Examination of witnesses (Questions 380
- 401)
MONDAY 27 JULY 1998
MRS BREIDGE
GADD, MR
OLIVER BRANNIGAN
and MR BRENDAN
FULTON
380. Do you find this relationship is effective
in delivering the service? Are there any special problems relating
to it?
(Mrs Gadd) There is always tension because the
primary concern of prisons is to keep prisoners within their care.
The primary concern of probation in a sense is resettlement into
the community and within that very often we may want to do things
about family relationships, about the community, about training,
about employment, which the Prison Service does not see as important
because they have other considerations, such as prison officer
staffing, overtime, et cetera. So there is always tension. Sometimes
it is healthy, sometimes it is not healthy. It is very frustrating
to probation officers or anyone if you bring in an outside expert,
as we try to do as much as possible, and then find that the programme
is cancelled because there are not enough prison officers to convey
the men from A to B, but that does not happen very often and it
is happening decreasingly so.
381. Thank you very much. Finally and briefly,
would you consider the provision of the prisoner welfare service
in general should be organised more regionally in Northern Ireland
than it is at present?
(Mrs Gadd) I think, ideally, if we had a situation
of peace in Northern Ireland we would have lots of ideas perhaps
for working with the, hopefully, reducing prison population that
we have, and rather than regional delivery of service we would
see perhaps different prisons specialising much more in different
sorts of prisoners. That would allow us to develop facilities
at local level in the community, and one of our concerns is providing
the same quality of service in the community in rural areas as
in urban areas. More and more, the sort of work that works with
offenders is group work, which is easy in Belfast and almost impossible
in somewhere like Fermanagh or Tyrone, because by the time you
bring the offenders together half the day is over. So there are
big regional variations in the sorts of problems which occur.
Our view is that the service delivered should meet those regional
variations.
Mr Salter
382. Good morning, Mrs Gadd and gentlemen.
A couple of quick questions. You have a fairly unique position
in terms of how you regard the delivery of the Prison Service
as a whole, coming in and putting in your own specific expertise
and your own disciplines and your own role. Something we have
picked up in the course of this inquiry quite strongly, particularly
from prison officers but from others, is what I would perceive
as a huge problem of low staff morale and perhaps a lack of confidence
in the senior management in the Prison Service. Is that something
you have detected and can you put your finger on any reasons for
it?
(Mrs Gadd) If I could make a comment about low
staff morale in prisons not just in Northern Ireland but throughout
Europe, I think that the prison services have to do a very complex
job where society demands more from them, and that is not just
to contain people but to change them while they are in prison,
yet the level of training and support is way below what is given
to or required of other organisations such as ourselves which
have the same job to do. In a sense, I would like to see in the
future training for prison officers, not all of them obviously
but the key ones working with prisoners, which is equivalent to
and as good as the multidisciplinary training that probation officers,
psychologists, et cetera, get, and I think that will increase
morale. I think prison officers in Northern Ireland have had an
extremely difficult job to do over the past 30 years and I would
be more concerned if they were not showing those signs of stress
now.
383. What I have picked up, certainly from
evidence from the POA, is almost unbridled hatred of the current
management structures and, certainly looking back at the evidence,
open contempt for the way the service is structured and the quality
of management, which seem to me to go beyond improvements in the
training programme. There also appears to be, and there is some
evidence to back this up, a lack of a clear, coherent personnel
strategy. Would you like to comment on any of that or have you
picked up any flavour of that or areas which perhaps could be
improved in terms of the personnel management structure in the
Prison Service as a whole in Northern Ireland?
(Mrs Gadd) I do think that the focus and the direction
has been on the terrorist problem, keeping secure highly dangerous
men. I would like to see an approach which focuses on career development,
on training which leads to external accreditation and which is
multidisciplinary in the future, which takes all those working
in the criminal justice system—probation, police, prison,
voluntary sector, the community itself—and develops a range
of qualifications which have equality of access. I think when
you have a prison service where—and I have to be careful
what I say—certainly the education service in prisons for
prisoners has been very good, I think it must be difficult for
prison officers to spend their day helping prisoners be educated
when perhaps they have not had access to those sorts of resources
themselves.
