a prison miles away and then shunted around. The answer to this is to localise the prison service and its management; to stabilise and reduce its population; and to have recourse to the community to pick up the results and make a far better answer of it. Page 145 of the House of Commons Justice Committee report refers to the experiment in the Deschutes County of Oregon, USA. The experiment devolved the management of youth offenders, excluding violent offenders, to the local authority and, to a certain extent, delegated the funding thereof. The report only summarises the statistical findings. The detail can be found on an Oregon website. The cost of incarceration by the county per day was greater than that provided by the state—$202 a day as opposed to $166. But the average length of stay in the correctional facility was 4.4 months, as opposed to 8.3 months. Therefore, it costs a good deal less. The cost of aftercare/parole was $62 a day, as against $20 when administered by the state, so it cost a great deal more. The average stay in aftercare/parole was 11.5 months, as opposed to 14 months—so, again, the cost was much less. The total cost per case was $48,396 when locally done, and $65,866 when done state-wide. The approximate saving on the current value of the dollar is $13,232 per case, and the actual outturns for reoffending are exactly the same, so the result is the same for a much cheaper price. If you add into it all the localism in this report, you will have a fantastically improved system.