Examination of witnesses (Questions 350
- 359)
MONDAY 27 JULY 1998
MRS BREIDGE
GADD, MR
OLIVER BRANNIGAN
and MR BRENDAN
FULTON
Chairman
350. Mrs Gadd, you and your colleagues are
most welcome. We will adopt the procedure which we usually adopt
under which we will seek to make the order of questions sound
logical and coherent, but it means they may consequently come
from different parts of the horseshoe. If at any stage you wanted
to gloss any answer you have given, either at the time or subsequently
in writing, please do not hesitate to do so. You have been very
helpful in providing us with material in advance. Is there anything
you would like to say of an introductory nature before we embark?
(Mrs Gadd) Yes, I would like to augment what we
submitted with just a few pieces of additional information about
the Probation Board for Northern Ireland. Before I do that, perhaps
I could introduce my colleagues. Oliver Brannigan, who is Deputy
Chief Probation Officer, who is in terms of split between myself
and him responsible for the operational running of the organisation.
On my left, Brendan Fulton, who is the Assistant Chief Probation
Officer responsible for the Probation Board's work in prisons
with release prisoners and with prisoners' families. I would like
to say briefly that the Probation Board was set up in 1982. It
is a community based board with members appointed by the Secretary
of State and it runs the Probation Service in Northern Ireland.
The Probation Service operates each year with a budget of just
under £11 million and has a staff of 300, of whom 200 deliver
services to offenders, their families, et cetera, and 100 are
in administration. Our legislative functions are broadly similar
to that of England and Wales, although slightly different. We
do not do civil work in Northern Ireland, we do only criminal
work. We provide reports to courts, we supervise people on probation
and on community service orders, and we provide a social welfare
service to prisoners. Our legislative responsibility until January
of this year with regard to prisoners released into the community
was quite different from England and Wales, and the only statutory
supervision we were required to provide by legislation was the
supervision of non-terrorist life sentence prisoners. Since January
of this year that situation has changed and two new orders have
been introduced into Northern Ireland—a custody probation
order, which I think is certainly unique in the United Kingdom
and as far as I can see unique within Europe, and we also are
required by law now to supervise those sex offenders who are placed
on licence by the judge at the time of sentence.
351. Thank you very much indeed for those
opening remarks. Let me start by asking, and obviously our inquiry
is into the Prison Service, how important you believe it is to
recruit significant numbers of members of staff from under-represented
parts of the community?
(Mrs Gadd) The Probation Board would place a lot
of importance on having a Probation Service which as far as possible
represented the community in Northern Ireland, both in terms of
gender and religious/racial make-up, so that we would reflect
the community, and we monitor that on a regular basis.
352. Are you applying that remark to the
Prison Service as well?
(Mrs Gadd) I think it is important that all of
the public sector agencies should aim for that objective.
353. How far do you agree with the observations
by NIACRO, which they made to us in a session which we had, that
the Prison Service is a "closed world" which has avoided
much outside scrutiny?
(Mrs Gadd) I think I would have to say that the
Prison Service, certainly from our perspective, appears to have
been subject to fairly regular scrutiny over the past few years,
both by Government itself and certainly by journalists. I would
have to say that any prison service in any country to a large
extent tends to have to be a closed organisation because its fundamental
job is to remove from society those people whom the courts require
to be removed from society, and to keep them securely—that
is a primary aim of a prison service. I think in Northern Ireland
the Prison Service has been much concerned with the security of
a particular prisoner group which may have removed it more from
the community than one would expect in a normal society.
Mr Browne
354. Mrs Gadd, gentlemen, good morning.
One of the things that we have observed or one of the aspects
of the Northern Ireland Prison Service is the non-segregation
of sex offenders within the Prison Service. Is there in your experience
any special problems associated with that, or are there any special
problems associated with the non-segregation of sex offenders?
(Mrs Gadd) I think, Mr Chairman, with your permission,
I will call on Mr Fulton to deal with that. I would have to say
that the handling of sex offenders in prison and in the community
is one of the most difficult issues that we currently have to
deal with. We would have to say that our position would be hoping
that everyone concerned with the problem, and I include almost
the general public in that, would work collectively on how we
can deal with this problem. There are problems in segregating
them and there are problems in not segregating them, in that they
are vulnerable to attack from other prisoners if they are not
segregated, and this attack from other prisoners increases their
feelings that rather than being the perpetrators they are in fact
the victims of society. On the other hand, segregating them creates
a special group of people who regrettably can very often further
their interests in prison if they are together. It is a very difficult
issue. What we would like to see is the best quality programmes
being delivered for sex offenders in prison, and if those programmes
are part of a compendium of programmes which help all sorts of
prisoners address their offending, then it becomes less important
whether they are segregated or not; if the culture in the prison
and the regime in the prison is such that all offences are dealt
with.
(Mr Fulton) I think it is a continually changing
situation and we are in a position where those who have offended
against children and sex offenders against adults are reaching
nearly 10 per cent of the population in prisons, and obviously
within specific prisons, such as Magilligan, it is a higher proportion
than that, and that does change the dynamic and does make it more
possible to begin to see a regime where many of them may well
be protected and still be integrated into the rest of that group.
