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Prisons: Howard League Commission

My Lords, like all other speakers in this debate, I recognise the wealth and significance of this report, and I believe very deeply that we ignore its research and recommendations at our peril. The report shows that our policies on imprisonment over the past 30 years have been laced with inconsistencies and misconceptions. The central irony is that while crime that is recorded by the British Crime Survey has fallen by 45 per cent in the past 15 years, the prison population has gone in exactly the opposite direction, more than doubling between 1992 and the present year. That is a very sobering central irony in the whole situation. Parallel with this development, and certainly not unassociated with it, is the fact that Her Majesty’s Government have, in each of the past 13 years, added on average 100 brand new offences that carry a custodial sanction: that is, something in the order of 1,400 offences in the past 13 years. Since 1997, Parliament has passed no less than 23 criminal justice Acts. It is worth noting that between 1925 and 1985—a period of 60 years that included a world war and all the disruption of its aftermath—only six criminal justice Acts were regarded as necessary: one every 10 years. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and others have mentioned, we incarcerate 153 persons per 100,000. That is more than any other country in western Europe bar Spain, which has a figure of 160, and Luxembourg, for some reason—presumably because of the number of banks that it has every acre—which has a figure in the order of 155. We incarcerate 60 per cent more people per hundred thousand than France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Irish Republic. I ask the same question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile: are we 60 per cent more wicked, more criminally disposed, than the people of those countries, or is there another reason? I believe clearly that there is. There is mass hysteria in the community about imprisonment that has been brought about by successive Governments, who have led people to believe that you can wave a magic wand and that crime will simply disappear. Opposition parties have shown that that is wrong, as they are entitled to do, but have given the impression that the Government of the day are presiding over a mounting crime wave. That is not the case. The ordinary citizen could certainly be excused for believing that we were going headlong down the path to disaster in relation to crime. Tabloid editors have predictably seen it to be to their profit to perpetuate these myths. Yet, for all the hysteria, the system has failed. Nothing shows that so remarkably clearly as this report. The system has failed to reform or assuage public fears, and in every respect. The statistic of two-thirds of persons being reconvicted within two years clearly shows that. There is an alternative, as shown in this report. The situation calls for change not only in policy but also in the psychology of the whole community. It is possible to reduce the prison population in a sensible and safe way. It has been done before. Between 1908 and 1939, the prison population was halved. That was done by long-sighted people with vision and resolution. It is exactly what has to be attempted now. Whichever public leader stands up and advocates this policy will be traduced and vilified. He will be said to be a namby-pamby, starry-eyed romantic—but he will be sane. He will be putting forward a better idea and vision than what we have today in our brainwashed society in relation to imprisonment.