Examination of Witness (Questions 570
- 579)
TUESDAY 10 MARCH 1998
SIR DAVID
RAMSBOTHAM, GCB, CBE
Chairman
570. Sir David, good morning. Your last visit
here was two years ago, when the Committee was under previous
management.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Very nearly that, yes.
571. There are two purposes in our questioning
you. We are doing an inquiry, as you know, into alternatives to
prison. We want to get your thoughts on that. We are also interested
in the wider aspects of your responsibilities and many of our
questions will be about that. May I start the ball rolling by
asking you auubout the growth in the prison numbers that has occurred
over the last few years. What, so far, have been the effects?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) As you know, the prison numbers
reached a new record the other day. 65,000 is the new figure.
I tell Richard Tilt, the Director General, that this represents
a rise of almost 25 per cent in the just over two years I have
been in the job. There is no connection between those figures,
but the fact is that 65,000 is a horrendous increase in a comparatively
short period of time. I think there are various impacts of this.
First of all, the prisons obviously were not prepared for those
numbers. Therefore, they have had to have an emergency rebuilding
programme, and one must congratulate them on the speed with which
they have put up additional house blocks in various prisons. They
have, of course, been bringing on one or two new prisons as well.
Therefore, they have not had to revert to putting people into
police cells at the cost of £300 at night. Nor, indeed, have
they had to triple up, which was one of the main problems in the
past. They deserve congratulations for that. However, the problem
about overcrowding is that it is not just whether there are places
enough for people to spend the night in prison. It is what happens
to them by day. What worries me is that in keeping them in, they
have not actually got the activities to occupy them by day. There
are too many of them sitting around idle. What we have been trying
to impress on the Prison Service is the need for them to build
into the infrastructure, to support the extra numbers wherever
they go in, with workshop places, instructors, extra staff, extra
activities, places and so on. The Government have made two extra
provisions of money particularly aimed at that, but the fact that
they have had to make two provisions in such short order indicates
just how far behind the curve everyone is. I personally think
that it is symptomatic of something I said to the Home Secretary
when he first took over, which was: unfortunately, although everyone
knows how much money is actually spent on imprisonment now—and
it is roughly of the order of £2 billion a year—in
fact, nobody knows how much money should be spent if you were
actually going to conduct imprisonment as you would like to: in
other words, provide all the regimes and offending behaviour treatment
and resettlement activities and so on. It always seems to me surprising,
coming in as a complete outsider, which I did, that there is a
perfectly good agenda, agreed by all parties in this House in
1991—the White Paper Custody Care and Justice, which set
out 12 very clear priorities for taking the Prison Service forward,
including the ending of overcrowding which was number one—but
that the only one of those 12 which has actually been activated
is the one about integral sanitation in cells. Personally, I believe
that until we get back and actually examine those priorities again
and cost them out, and therefore have a clear estimate for Ministers
and therefore for the Treasury of how much imprisonment as envisaged
by this House should cost, then the Prison Service is always going
to be behind the curve; always begging for extra money to plug
the gaps rather than being able to say: "Look, the provision
at the moment does not allow us to do the following and this is
what we need."
572. If the trend continues, where do you see
the future lies? I see from a Parliamentary Answer given by Mrs
Quin to Mr Beith the other day, that on present trends we can
look forward—if that is the right word—to an average
prison population of 69,000 in 1999, 72,000 in the year 2000,
and 82,800 by the year 2005. Now, that is obviously a prediction
based on present trends but if that were to continue, where would
it lead?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I think that it emphasises
even further the need for a real radical look at the Prison Service
structure to see how it can cope. Hidden within that, you have
a whole lot of different categories of prisoner who all need treating
in a different way; not least—and the ones I am studying
at the moment and I shall be reporting on in the summer—the
increasing numbers of lifers who number 3,800, where there is
not proper provision for them. You might like to question me more
about that in a minute. The fact is that there are increasing
numbers of long sentence prisoners. The evidence shows that both
the long sentence and the short sentence and the medium sentences
are going up. There are an increasing number of young offenders.
There are an increasing number of women. There are increasing
numbers of foreign nationals. There are increasing numbers of
mentally disordered offenders. There are an increasing number
of people who are on remand for far too long, which is choking
the system really. I have quoted on a number of occasions that
if you use the 110-day remand rule they have in Scotland, between
4 and 5,000 of the current 12,000-plus people on remand would
have to be released. This is because they have been in prison
for over 110 days already and many of them for much longer. What
I believe is that the rather hand-to-mouth putting-people-where-beds-are
type of approach, is actually negating a lot of the good work
which should be done to tackle reoffending. I think the Prison
Service have had all the guidelines as to how they might do this:
Lord Woolf's community cluster of prisons, which localises things
more. Better focused direction, where you have people responsible
for consistent delivery of treatment to each type of prisoner,
wherever they happen to be in the country. But those numbers are
just going to swamp the existing management system.
