Examination of Witness (Questions 40 - 59)
TUESDAY 10 MARCH 1998
SIR DAVID
RAMSBOTHAM
40. You are talking about locating prisoners in areas where
they are going to be released?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes.
41. Apart from the resources, what else might be done?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) There is a lot of talk, at
the moment, on the Prison Probation Board of actually merging
the two services together into some form of correction service.
42. Do you support that?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I do, yes. There is a precursor
to that, which has got to be that the Probation Service must be
made a national but not a regional service, otherwise it will
not work. It has to be as national as the Prison Service. Then
I would like to see another follow-on from that. The criminal
justice system is riddled with different boundaries. There are
local government boundaries, police boundaries, probation boundaries,
prison boundaries, area criminal justice co-ordinating council
boundaries, and so on. I know the Home Secretary is desperately
keen to make the criminal justice boundaries co-terminous. From
the prison point of view it does not matter. You can group prisons.
You can re-roll prisons. You can do anything you like. But it
is terribly important that the probation boundaries are co-terminous,
particularly for the people who are doing the work in prisons
to be linked to the people doing the work out of prison. At the
moment that is not happening.
43. Apart from the administrative changes and the resource
changes, what about the actual substance of the programmes? Do
you have any impression of them? Do you think they should be different?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No, I do not think they should
be different at all. One of the things that there ought to be,
particularly in offending behaviour treatment, is consistency.
There is absolutely no reason why the Prison and Probation Services
in prison and outside should not use the same programme at all.
No reason at all. For drug treatment there is absolutely no reason
why drug treatment in prison should not be exactly the same as
outside, so that when somebody comes out he continues with what
he is doing. You confuse him and put back the process if you change
it.
44. Can I take you back to something you were talking about
earlier, relating to the restriction on long temporary release
after mid 1995. What sort of effects has that had? Obviously it
has meant that more people are there in prison, but is there anything
else you would like to comment on?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Particularly the allowing of
people to work outside has had a very large effect on the regimes
in young offender institutions. For example, a lot of them used
to go and work in the community, where it is much easier to do
something to educate them about the need to look after their victim
or think about them, if they are out in the community doing something.
Also, something which I am personally very keen on, is outward
bound challenging training, which used to happen in prisons. It
has had to stop because they are not allowed to go out for weekend
nights away or out in the mountains challenging themselves. This
is not necessarily a prison regime but it is character building.
It is trying to put right some the things that have not happened
to them before. It is interesting that the new trial regime at
Thorn Cross in Cheshire, the high intensity training scheme which
the last Government introduced, includes adventure training very
early on in the programme. This is because the self-esteem, the
self-respect which is built up from that, is a very important
weapon in encouraging them to go forward. I think, particularly
for people on long sentences, we are finding a problem that they
cannot go out and do work and they cannot go out on release. I
found a chap the other day who was about to go out after being
in 57 prisons in the last seventeen years. He had been moved round
the merry-go-round and he was going straight from the segregation
unit into the community. I think that is totally wrong. It is
totally wrong for the prisoner. It is totally wrong for society.
We have to get a system which does insist that there is a period
of trial; getting them into the community under control before
they go out. If they fail, it may well be that you have to think
of extending the sentence, but not doing it is wrong.
Mr Cranston: Thank you very much.
Chairman
45. Are you familiar with the pre-release employment scheme?
PRES, I think it is known as.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes, I am, yes.
46. Does it work?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) It could work and does work
in certain places. The problem is the provision of work. There
are some outstanding examples of where it is working. One of the
contract prisons called Buckley Hall outside Rochdale is where
it is working because they are relating the work to work that
is done in the local area. You are training somebody for a job
and they might even be working in that job before going out. It
is working very well at Springhill, a prison in Buckinghamshire,
where people are actually going out and working by day and getting
certificates for it from their employer, and indeed some of them
have been taken on by the employer the moment they leave prison.
My feeling is that it is something which ought to be tackled much
more on a local basis. The trouble is it should be linked to jobs
in the local area. Parc, the new prison in Wales, has linked this
with a lot of industries in Bridgend, and people come from that
part of the world and they might get taken on in Bridgend. It
is no good having somebody up in Leeds being taught to do something
for Bridgend. So it needs a lot of structure. This is where I
think the new Assistant Director of Regime Services, who is responsible
for work provision in prisons, is a good appointment and I know
he is getting on with it.
47. I had a letter from someone who has been writing to me
over a period about a particular prisoner who went through the
Wormwood Scrubs PRES scheme—the shorthand writer cannot
note down when you raise your eyes towards heaven, Sir David.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) When you mentioned "Wormwood
Scrubs", I raised my eyes.
48. This is a woman whose judgment I respect, and she says,
"He had absolutely no help from anyone with the PRES except
for receiving the £4 a day. He was left entirely on his own."
She goes on to say that he showed determination to get a job and
he got one, and it was a job which involved unsocial hours and
he had to travel a great distance as well and she said that the
log book at PRES was full of unhelpful comments about him getting
back late, which was quite obviously because he was working away,
and they had the number of his employer but they never even bothered
to check he was there if they were worried about it.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I am as worried about Wormwood
Scrubs as any prison in the whole system. I think it is awful.