(Mr Fulton) If I could add to that, I think for
those prison officers who have been involved in either programmes
or aspects of work with prisoners with other professionals, or
indeed just with prisoners who are trying to change, there is
some buzz with some of those staff. It is not realistic to think
that everybody can do that type of work. Part of our debate has
been actually to look at some of the aspects of the basic social
welfare role in prison were in fact we would see the possibilities
of prison staff taking on more of that role which would actually
free up some of our more highly trained staff to do some other
aspects of the work. One of the blocks at times for prison staff
has been that lack of relationship or block on relationships with
prisoners, and part of the buzz with any job has to come from
relationships, and relationships with prisoners has to be an important
part of that.
Mr Beggs
384. Good morning, Mrs Gadd and gentlemen.
Up until January of this year only non-terrorist life sentenced
prisoners were subject to statutory supervision as part of a release
licence. Could you comment on why released terrorist prisoners
are not subject to statutory supervision?
(Mrs Gadd) The life sentence ones?
385. Released terrorist prisoners.
(Mrs Gadd) The Government policy since the early
1970s has been not to require those sentenced under the emergency
legislation schedules to be supervised in the community on release.
The legislation introduced 50 per cent unsupervised remission,
and life sentence prisoners who were, as I say, convicted came
out on unsupervised licence. The reason was that it was felt a
supervision programme would not work.
386. Could you comment further on whether
this difference of treatment between terrorists and non-terrorist
prisoners has created significant resentment from other released
lifers and/or any other difficulties for the Board in maintaining
effective compulsory post-release supervision?
(Mrs Gadd) I think it would be fair to say those
lifers who come out under our supervision do—some of them—resent
the fact that they are subject to very close supervision and scrutiny
in the community, whereas another category of men and women who
have committed in many cases more murders come out unsupervised.
Certainly I get complaints from them. I have not had a situation
where any lifer refused to be supervised. I would also have to
say that many of the supervised in fact welcome supervision because
quite a lot of them do not have families, do not have community
support and need the help as well as the surveillance.
387. In your memorandum you say, "...
our main focus in prison will be on helping to prepare those prisoners
who engage with us for re-integration into the community."
In your opinion, should not all prisoners be required to engage
with the Board within prison and for a period post-release?
(Mrs Gadd) Yes, I would prefer it that way but
it is impossible I think in any European country to force a prisoner
to be treated while he is in prison. So we are going to have to
use persuasion, and that includes all sorts of elements to get
the prisoners who come out subject to custody probation orders
to work with us in prison. If they refuse to, and they will be
able to we understand legally, when they are released into the
community if they do not abide by the requirements of the Probation
Board we can then bring them back to court and they can be re-sentenced.
But we cannot take any sort of legal action during the custody
period, and that is a legal constraint rather than a policy one.
388. Finally, could you explain more fully
the purpose of the new custody probation orders? What kind of
offenders are receiving them? What kind of demands do they make
and are likely to make on the Board?
(Mr Brannigan) Since legislation was imposed,
we have had somewhere over 100 custody probation orders made.
The courts do not seem to have a common thread of sentencing policy
in relation to custody probation orders, but as far as we can
see from looking at the cases which there have been, the court
wants you to have an element of punishment and rehabilitation
because of the raft of information the court has. I would have
to say if there is a predominance of any amount of offenders getting
custody probation orders at the moment, it would tend to be drug
related offences, especially those who have been engaged in what
the court would perceive as dealing rather than using. So that
will pose difficulties for the Probation Board when those people
who do not engage with us in prison come out of prison, and we
will have to set about setting and devising programmes which engage
those people. It is going be extremely difficult, especially as
we recognise those who have been dealing perceive it as an economic
activity rather than a criminal activity, and we are going to
have to deal with that and supervise the orders very closely.
