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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): With this, it will be convenient to discuss new clause 13--Court to be aware of provision in custody for certain dependent offenders--
'It shall be the duty of the Secretary of State to make available to any court passing a custodial sentence upon any offender whom the court believes to be dependent on drugs or alcohol an assessment of the provision available in any prison or other custodial institution to which the offender is liable to be committed of facilities for providing treatment appropriate to his condition.'.
Mr. Howarth: In Committee, we debated a new clause that had a similar effect to new clause 7, which would allow for the rehabilitation and treatment of problem drug users to be recommended as part of a sentence. New clause 13 would be consequential on new clause 7 and would empower the courts to recognise that a treatment and testing order was available in those circumstances.
I suspect that the Minister will argue that the new clause is unnecessary--that is what he said in Committee when he opposed the similar proposal--but evidence suggests that we need treatment and testing orders because the current arrangements do not serve us well. We seek an effective course of action that is permissive rather than prescriptive. The courts should have the option of imposing treatment alongside punishment as an effective way to deal with drug abuse and drug-related crime. We want to present the courts and offenders not with a soft option, but with a means of providing a system that deters and deals with drug abuse and drug-related offending.
The new clause is based on Labour's treatment and testing programmes in a document entitled "Breaking the Vicious Circle", launched by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) during our conference in October. A number of arguments can be used to support the proposals. First, treatment is a humanitarian
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Secondly, a great deal of crime is drug driven. If we can remove the incentive to steal and get involved in crime because people are no longer dependent on drugs, we shall make an important contribution. Good empirical evidence suggests that approximately half of all property crime--burglary and other acquisitive crime--is committed by people seeking to feed their drug habit. The Metropolitan police commissioner recently estimated that, in his police area, the true figure is more like 60 per cent.--so in our capital city and elsewhere there is a powerful incentive to deal more coherently with the cause as well as the effect of drug-related crime and drug offences.
Another important argument in this context is that drugs in prisons are closely associated with prison disturbances. Drug treatment would reduce demand in prison. I shall talk later about the effects of mandatory drug testing, but there can be no doubt, not least on the basis of the reports of Her Majesty's inspector of prisons, that there are far too many drugs in our prison system and that drugs can lead to disorderly behaviour. They lead to offences within the prison system and can lead to serious disturbances. We may deal later with the statistics that underpin those arguments.
Mandatory drug testing has revealed a steady increase in hard drugs--opiate-based drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine--during 1996. In other words, drug abuse in prisons has shifted away from cannabis to harder drugs.
The Government seem to have no information on the amount of time that prisoners spend in drug rehabilitation. The source for that observation is the Official Report of 29 November 1996, columns 450-52. The Government cannot evaluate how much of a prisoner's period of incarceration might be devoted to drug rehabilitation in appropriate cases. It is important for us to understand the relationship between treatment, offending and drug abuse.
There is a significant amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the time spent in rehabilitation in prison is decreasing. That might result from the reductions in expenditure that have recently taken place in the Prison Service, but we would need to study a great deal more evidence before arriving at that conclusion.
There are two additional reasons why the new clause merits support. Before I deal with those, it is important to make the point that all drug abuse, whether it takes place in prisons, in nightclubs, in the streets or in people's homes, is wrong. It is right and proper for us to maintain that position whether we are dealing with cannabis or with harder drugs. It is right that those who are apprehended for trading in drugs or using them are properly punished; it is also right that where drug abuse is a habitual part of people's lives, treatment should be available, as well as punishment. The siren voices calling for decriminalisation or a more permissive attitude towards drug abuse will in the long run serve neither those who are caught up in the vicious cycle of drug abuse, nor society in the wider context. They may believe that there is a humanitarian aspect to their argument, but it dissolves on closer examination.
I mentioned two other reasons for supporting the new clause. The first is the point made by Justice--not an organisation with which I always agree--that drug
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Secondly, if direction on treatment were available in guidance issued by the Home Office, judicial discretion through the courts could be maintained, at least in part. That would mean that the courts could make clear judgments about the most appropriate way of dealing with individual cases.
The hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Carlile), speaking from his experience as a recorder at Hereford Crown court, said that in some cases the courts find it difficult to deal with drug-related offences because of the many complicating factors involved. Home Office direction would make life easier for those in the courts who deal with such cases.
Since March 1996, when mandatory drug testing was introduced in all prisons--we agreed with that move--the scale of drug abuse in prisons has become clear. Initial conclusions show a disturbing shift away from cannabis use--which is wrong and unacceptable--to harder forms of drugs, particularly opiates. That shift is evidenced by a number of factors. Since the introduction of mandatory drug testing in prisons--I shall cite the statistics in a moment--there has been a shift from cannabis interceptions to interceptions of various forms of opiate.
Between 1 March 1996 and 30 September 1996, the percentage of random drug tests showing positive for opiates increased from 5.94 per cent. to 6.35 per cent. If my mathematics have not let me down, that represents an increase of about 7 per cent. in the number of prisoners testing positive for opiates. If we project that figure on to the entire prison population, the number of prisoners regularly using opiates has increased from 3,192 to 3,595.