We reported on it very unfavourably two years ago, or 18 months
ago, and it has got worse since then. There is employment, I think,
for about 150 out of 1,300 inmates.
49. To what do you attribute this problem?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I attribute the problem to
very inefficient management by the Prison Service who dismantled
all the work opportunities in the prison.
50. On what grounds?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) A very good question, Mr Chairman.
I asked that question in my report and said, "It used to
be a flag ship, it is dead in the water and the Prison Service
should explain why and do something about it."
51. How long ago did you say that?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I said this in September 1996
and my report had quite a bit of publicity when it came out.
52. Nothing to your knowledge has improved?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) To my horror, nothing has happened.
We were in there the other day looking at the lifer management
unit, which has got people who have been in the lifer first stage
unit for four years waiting to go somewhere. That has come to
an end. They have had no governor for the last five months because
the last governor retired, so they have had no real leadership.
It is a prison which is one that causes me an immense amount of
concern and I am personally surprised that the Prison Service
have not declared it a prison deserving special managerial attention,
because it needs it.
53. I think what you have to say about that has been heard
and we hope people follow it up.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I will be doing, yes.
Chairman: Reducing reoffending. Mr Corbett?
Mr Corbett
54. Sir David, a couple of times you have spoken of the need
for a national probation service. In the light of some of your
answers, should we not have a national prison service in the sense
that there is some consistency in what is on offer for prisoners
in various categories at different stages of their sentences?
You give me the impression of absolute chaos and happenstance.
"If you happen to be here, you get it, if you happen to go
there, you do not. You start it here, you cannot continue it there."
Somebody gives you a warrant, a handshake and locks the door after
you and down the street you go, back probably into the climate
and circumstances which led you to offend in the first place.
Is it as chaotic as the impression you have given me?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes, to be quite honest, it
is. The Prison Service is trying desperately hard to struggle
with these huge numbers, and I commend it, as I have done, for
some of the things they have done. I commend them for some of
the introductions they are making; the offending behaviour programmes
which have been designed. I commend them for that and I commend
them for trying to tackle drugs. I do not think they are completely
right in the way they are doing it, but they are trying very hard.
Their organisation, as I explained to the Committee when I came
last time to see you, to my mind is flawed, because every other
operational organisation that I know, including the one I spent
my professional life in, has it quite clear that you have operational
direction which is consistent for all people doing the same role,
and you back that up by support from the local area in which you
are doing it, to make certain all the local services are there
to support you. That is not happening. There is a long argument
about functional and geographical. What the Prison Service has
done is to divide England into two, north and south, and divide
the north and south into areas, and they have appointed an area
manager for each area and he is responsible for all prisons of
all types; he actually finances it. The only thing all those people
have in common is that they all work from Cleland House just round
the corner from here, and I am not sure that is the right way
to do it. It also means there is a lack of consistency. You go
to the young offender institution in Lancaster Farms in Lancashire,
where there is tremendous work being done, and you go down to
the young offender institution in Dover, which is awful.
55. It could be a different country.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) It could be a different country.
Why? I think it is wrong. They have already been pointed the way
by having a Director of Dispersal Prisons, who was appointed after
the Whitemoor and Parkhurst inquiries. He is responsible for co-ordinating
the six dispersal prisons and it works. He directs them, he co-ordinates
them, he supervises good practice, he arranges appointments, he
has discussions between governors and so on, and they are run
as a group. Any time the Prison Service is asked for information
on something, they always go to the Dispersal Estate because they
know they can get a collective answer, but they cannot elsewhere.
What they have done about it is that they have appointed a Director
of Regimes, as they call him, who has just taken up post, with
an assistant director of regimes for adult males and lifers, an
assistant director for women, an assistant director for young
offenders, and an assistant director for regime services, which
is the provision of work.
56. This is at national level?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) This is at national level.
The only thing is that they have not abolished the area managers.
The area managers have got the money, these people are going to
say what regimes should happen and then they have to go and beg
the area managers to give them the money to do it. I do not think
this will work.
57. Let's then put into this attempts at doing work in prison
to try to minimise the risk of reoffending after sentence on release.
That fits into again the impression, which you have confirmed
, of a very chaotic patchwork.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes.
58. Do prisoners have to volunteer for programmes that confront
their reoffending? If so, are there carrots and sticks in it and
do they get something if they do and lose something if they do
not?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) They do have to volunteer for
them. For example, a sex offender has to volunteer for a sex offending
course, which means actually he has to admit his offence. This
causes some of them problems because they are not willing to admit
their offence. Sometimes they will admit an earlier offence but
not that one. That is the stick and carrot.
59. Forgive me, this touches on parole as well, I think,
in time?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) This is the point. They are
now told that unless they have gone through this course they will
not be paroled. That, I think, is right, particularly for that
sort of offence, because there is no offence which will worry
the public more than having a repeat sex offender out.
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