(Mrs Gadd) It would be remiss of us not to mention
resources in front of a Committee such as this, and we have been
subject to public sector cuts as everyone else has. We would be
concerned that in fact the resources follow the new responsibilities
in the legislation. I think also, with regard to the type of offender
that Mr Brannigan has referred to, we will be working very closely
with the police in terms of joint supervision and surveillance
of some of the people such as sex offenders, drug dealers, et
cetera, who come out, and we are doing that already.
Mr Donaldson
389. Mrs Gadd, gentlemen, regarding the
future priorities in the Prison Service and particularly the role
of the Probation Board, you suggested in your memorandum to the
Committee that because of the increase in statutory supervision
there will be more pressure on the availability of non-statutory
services to other released prisoners. I think you were referring
particularly to the work with sex offenders and other aspects
of your work within the prisons. Your future focus will be primarily
on helping to prepare those prisoners within the prisons who engage
with the Probation Board for reintegration into the community.
Could you elaborate on this and particularly what services you
feel you will be unable to provide as a result of the increase
in the statutory supervision that you are required to carry out,
and what will be the consequences of having to withdraw these
services?
(Mrs Gadd) If I could give the example of sex
offenders, the bulk of sex offenders so far have been sentenced
without supervision in the community on release. The legislation
in fact only came into operation in January. Somewhat, I would
have to say, to our surprise, courts have not been making supervised
licences of those sentenced since January, and there have been
at least ten very serious sex offenders sentenced to long periods
of imprisonment. If we do not have the resources when they are
released and seek help on a voluntary basis, we will not be able
to integrate them into our existing programmes. We will, if we
have spare places, but if the courts make statutory orders we
are going to have to say to them, "You are going on to a
waiting list because we have not got the resources to do that."
Another example is the domestic violence programmes. We find that
people prefer to come forward to those on a voluntary basis rather
than being sentenced through the courts, and a lot of cases where
people are admitting guilt are actually not processed through
the courts because of the difficulty of getting a conviction.
If our resources are limited, as they are at the moment, we have
got to give preference to people who are part of the statutory
order; it is a legal requirement. The other big area is the service
we provide to prisoners' families at the moment, and that is very
vulnerable to being reduced because of cuts, because it is not
a primary requirement in legislation. In fact they are a group
of people whom no one has primary responsibility for, and we have
had to reduce that somewhat this year and obviously the Northern
Ireland Office is looking at the possibility of increasing funding
to sustain that service. It costs less than half a million pounds
and in our view is very much needed because prisoners' children
particularly are vulnerable to becoming criminals themselves.
390. On the cutbacks in your service, how
far will such cutbacks be alleviated by the reductions in the
requests for welfare assistance in the prisons consequent upon
the greater availability of telephones to prisoners? I think you
have indicated in your memorandum that there was a drop-off in
requests for assistance due to the availability of telephones
and that prisoners tended to have a go for themselves?
(Mrs Gadd) Not a lot unfortunately because the
drop-off in welfare requests—like, "Would you ring
my wife and tell her to come on Thursday, not Saturday"—has
allowed us to develop more programmes in prison which are about
addressing offending behaviour. So we have replaced the time by
probation staff spent on that with the development of programmes
such as anger management, addressing violence, sex offending,
victim awareness, et cetera, so we are moving to try and do something
with a bit more quality and depth to it.
391. Finally, Chairman, Mr Hesford touched
on the issue of the Belfast Agreement and the impact that that
would have, and it will have an impact upon the prison population
with the accelerated release of prisoners. To what extent will
that impact upon your resources and your ability to deliver welfare
assistance? Will the consequent reduction in the prison population
mean that you are able to utilise your resources more fully in
terms of welfare assistance to the remaining prison population?