That would be the ideal, and I think there are some signs of shifts
within that. They are more vulnerable in that situation and we
are hopeful that as well as the new buildings becoming available
for the remand part, the issue can be looked at specifically within
the context of that development as well.
355. In a sense, that last answer leads
me on to another subject I wanted to ask you about, and it may
be appropriate to ask you about it now. Do you think there should
be a separate remand unit within the prison system within Northern
Ireland?
(Mrs Gadd) Yes, we think that would be a very
good idea. Remand prisoners by definition are quite a difficult
group to work with. They have not been found guilty of the offences
with which they are charged, but many of them have a whole range
of problems which need to be dealt with, and we think a lot more
could be done in terms of a seamless offer of service to them
in terms of getting them to address their offending if they were
in a separate unit. Also, their relationship with their families,
with the community outside, is very different, they are in a state
of suspended future so to speak, nobody quite knows what is happening.
It is important that we get maximum benefit out of what can be
done with them in the remand stage in terms of preparing them
for release, while bearing in mind that no one knows when they
are going to be released back into the community. So we would
see that as being important, yes.
356. If I have understood those answers,
what you are suggesting, Mr Fulton, was if that change—that
is a separate unit for remand prisoners—could be achieved,
that would be a start in dealing with a high proportion of an
increasing proportion of sex and child offenders who are being
placed on remand presumably? What specific changes do you think
should be made in dealing with prisoners who are sex offenders
and child offenders?
(Mr Fulton) Just so I understand, you are making
a distinction between those who are sentenced to offences against
adults as distinct from those who are offenders against children?
357. I was only trying to reflect part of
your answer. You made that distinction yourself in your answer,
Mr Fulton, as I recall it. My interest is in the fact sex offenders
are not segregated by the Northern Ireland Prison Service and
whether or not that impedes work that you could do with them.
(Mr Fulton) Our feeling is that integration actually
will aid work with them, will assist work with them. There are
situations where they feel so vulnerable they will not actually
be in a position to look at the wider issues, and that is the
balance that I think we are always trying to strike. The distinction
between those who offend against children and adults is important
because it is more those who offend against children who are more
vulnerable within the Prison Service, and yet within that group
obviously everybody does not feel vulnerable. I think we start
from that particular premise. Apart from the possibility of doing
a programme which specifically looks at that kind of offending,
they have begun in Magilligan to look at other issues with sex
offenders—anger management, alcohol management, those kind
of factors—which are on the side but which are factors alongside
their specific offending, and that is help within an integrated
setting and that would be much more difficult than the actual
setting of segregation.
(Mrs Gadd) If I might add, we would be concerned
about segregating sex offenders because it gives the impression
that they are people apart, outside of the community, and that
their offences are more serious than other offences of serious
violence. Our view would be that all prisoners who commit offences
of violence should be challenged in prison with regard to their
behaviour and that would include a whole range of violence in
the home, on the streets, et cetera. The culture in prison should
be that prisoners should be helped to address the problems they
face with regard to the victims, and that is no greater or no
less with sex offenders than it is with other forms of violence.
Our key interest is that the work which starts in prison can be
continued in a seamless way into the community where they will
require in a sense a different sort of supervision and treatment
from what they get in prison, but nevertheless in our view the
problems start when they are released not when they are sentenced
in terms of their risk to other people. Northern Ireland is small
enough, irrespective of where they are placed, for us to be able
to work with the Prison Service to deliver the sorts of treatment
programmes which appear to work.
358. If I can move on to another subject,
when we visited Maghaberry Prison, we were shocked that a child
was being detained, a female child. How would you improve the
treatment of female child prisoners in Northern Ireland?
(Mrs Gadd) We do not think they should be in prison.
They should not be in prison. We understand that there is a difficulty
with numbers but it is the view of the Board that there should
be a specialist secure unit which has staff who are trained and
experienced in dealing with the problems that this sort of young
female presents. It is not going to be cost effective in the sense
the numbers would not make it so, but nevertheless for the small
number of very disturbed young people who do come through the
system we believe that specialist facility should be available
and preferably not delivered by the Prison Service. It should
be delivered by people who are skilled in dealing with very damaged
disruptive females.
359. Are you satisfied with the arrangements
for custody at present for women prisoners, young offenders and,
obviously we have discussed sex offenders, the overall arrangements
for sex offenders?
(Mrs Gadd) In the Prison Service in Northern Ireland
over the past 25 years the primary concern has been to deal with
the terrorist problem and to deal with the security issues, and
because of that all of the prisons in Northern Ireland operate
a higher level of security requirements. If we did not have a
situation of a terrorist threat, we would want to suggest that
prisoners who are lower risk in a sense prior to release are tested
and helped to prepare for resettlement in conditions of custody
which mirror more what they are going to find when they go into
the community. I am not talking quite about open prisons, because
open prisons can have a lax regime but not work towards resettlement.
Ideally we would like to see a continuum of services, for example,
a kind of working out hostel or where a person is still a prisoner
but might be able to practise living in a self-contained flat,
because a lot of the people you are talking about are in prison
because their offending is caused by their lack or social or living
skills, they have not had a chance to learn how to live in a community.
Many of them, regrettably, have grown up in institutional care
of one kind or another, and they are not going to live satisfactorily
in society until they are helped to practise living skills, which
include practical things like cooking but also include human relationships,
and a top security prison is not good at helping in that way.
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