Examination of Witnesses (Questions 152
- 179)
TUESDAY 27 JANUARY 1997
MR PETER
COAD, MR
DAVID FRASER
AND PROFESSOR
KEN PEASE
OBE
Chairman
152. Good morning, gentlemen. I apologise
for keeping you waiting. We understood you wanted to make an opening
statement of about four minutes. We are, on the whole, against
opening statements, though we do occasionally give in. If at the
end of the session, however, there are any points you would like
to make which you feel have not been made that would be the moment,
not necessarily to read out the whole statement, which you can
hand in anyway and we will take into account, but to make any
points that you feel you have not been given a fair opportunity
to make.
(Mr Coad) I had mixed feelings having asked
you in the first place.
153. Can I just check one thing before we
start? Your evidence was drafted in a slightly different fashion
from evidence we have received from other quarters. The three
of you, indeed, five of you, made your own contributions, which
did overlap to a considerable extent, instead of all three of
you signing a similar document. I appreciate it is probably because
you all come from different parts of the country and had not had
an opportunity to co-ordinate, but can I check that you all agreed
with each other on the broad thrust of each other's evidence?
(Mr Coad)
David Fraser and I worked together for many years, so, broadly,
we are. I only met Ken last night for the first time, although
I have written and talked to him over the `phone for some years,
and he must have his independence, as it were, to disagree, if
that is appropriate.
154. Professor Pease, you have read the evidence
of your colleagues?
(Professor Pease) I have.
155. You feel happy with the broad thrust of
it, do you?
(Professor Pease) I do.
Chairman: Thank you. We are going to start off
with some questions about the use of custodial and non-custodial
sentences and the relationship between the Probation and Prison
Services. Mr Linton.
Mr Linton
156. Mr Coad, can I say that I found your evidence
very interesting. I was particularly struck by the statistic that
you came out with that if the sentencing patterns of the 1950s
were continued till now there would be 300,000 people in our prisons.
Do you think the prison population should be 300,000?
(Mr Coad) No. I think that that should be qualified.
If the sentencing patterns of the 1950s had continued through
there probably would not have been any need for 300,000 people
to be in prison, because the sentencing probably would have deterred
a number of those people that would have ended up in prison. But
to answer the point about should there be more people in prison,
if you accept Home Office statistics of reconviction rates then
I think the evidence is fairly strong that society has got a choice,
either they allow persistent offenders to continue offending in
the community or they protect society and lock them up. Our emphasis
is on persistent offenders; we are not talking about first offenders,
and we make assumptions about the sentencing of serious offenders.
Over the past five years as the prison population has gone up
the crime rate has deteriorated, and I think the two things are
linked.
157. But if there is a deterrent effect, as
you say, how come the prison reconviction rate is 53 per cent?
(Mr Coad) Interestingly, it is 53 per cent, which
is about the same as probation, if we take probation statistics
over all the age ranges, and it is important to understand that
because the 30-plus age group is very low and if you mix it up
with all the other age groups, it brings it down to a low average.
However, people who have served a sentence of between four years
and ten years in prison have a reconviction rate of only 26 per
cent.
158. Yes, but do you think that there are people
then, any of the 60,000-odd people in prison now, who should not
be there?
(Mr Coad) I think the odds must be there must be some,
but, taking the whole figure, it would be very, very few; there
are bound to be wrong convictions, there are bound to be people
where judges have wrongly felt that they should have gone to prison,
but the numbers, in my opinion, would be very, very small.
159. You would not say that there are any categories
of people, or groups of people, whether it is fine defaulters,
people who have not paid their TV licences, or whatever, who as
a category should not, in the generality, be in prison?
(Mr Coad) It is a very difficult one about the TV
licences, especially as I am aware that husbands allow wives to
carry the can for TV licences. But the broad answer is, how patient
does one want courts to be, do you go on and on not paying fines,
go on and on and not pay television licences. There has got to
be an ultimate sanction, but if there can be alternative ones
to prison that work then I would be all for them, but I do not
know the alternatives. Most people get sent to prison—sorry,
I am making an assumption. I would have thought that most people
who went to prison would have had some help with paying fines
before it reached the stage of actually sending them to serve
a prison sentence. We have Money Payment Supervision Officers
in the Probation Service and they are normally quite helpful;
but, sadly, fines are very often made on people out of all proportion
to their ability to pay for them, and that leaves me with other
mixed feelings.