As the Probation Board are you developing a strategy to deal with
the new situation which will evolve with prisoners, certainly
the changes consequent upon the accelerated release scheme for
the terrorist prisoners?
(Mrs Gadd) The implications in terms of down-sizing
for the Probation Board is quite slight because at the moment
in the Maze Prison we have four probation staff and with the reduction
in the prison population those particular staff could be re-allocated
into existing vacancies within the community, so it is small beer
from our point of view. The reduction in the prison population
leaving a prison population which in a sense perhaps reflects
more normal society, we see as being a very exciting challenge
for us and for the Prison Service in the future, with us perhaps
being able to develop the range of facilities in prisons in Northern
Ireland which could lead the way to using prisons in different
ways to help address re-offending and helping prepare people for
resettlement. So we would look forward to the day when we might
be collectively looking at a normal prison population.
392. Would it be fair to conclude then from
what you have said that your primary focus and the focus of your
resources even in changing circumstances is on work within the
prisons with prisoners, preparing for release into the community,
and that although resources may be freed up by the changes brought
about by the Belfast Agreement, your preference is to focus those
on innovative programmes within the prisons rather than shoring
up your welfare system work for, for example, prisoners' families,
which you have indicated is reducing as a result of cutbacks?
(Mrs Gadd) No, I am sorry, I am not expressing
myself very well. We fundamentally believe that the trouble starts
when the man is released and so as well as working within prisons
to help the man or woman do whatever can be done within the prison
context, we also place great importance on having the supervision
and support available for that time frame of coming out into the
community. Take, for example, a prisoner with an addiction problem,
he or she can do any amount of alcohol abuse work in prison or
drug abuse work in prison, but it is when he or she is in the
community and has the full range of temptations which is the testing
time. So in fact our focus is on using their time in prison to
prepare for release but also trying to have the resources in the
community for when they come out when it is most needed, and we
would want to emphasise that, where possible using the community
to work in the prisons and to work with the people in as local
a way as possible, to bring outsiders in, rather than to do it
as an internal institutional event. In Northern Ireland, because
of the size of Northern Ireland, most people can travel to all
the prisons, and that is a very realistic possibility for the
future.
Mr Grogan
393. Just to turn the focus for a second
from the offenders to the victims and their families, in England
and Wales under the Victims' Charter, which dates back to 1990,
there is a statutory responsibility on the Probation Service in
the case of life sentence prisoners when they are going to be
released to contact the victims or their family if at all possible
to discuss the process. Is anything similar happening in Northern
Ireland?
(Mrs Gadd) Other than in an ad hoc manner,
a similar policy has not been adopted by the Northern Ireland
Office. We, the Board, are in the process of putting together
a new corporate plan and we have signalled to our criminal justice
services division that this is an issue we would like to explore
with them, and to use the very valuable information which has
come through from England and Wales on how we might address this.
What we are finding is that a small number of victims, particularly
of violent sex offences, in many instances through their local
MPs are approaching us to find out about the offender in prison.
So it is something we would very much welcome further discussion
on. We would see the lead in that needing to come primarily from
victims organisations and that should be about the victims' needs
and not about the offenders' needs, but we feel the Probation
Service would have a very valuable role in dealing with that here.
394. There is now a minister within the
Northern Ireland Office with responsibility for these issues,
for dealing with victims and their families, more generally does
the Probation Service in Northern Ireland have any direct contact
with victims or their families? Are their needs taken into account
in your more general policy?
(Mrs Gadd) Yes. All of our programmes now contain
a victim element where staff are requiring offenders to look at
the notion of victim, who was the victim, and to deal with that.
Specifically, we involve the Northern Ireland Victim Support in
the delivery of our programmes and we work very closely with Women's
Aid with regard to domestic violence, and our domestic violence
programmes actively involve the victim, whether that is a partner
or children, with a monitoring role once the person starts the
programme. We also work with the organisations which deal with
the victims of rape and sex offences.
