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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): I call Mr. Paul Stinchcombe.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am awfully sorry to have to say to the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) that I called Mr. Paul Stinchcombe.
11.45 am
Mr. Paul Stinchcombe (Wellingborough): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to make just a small contribution to this morning's debate.
My constituency of Wellingborough is not inner city; it is leafy Northamptonshire. It has pockets of deprivation and problem estates, but essentially it is middle England. None the less, heroin is available at £5 a wrap; youngsters hold and hide hard drugs at the behest of older pushers; and young mums come to me for help when their three and four-year-olds pick up needles that junkies have discarded in their front gardens. Local policemen estimate that 80 per cent. of crime in the constituency is drugs related. I do not believe that a single part of this country--a single community, family, age group or individual--is immune from the wreckage that addiction to hard drugs brings.
Many points need to be made in this debate. I hope to concentrate on just one area, which has barely been mentioned thus far. It is the problem--and, indeed, the opportunity--that arises in respect of drugs in prison. I have already shown to what extent crime is drugs related. Between half and four fifths of all crime in this country is estimated to have an association with drug taking. For some, that association is direct and causal--addicts steal simply to fund their habit. For others, the link is more attenuated. In all cases, however, whether the relationship is causal or not, the intervention of the criminal justice process affords an opportunity to deal not just with crime but with drug abuse.
That opportunity is most obvious when people with a drug problem are in custody, not just because they are a captive audience but because they might just begin to question why they are in custody. They might be receptive to the idea that drug taking was part of the reason that they lost their liberty, and they might be receptive to help offered in that regard. Incarceration therefore offers a unique opportunity for us to step in and break a vicious and life-wrecking cycle of drugs and crime.
I am not alone in thinking that, and the idea is not new. As long ago as 1995 a document entitled "Drug Misuse in Prison" was published. In April 1998, a document on tackling drugs in prison was published as part of a so-called "new strategy". They are good documents, which signal a genuine commitment to act. Money has been made available, yet I fear that in implementing the strategies embraced by those documents we are continuing to make avoidable errors.
I do not, however, underestimate the difficulties. We can agree on the objectives. Any anti-drugs strategy for prisons and prisoners must endeavour to achieve three aims: to cut the supply of drugs into prisons; to develop appropriate regimes in prisons; and to ensure that prisoners' needs are met when they leave prison. We can agree on the aims; the trouble is that they are more easily agreed than achieved. Each of those aims raises difficult questions, some of which are hideously difficult. Let us take the first aim of cutting the supply of drugs to prisons.
We could cut the supply of drugs into prisons to an irreducible minimum, but to do so we would have to compel closed visits and intimate searches. By such compulsion, we could stop drugs being concealed--internally or in nappies--by the person visiting, stop drugs being transferred to the prisoner and stop them being secreted internally by the prisoner immediately afterwards.
The difficulty with that approach, however, is threefold. First, it would lead to hideous problems of management in prison. Secondly, it would breach fundamental human rights, not only of the prisoners but of the visitors who have committed no crime at all. Thirdly, and most important, it would threaten the family relationships of the person in custody, whereas we know that preserving those family relationships is the single best way of trying to prevent that person from going back to crime once he has left custody. So, difficult questions arise.
If difficult issues arise in stopping drugs getting into prison, even harder issues arise in developing anti-drugs regimes for people while they are in custody. Many aims must be embraced by an appropriate regime, but we can agree on those aims: to reduce the demand for drugs in prison; to assess the drug-related needs and health needs of prisoners while they are in prison; to develop programmes and wings in prison to meet those needs; to support those programmes with effective drug testing; and to use drug results, especially positive results, not only to penalise inmates but to trigger positive and useful intervention. However, although we can agree those aims, that is not enough--we have to work on the policies, which are difficult to formulate.
In assessing prisoners' health and drug-related needs, for example, what if we should decide to allow needle exchanges in prisons? We allow that to happen outside prison, but if we allowed it in prison, not only health issues but issues of whether we are condoning drug use--and even putting weapons into circulation--would arise. They are difficult issues on which reasonable people can disagree.
There are difficulties also with the issue of drug-free wings. Should we build such wings around incentives, offering a package of Sky television for those who want to go on the wings? If we do not offer such incentives, perhaps the approach will not work. If we do, we encourage people to go on drug-free wings even if they do not want to live in a drug-free environment. Given that we cannot stop drugs going into prison, perhaps, in taking that approach, we would be sowing the ruination of drug-free wings.
There are also difficulties with mandatory drug testing, which we know we need. However, when we have introduced mandatory drug-testing, we are told by every single prisoner that it has led to a switch from cannabis to heroin abuse--simply because cannabis stays in the bloodstream for 28 days, whereas opiates stay for only three days. That evidence may be anecdotal, but it is unanimous anecdotal evidence. It was also backed up by a recent answer to one of my parliamentary questions. It said that, in the past five years, cannabis finds in prison have declined by a half, whereas heroin finds have increased by 300 per cent.
If we discover difficult problems in achieving the first two aims, we shall likewise discover difficult problems in achieving the third--trying to secure an easy and proper transition to care for prisoners when they leave prison. How are we to achieve that when prisoners are moved from prison to prison so frequently that they often end up hundreds of miles from the community into which they will be released? One of the saddest facts of all is that, even when we do reduce inmates' drug dependency, we release them into their communities without aftercare and therefore put them at huge risk. The risk is not only that
they will take up their habit again, but that because their tolerance to drugs is diminished, they will overdose and die.
There are horribly difficult problems, but that makes it all the more important to take the easy steps first--to do the simple things and to get them right. With the greatest possible respect to Ministers, I must say that I genuinely believe that we are failing to do that now and that we are making basic, avoidable and expensive errors.
I shall take the three aims in turn and give my hon. Friend the Minister a few simple examples. On cutting the supply of drugs into prison, we know that we cannot have compulsory closed visits. However, we can have centrally funded drugs dogs.
Dr. Iddon:
Does my hon. Friend admit that drugs go into prisons not only by the front door, but via the back door?
Mr. Stinchcombe:
Drugs go into prisons in many ways. Sometimes they are thrown over the fences--in crisp bags, for example--but they go in predominately via visits.
I have said that I do not believe that imposing closed visits is the answer. One thing that we could do, however, is use centrally funded drugs dogs, active and passive, in prisons. An answer to a parliamentary question that I tabled a week or so ago states that training and maintenance costs for a passive dog are £3,321, and for an active dog £3,000. The annual refresher is £1,000, and the average annual cost of keeping a dog is £2,088. Therefore, it is not hideously expensive.
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