The fact that prisoners change to hard drugs to escape detection suggests that the figures underestimate the extent of opiate use. I received a letter today from Her Majesty's chief inspector of prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham, who said:
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We are concerned about the perceived move from abuse of cannabis--which is bad enough--to harder drugs. We must face the fact that many prisoners--particularly younger inmates--who at present take no drugs, or who use cannabis, may begin to take harder drugs during their period of incarceration. If that is what is going on, we should be very concerned indeed. One reason why the new clause should be given a fair wind and accepted is that such factors, and the ability to treat people while they are in the prison system, should be given greater prominence.
Apart from the cost of administering mandatory drugs testing in the Prison Service, each positive test results in an additional number of days in prison. There was a total of 7,618 such punishments between March and September of last year, which led to an extra 112,354 days in prison. There is nothing wrong with that. That was the system that was introduced, we supported it, and if people are going to get involved in drug abuse, they must be prepared to accept the consequences. If we could treat them and stop them from abusing drugs while in the prison system, however, that would prevent their serving extra days in prison. It would also yield savings to the Treasury.
I estimate that, at an average cost of about £400 per prisoner per week, the expenditure arising from extra days in prison has amounted to more than £864,000 since March 1996. It is a very large amount. If that is added to the initial start-up costs, which were assessed at £948,840, we realise that the amounts involved are substantial. In addition, each test costs, on average, £45.52--and between March and September there were 47,425 tests. The running costs of the tests alone are £2,158,786. The costs of the problem are enormous and it is in everybody's interest, not least the Exchequer, that we get to grips with it.
We have consistently argued the case for rehabilitation of drug users. There are examples of good practice, not least of which is the excellent scheme at Her Majesty's prison Downview, of which I shall say a little more later. I have had the opportunity to visit it. If the Under-Secretary has not been there to see what goes on, I suggest that he does so. One thing that is abundantly clear is that if we deal with those who are convicted of drugs or drug-related offences by treating them, there is a strong possibility that that takes away the incentive to get involved in drug abuse in future. That has to be worth while.
The Government, however, appear to have little if any knowledge of the amount of drug rehabilitation that occurs in the Prison Service. When we ask them questions about it, they seemed to confuse rehabilitation and detoxification and have information only about
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If we are to make progress, mandatory drugs testing, although welcome and necessary, is inadequate to deal with the problem. Under the current system, there is a danger that we will send the small-time cannabis user and dealer to prison and release him seven years later as a confirmed heroin addict. The need for an option to include mandatory treatment is therefore obvious.
There is international evidence to support the claims that I am making. In California, an evaluation of the FIRST--fast, intensive, report, supervision and treatment--programme, which reviewed the work of the drug court programme in Oakland, showed impressive savings in terms of custody costs to the Alameda county sheriff's department. Last October, I visited Alameda county, which has a drug court programme. We could replicate elements of that interesting experiment in our system. The evaluation showed that the average number of arrests per defendant during the three-year period following the arraignment was reduced by about 40 per cent. if they had been through the drug court process. A cost-benefit analysis from the same report showed that those who had been diverted from custody into treatment spent approximately 34,000 fewer days in custody.
I also saw what was being done in Miami. An evaluation of the drug court in Dade county suggested that closely monitored drug treatment had extremely positive results. A comparison of defendants who had been in the programme with similar defendants who had not drew some interesting and useful conclusions. Defendants in the programme had lower incarceration rates, less frequent re-arrests and longer times before re-arrest--about three times as long. Clearly, the experiments in diversion are working in the state of Miami.
A study of the intensive, 18-month programme that is run by Osteraker prison in Sweden showed significantly reduced rates of recidivism and drug relapse since 1979, when the scheme was introduced. A 1992 study showed that recidivism over a six-year period was 58 per cent. higher in a control group than it was in a group of people participating in the programme.
Her Majesty's prison Downview provides a more local example. The chief inspector of prisons said:
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"Like so many things connected with the drugs scene, I am suspicious of all statistics . . . I expect that it"--
he is referring to the use of heroin in prisons--
"is considerably higher than the figures disclosed."
That is an authoritative source in support of my argument, and it is a view based on evidence gathered during recent prison inspections. During an interview for the journal Focus, the Minister of State who has responsibility for the
"there is precious little evidence that this shift to opiate use is happening."
I do not wish to be disrespectful to the hon. Lady--perhaps I shall be if I am pushed hard enough--but I would rather accept the evidence of the chief inspector of prisons, who speaks to the relevant people and has more experience and greater exposure to what is occurring in the prison system, than the hon. Lady's comments during an interview.
"We are particularly impressed by the"--
drug rehabilitation--
"scheme at Downview which has developed a special residential programme for drug users in conjunction with the Addictive Diseases Trust".
The evidence for that conclusion is in a report produced in March 1996--which the Home Office has received--entitled "The ADT Drug Treatment Programme at HMP Downview". That study found that applicants had been dependent on drugs for an average of nine years, so they were well-established drug users of one kind or another. It also found that the overwhelming majority of applicants identified their habit as the main cause of their offending, whatever its precise nature. All but one of the sample studied had stayed drug-free since joining the programme's pre-admission group. That finding was supported by the use of drug tests, which I think were
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