Mr McWalter
395. Good morning. I would like to ask some
questions which relate to the England and Wales Prison-Probation
Review and its relevance to Northern Ireland. Specifically, some
of the things in the Review suggest that you may reorganise things
along regional boundaries or go along boundaries that relate to
policing areas and so on, and some of those options do not seem
very appropriate to Northern Ireland. The Review incorporates
the so-called "zero plus option", which obviously does
not require that kind of structural change. I wonder if you could
say to what extent you think that zero plus option within the
England and Wales Prison-Probation Review is relevant to Northern
Ireland?
(Mrs Gadd) I think Northern Ireland is quite different
because there is one probation board in Northern Ireland which
covers the whole of Northern Ireland, although I would have to
say increasingly the Board itself is pre-occupied with the differences
and the different sorts of crime problems throughout Northern
Ireland. That is important whatever the structure. We have the
advantage of having one probation service and that is to do with
size as well and one prison service, so I think we are in a very
different situation here in that it is highly possible to work
very closely with the police, the Prison Service, social services
and all the other various statutory and voluntary agencies on
a regional level. In fact there is a plethora of different committees
which in our view need to be rationalised. But with regard to
all the major problems of high risk offenders, you will find at
local level there are regional committees which are sitting, whether
that is to do with child protection or drugs or violence or whatever.
So our view would be that the circumstances are different here
and there is less need for rationalisation. I am not sure if I
am answering the question.
396. That is a start, I think. One of the
things they mention, for instance, is the public image of the
Probation Service and they suggest maybe a chance of name might
be appropriate. Some people think that probation means you have
managed to get off. There are also very technical concepts like
through care, which look as if the Probation Service is mainly
concerned with those who perpetrate crime rather than the victims,
as my colleague suggested. A lot of alternative names are suggested
instead of Probation Service, and I wondered whether you personally
thought one aspect of such a change might be to change the name
and change the public perception of your role.
(Mrs Gadd) I think we need to re-double our efforts
to change the perception of our role. We try very hard to get
it across via the media that probation is not a let off and a
soft option. It is enormously difficult to do this because prison
has such a strong image for people, you are taken away, you lose
your freedom immediately. It is very difficult in a sense to compete
with that image in a community which wants to see offenders punished.
To be honest, I think you need to change the way you deliver your
services. I think you need to hold offenders to account and I
would say in Northern Ireland we are doing that. I think the name
is of less relevance and it is quite difficult. I understand that
in England and Wales the notion of "community justice service"
is one example, but that has all sorts of connotations in Northern
Ireland that we would be very unhappy about. There is also an
idea taken from Canada and America of a "correctional service",
which again we would be unhappy about. In our view the Probation
Service's fundamental contribution is its base in the community
and its work with the community, and the fact that whatever it
does for offenders it works with the community, in the community
and very often funds the community, and we see it as a community
based supervision service as opposed to a correctional service.
So I would not want to change the name unless we collectively
came up with something better than we have already got.
397. Somebody suggested "community
protection and justice service".
(Mrs Gadd) That, again, in Northern Ireland would
have all sorts of connotations. There is a term used called "community
justice", which is not in——
398. I understand.
(Mrs Gadd) We would be very unhappy about that.
Chairman
399. Mrs Gadd, you and your colleagues have
answered our questions extremely comprehensively. I was not sure,
given the number of questions we had to ask, what our timetable
would precisely be. I have a couple of questions I would like
to ask before we conclude and then I have a wrap-up question.
Could you say more about the Prison Service's Review of Programmes
for 1997-98 and what its implications would be for your own Board?
(Mrs Gadd) Brendan Fulton has actually been a
member of that Review Committee so, if I may, I will ask him to
answer.