160. You do accept, do you, that prison is an
expensive option, it costs far more than community sentences,
so that an increase in the use of imprisonment would result in
an increase in public expenditure, or do you argue that the deterrent
effect in itself would counteract that?
(Mr Coad) If we take the comparative cost one, having
listened to ACOP evidence last week and having read such comparisons
being made many hundreds of times by people like the Howard League
and the Prison Reform Trust, NACRO, etc., they present the £2,200
administrative costs to keep someone on probation, compared with,
whatever it is, £24,000 for people sent to prison. What they
never, never say is how much it costs to keep a persistent offender
in the community, persistently offending. And the latest estimate
of the cost of crime to the community, and I think this was alleged
to be a secret document passed to the Home Office, is £30
billion.
Chairman
161. Sorry, what is the source of that? What
is this document that is secret?
(Mr Coad) This was an account of a document that had
been written by an economist and given to the Home Office. I am
not entirely reliant on that document about the costs of crime.
162. Do you know the name of it?
(Mr Coad) No; the name of it was not published.
163. The name of the economist?
(Mr Coad) I just simply do not remember.
164. Where did you hear of it?
(Mr Coad) I think, two or three months ago.
165. In the Sunday Times, is that where you
saw it?
(Mr Coad) I think that was in the Sunday Times.
166. Okay, thank you.
(Mr Coad) And, for instance, a gang of people, boys,
who were on either probation or supervision or on bail, stole
nearly half a million pounds worth of money, actual money, from
Marks & Spencer, and two teenagers in Nottingham knocked up
£1 million worth of crimes; so persistent offenders are very
expensive to keep in the community. And, compared with the cost
of sending those people to prison as well as protecting the public,
I would consider it a bargain; I do not think we can afford not
to do it. We are fighting a war against crime. If in 1942, if
I may use this analogy, had we decided we could not afford to
house all the German prisoners we had and sent them back to Germany
to fight us again, the world would have thought us mad. I think
the criminal justice system does this with persistent offenders;
they send them back into the community to keep on and on victimising
society, and I cannot see any moral or legal argument for that
being allowed to continue. And yet people like ACOP and people
who support them come up with these extraordinary figures of between
71 and 90 per cent success rates, and described them as "remarkable"
in their presentation last week; well, they are remarkable, inasmuch
as they are simply not true. And I rely not on what I guess they
are but what the Home Office say they are. The bulk of crime is
committed by people under the age of 30: up to 21 year olds have
77 per cent reconviction rates; 21-24, 66 per cent; and 25-29,
60 per cent. And, as I have boringly said, in much of the evidence,
if you place those figures against the 4.9 detection rate you
can imagine that the actual reoffending rate has got to be somewhere
in the 90s.
Mr Linton
167. Can I just bring you back to the narrower
question. You presumably do accept that there is a role for a
Probation Service; you seem to imply that it should be used, as
was originally intended, more for those offenders who show genuine
remorse and desire to reform themselves?
(Mr Coad) I think it is a matter of logic, that the
only people who are going to respond to the assistance of a probation
officer are people who want the assistance. If they are not motivated
to reform they simply are going to use probation as an escape
from going to prison. And if you read the National Standards book
of the requirement for contact with people on probation, and bear
in mind that 90 per cent of these are persistent criminals, an
average of 18 hours in two years is the National Standard requirement.
You can imagine the logic of making a persistent criminal see
a probation officer for just 18 hours in two years; it cannot
be effective supervision.
Ms Hughes
168. Mr Coad, what I would like to be clear
about is whether the principle of community supervision is something
you do not support, or whether you can see—that is right,
is it, you do not support it?
(Mr Coad) No, I do support the principle.
169. What kind of community supervision, what
would be the features of community supervision you think would
be effective, as an alternative to prison?
(Mr Coad) I have no doubt about that at all; simply,
people who want to stop offending and were looking to the Probation
Service to help them to do so. It really is as simple as that.
170. And what form would that supervision take
then of those kinds of offenders, what would the supervision involve?
You have criticised the contact time that has been a feature of
probation hitherto; what would the community supervision that
you would endorse look like, what would be its characteristics,
what contact time would there be, what other features would there
have to be in it?
