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Prisons: Howard League Commission

My Lords, from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench, as it were, I welcome this report—and not only because it confirms my own prejudices. I have never been attracted by the sort of sentencing policy that tests the machismo of the current Government. Rather, I regard a willingness to work at the harder options—community-based responses are not a soft option, if properly structured—as a test of a community’s dignity. We must not underestimate the need to win the hearts and minds of the community, nor the difficulty of that task. Community-based responses need to be accepted. This morning, in a local shop, I overheard a discussion about a number of burglaries that had taken place locally, where someone commented: "Lock ’em all up, that’s what I say". That is an instinctive reaction from both a victim and a potential victim. As the report says, ""once the punitive genie is out of the bottle, it is not easily put back"." The report refers to a characteristic of a more, ""moderate approach to penal policy"," being, ""a mass media relatively uninterested in crime and punishment"." That could not be said of the media in this country; they carry a heavy responsibility, and the right reverend Prelate’s term "distortion" was a temperate one. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Wallace for covering the issue of localism. I hope that stronger local partnerships are ideas whose time has come; they have been bubbling up for a little while, with other organisations looking at the same issues. We know that the risk of reoffending is much reduced by stable housing, employment, drug treatment planning and programming and family and local contacts—all things that are the very stuff of local partnerships. Education and training are vital; an offender needs skills to go straight. Partnership work between business and prisons or other penal schemes can help to achieve purposeful activity. I have one specific question for the Minister; do the Government recognise all this as an appropriate component in the Total Place work that is now being carried out, up and down the country, and is sponsored by the DCLG? The report also mentions prisons built under the public-private finance initiative, an issue presently being considered by your Lordships’ Economic Affairs Committee. A good privately financed prison should be not just about bricks and mortar but also about facilitating a modern, productive regime through the bundling of building and services. I was also interested in the report’s references to New York City being, ""in the midst of national mass incarceration"," but it has reduced crime and the prison population. I wonder whether that goes with the broken windows approach of tackling crime at the lowest level to seek to stop it escalating. That was pioneered in New York. I congratulate the Howard League. If prison does not work, then more of the same will not work either. I believe that the report has identified and described what is far more likely to work.