(Mr Fulton) Fundamentally, it will bring a single
direction in the Prison Service and also a central place where
in probation terms we can actually link in and align the ideas
about the programmes, the structures of the programmes and the
actual manuals, which could then be delivered. It can also look
across the prison population and decide what are the priorities
for the programmes. We are in a situation where a lot of the good
work on programmes came out of the evolution of creative work
by individuals, by the Probation Service, by different members
of the Prison Service, by psychologists and others, and it clearly
was at a point where it needed to be co-ordinated much more. The
Review of Programmes does offer that, it offers the possibility
of a central co-ordinating group and a group within each prison
which will shadow that and translate into the local prison situation
how that is to be put into effect. It is also important from a
probation point of view, as we look at the journey that offenders
and those sentenced may actually take through the courts, and
we talked earlier about custody probation orders, where programmes
are being offered in prison that they actually are aligned with
what is possible within the community. An example would be if
a sex offender actually did the intensive course which is now
available within prison, which might take up five to six months
to complete, we on the outside would line up a relapse prevention
programme to align with that. There are enough similarities for
us to do that and we can look at a number of other programmes—the
cognitive skills programme, for example—so that prisoners
are not being asked both in the community and out to keep doing
the same kind of things and also what they do may actually in
a modular sense build up to something which we could begin to
look at so that they may get something out of it apart from just
measurements of behaviour. It offers an opportunity for us in
probation so that we can accredit programmes and bring in accreditation
of staff who are trained to deliver those programmes. The final
point, which is natural for us all, is to try and evaluate what
the impact of these programmes is and we are hopeful out of this
central group we could begin to agree some follow-up studies about
the impact of the programmes.
(Mrs Gadd) Again I think we have missed out on
saying what is the vital importance we place on training for employment.
I suppose our dream, our vision, would be that we persuaded the
Prison Service not just to occupy the prisoner while he is in
prison but to use his time in prison in order to prepare him for
where he is going to be in a year post-prison, and that would
mean an emphasis on jobs and training and a seamless service there
which clearly would have a high role for training and employment
agencies and also employers, trade unions, et cetera.
400. I have one supplementary question which
I think, arguably, you have already answered but I will still
ask it. You have referred to "the conduct of the review of
programmes as providing a model for inter-agency and interdisciplinary
working". I think your testimony already has indicated why
you might think that, but do you want to elaborate on that at
all?
(Mrs Gadd) I would say it is vital that all of
those working in prisons work in a collaborative manner and not
a competitive manner, that we pool our resources to maximise what
we can deliver, which helps the prisoner reduce re-offending on
release and which tries to provide support to the family. That
can only be done when the different disciplines work together
and where the potential of each discipline is maximised, and we
believe we can contribute a lot of that to the working with, the
training of and supporting of prison officers.
401. You have been extremely patient with
us, not least in the degree to which we rearranged the programme,
not I have to say through our own fault but because of the programme
of the Northern Ireland Bill on the floor of the House of Commons
which caused our plans to have to change. Having been very patient,
is there anything we have not asked you which has surprised you
we have not asked?
(Mrs Gadd) Chairman, that would be a real give-away!
We will resist the temptation! I think we would simply want to,
I hope, impress on you that we feel the criminal justice system
in Northern Ireland has come through an enormously difficult period
and if we do have peace there are exciting times ahead. Certainly
within the Probation Board we have a wealth of talent and we want
to do our bit. As you know, Northern Ireland has already a relatively
low crime rate, we would hope we can keep it that way and that
we deal with the problems before they become problems. I would
have to end on a cautionary note about our deep concern about
the growing drugs problem in Northern Ireland. If I end on a slightly
negative note, it is just to reinforce that we do feel very strongly
that perhaps we need to gear up into the provision of a range
of services which deals with the growing addiction problem in
Northern Ireland.
Chairman: Thank you
most warmly, not least for accommodating us first thing on a Monday
morning. We are most grateful and I speak for the whole Committee
in appreciating the manner in which you have answered our questions.
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