(Mr Coad) It is very difficult to nail down that in
precise terms, but it certainly would not be nine hours a year,
because that is not supervision; you cannot effectively supervise
someone nine hours a year, that is self-evident nonsense. There
are all sorts of ways you can supervise people, it depends on
the individual needs. If they are illiterate then you can help
them to learn to read and write, and so on; if they have relationship
problems then they can be helped with relationship problems; if
they are out of work then they can be helped to learn how to present
themselves in the most positive ways to employers. If you have
someone, I am pushing this a bit, who is sitting in front of you,
who has been unemployed for five or six years and has got nose-rings,
earrings and tattoos all over their faces, you might try to help
them to know that that is not going to exactly endear them to
prospective employers; and yet I would defend the right of people
to put nose-rings, earrings and tattoos all over themselves, but
a price is paid.
171. Can I ask you, Mr Coad, how long it is
since you actually retired from the Probation Service?
(Mr Coad) My first day of retirement was 1 January
1988.
172. Because, with respect, you do seem rather
out of touch as to what is going on in the Probation Service at
the moment, in terms of some of the things that you have just
identified, that I presume you think are not going on, whereas,
in fact, they are going on; do you not accept that? You have just
given us a litany of the kinds of things that the Probation Service
could do—
(Mr Coad) All these things are happening.
173. If I could finish—with people whom
you felt were motivated. And I think the supposition behind your
comment was that that is not happening at the moment, but it is
happening at the moment?
(Mr Coad) No, it is not at all; no.
174. So you accept that is happening at the
moment?
(Mr Coad) Absolutely; and, in fact, the Probation
Centre orders are absolutely packed with programmes to help people,
they go out of their way to help people with drugs and alcohol
problems, you name it. The Probation Service could not be more
dedicated. It is where they give their all, in those Probation
Centres. Yet the Probation Centres have the highest reconviction
rates of all forms of probation intervention.
175. So, in terms of people who were not wholly
motivated, and there is a question as to how we assess that, at
the point of sentence, but in terms of people whom you judge to
be not wholly motivated, you do not see any form of supervision
in the community then as being appropriate, in an effective sense,
for those people, as an alternative to prison, you would lock
all those people up, would you?
(Mr Coad) It depends on what you feel is appropriate.
If you feel it is appropriate to send someone from the dock back
into society who is going to endlessly victimise the general public
then that is not my view of appropriateness. I think it should
not be very far along the line of further convictions before a
court imposes a custodial sentence. Society has to make a decision:
do we experiment further with this man, who has demonstrated a
total unwillingness to live within the law. Should we take yet
another chance, the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh chance, with
society, society not having made any contribution to this decision
at all, and just let them go again, knowing that they will reoffend?
176. I am just trying to re-establish whether
you have any contribution to make, actually, to an inquiry which
is trying to assess the effectiveness of alternatives to custody,
because you seem to be saying that, for all but a small minority
of offenders, the most appropriate course of action is to put
them in prison. Is that right?
(Mr Coad) Eventually.
177. So you actually see very little place within
the criminal justice system for alternatives to custody for a
very small minority of people?
(Mr Coad) I feel a lot of optimism about Mr Straw's
Crime and Disorder Bill proposals, I see it as a new start, an
intervention, reaching out to people early on in their criminal
careers, getting them early. I think there is a lot of positive
things to do. I am as committed to the notion of supervision in
the community as I was when I joined the Probation Service in
1960, but not endlessly putting unmotivated offenders back into
society, I think that is a contradiction of commonsense.
Chairman
178. I think you also, in your evidence, make
a point not only just about imprisoning people but also about
the use of the suspended sentence as a potential deterrent, do
you not?
(Mr Coad) I suggested that as a more meaningful alternative
than putting someone on probation, knowing that they are going
to break down, because it is a waste of probation resources to
put them on probation. It is a waste of the manpower, and you
might just as well give them a suspended sentence so that something
absolute is going to happen to them when they reoffend, instead
of something not likely to happen, which is what happens with
the majority of people who reoffend on probation. It would be
much better to do that as a possible deterrent in place of putting
them away in prison, when we have not got the prison places to
do it. So it is therefore, second-best.
Mr Winnick
179. Mr Coad, basically, as far as I can gather,
from the contributions your colleagues and yourself have sent
us, you believe, and this phrase comes out time and again in the
papers, that there is an anti-prison conspiracy, or whatever;
that is strongly your view and that of your colleagues, am I right?
(Mr Coad) Yes.
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