573. Would you say that all of the progress
of the last few years is threatened?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes.
574. By the rise of the prison population?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes. I do. I think from all
that I learned, that actually it is slightly complicated in that
the Prison Service was moving forward, and then for the last four
years the numbers swamped and the money was spent on security.
The Prison Service deserves enormous credit for the fact that
the escapes have come right down to 0.3 per cent. That is greatly
to their credit. But it is unfortunate that so much money was
spent on the security, the physical security, rather than all
the other activities with prisoners. What is now happening is
that the Prison Service are picking up on all the programmes that
have been developed and would like to run with them, but the numbers
are preventing them doing all they would like to do.
575. You are already seeing evidence of that
from your daily work?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Absolutely. I am reporting
on it in inspection report after inspection report.
576. Before we leave this subject, you did mention
the proper provision for lifers. May we touch on that now.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes. Lifers worry me. They
worry a number of people as well. The Lord Chief Justice is very
concerned at the number of people who pass their parole date and
their tariff date without being released. I am very concerned
that a lifer, who really needs to have proper sentence planning
and management started the moment he is sentenced, all too frequently
is left languishing in a local prison for up to a year before
he is moved on to a training prison. This is because there is
no proper provision for him. I am not satisfied that there is
a proper structured programme which moves them on through the
system when they achieve things. Particularly, as the numbers
of lifers are likely to increase under the new legislation, this
is something which I think has got to be tackled. What I am doing
is a joint study with the Probation Service - the first time we
have done a joint one—because a life sentence, after all,
is some time in custody and some time on licence. We are doing
this by going into both prisons and probation areas jointly and
looking and seeing the work. When we come up with recommendations,
they will be based on what should happen to a lifer when they
first come in. What I would like to see is some form of proper
induction to their sentence. There is a very good example of this
in Scotland, at the moment, at Shotts, where they have started
a national induction centre for people with sentences of ten years
or more, where they go for six months preparation. I would like
to see that done. Then I would like to see them have a proper
sentence plan, made which is followed in certain prisons. At the
moment there are lifers in 61 prisons in this country—sometimes
only three or four. I think that is wrong. It penny packets them.
What I would like to see is that they are sent to places where
there are people trained to look after them and follow their sentences.
One ought to be getting them to their parole and tariff dates
as quickly as possible. This particularly applies to people like
sex offenders who must start sex offender treatment as quickly
as possible, so that the risks of their reoffending can be assessed.
It is fortunate that the National Audit Office is studying the
Parole Board at the same time, so we are working with them as
well. Again, the Prison Service is choked. They have people in
the wrong places. Because they are such a special part of the
system they need special handling, so I hope we will be able to
help them.
Mr Allan
577. To come back to the issue of remand prisoners,
if I can recall the figures, I believe you said there are around
12,000, of which 4,000 have been waiting for longer than 110 days?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) That is right.
578. Can you tell us what sort of distribution
there is in terms of their accommodation. How many are in suitable
and how many are in unsuitable? What sort of accommodation are
those 12,000 in?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I am very worried about local
prisons particularly, which is where most of them are held. They
are held in local prisons because, of course, they are adjacent
to the court. The local prisons are, in fact, no longer local.
I was talking yesterday to the Minister about this. I am going
to do a study of them starting in the autumn. The local prisons,
where remand prisoners should be held, in fact you will find in
there remand prisoners, long sentence prisoners, lifers, short
sentence persistent offenders, mentally disordered offenders.
You could find young offenders in that. In Winchester you will
find women. That is an impossible task for any governor; to conduct
a regime which can cater for the needs of all those people. Also,
the trouble is that because all the work opportunities there are
in those local prisons have to be used for sentenced prisoners,
because you have to do something with them when they are sentenced,
it means they are denied to remand prisoners. Although in theory
you cannot do anything with the remand prisoners unless they volunteer
to do it, they are denied the opportunity to volunteer for anything.
I think that is wrong. I want to tackle the problem of remand
prisoners at the same time. For example, I have seen some very
good and imaginative work done in Gloucester Prison where they
have some juveniles. They have set up a special education department
to deal with juveniles on remand; to do some education tackling.
At Lincoln they have organised a very good day where they have
divided remand prisoners into three groups. Each of them has a
third of the day to do something. There is good work going on
elsewhere which I would like to see repeated. It worries me because
about 60 per cent of the remand prisoners do not get a custodial
sentence. What are we actually doing with them during that time?
579. There are several thousand individuals
in inappropriate accommodation—
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Correct.
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