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Oral evidence Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 11 November 2003 Members present: Mr John Denham, in the
Chair __________ Memorandum submitted by the National Advisory Council of the Independent Monitoring Boards Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: MR BRYAN BAKER, Chairman of National Advisory Council for Independent Monitoring Boards, MS JILL BERLIAND, member of National Advisory Council representing the South East, and MR NEIL ORR, Chairman of the Chelmsford Independent Monitoring Board, the National Advisory Council of the Independent Boards, examined.
Q72 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Baker. Thank you very much indeed for coming before us this morning. Would you start by introducing your colleagues, and if you have any opening remarks then please make them. Mr Baker: Thank you very much. I am Bryan Baker, Chairman of the Independent Monitoring Boards National Advisory Council, a body which in effect is almost defunct and will be replaced at the beginning of December by the National Council which will be headed by Sir Peter Lloyd as one of the provisions of the Lloyd Report. I have with me Jill Berliand, who is a member of the National Advisory Council and represents the Southeast of England and has served on the National Advisory Council with me for the last three years. On my right is Neil Orr, who is the Chairman of the Chelmsford Independent Monitoring Board, whom we asked to come along so that he could speak about the current situation in one particular prison to give you some practical examples of what is happening. We as the National Advisory Council are each members of boards ourselves, but as a national body we look at the performance of boards and try to monitor their progress. Perhaps we should make the point at the outset that that is our task. Our task is to monitor what boards do and help them to do their job more efficiently. We are not appraisers of prisons, as one prison against another. We operate on an independent basis within our own prison. As with overcrowding, we do gather general trends nationally and seek to address some of those issues.
Q73 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We will certainly want to draw on your expertise this morning. I am sure it has been mentioned to you that the Committee will pause at 11 o'clock for Remembrance Day . Given the overview that you have and with the qualifications you have just given us, do you as a body have a view of the purpose of prison and the role of rehabilitation within prison, as opposed to, for example, the other functions of prison to deter or punish, or to protect the public? Mr Baker: I think you start with the definition that we are normally given - there are probably three elements to imprisonment: the first is in fact to protect the public. Second, coupled with that, I am sure, is an element of punishment. Certainly as far as the general public are concerned, there is an element of punishment in it. The third element should be rehabilitation in the hope that you can use the time you have someone in prison to work with them, to put them into a situation where they do not re-offend. I think statistically it is probably shown that the rate of success is not as high as people would want it to be. I think something could be done about that by better coordinated services from the time that a prisoner goes into prison.
Q74 Chairman: We will pursue that last point in a moment. We have had evidence from some groups saying in essence that prison does so much harm that to try to rehabilitate a prisoner is merely trying to put right some of the damage you are doing by sending them to prison in the first place. Do you take that view, or do you have a more positive view about what can be achieved at least in the best prisons from what you have seen through rehabilitation? Mr Baker: I am sure my colleagues would have a view on this. My personal experience has been that there is a fair amount that is achieved. I think we would argue that there are a great many people going to prison with whom you will achieve nothing because of the time you are holding them in prison. In fact, their very presence in prison defeats part of the object of the Prison Service because it stops them working with those who are going to be in there longer, and with whom they could have some success. Mr Orr: There seem to be two things one is doing in prisons, one is security, keeping the prisoners secure from the public, and the public secure from the prisoners and, within the prison, prisoners secure from the officers and so on. The other is whether you are going to address this business of rehabilitation, resettlement and retraining. Really retraining, rehabilitation and resettlement in a lot of cases just do not exist. There is no "re" - it is training, habilitation and settlement, because an awful lot of these people have had nothing to retrain into. What one has got to decide is whether prison is there just to keep people away from the public, or whether you are going to put them back better people, and that is a big difficulty.
Q75 Chairman: I take the point that you are not an appraisal organisation, but with your collective experience are you able to highlight for us examples of really good practice despite everything else - despite the overcrowding and the pressure on resources and all the rest of it? As you discuss what you see in the prisons around the country, are you able to highlight for us examples of best practice and say, "This really is pretty close to what we should be doing"? Mr Baker: Yes, I think there are examples of this. One of the sadnesses as far as we are concerned as an organisation is that there are, by and large, individual initiatives from prison to prison. At our annual conference we try to hold workshops to highlight these goods practices in the hope that boards will go back to their prison and say, "Why aren't we doing this here?". Examples of good practice that we have identified latterly and been very impressed by are in such places as Liverpool, where now they have their scheme "Inside Out". From the moment the prisoner arrives there, there is - and I hesitate to use the word "committee" because I think it is wrong in that context - a group which comprises prison staff and all the social security departments from the local authority who tackle the prisoner's situation from the moment he arrives there. They try to protect his house or his flat to make sure that does not disappear because he cannot pay the rent, so that the first of his worries disappears - "I am not going to lose my home because I am here. Somebody is going to do something about protecting that". They look at other problems, looking after the family, children, and they work towards getting him to job interviews and trying to find something for him to do when he comes out. That is the sort of all-round package we think ought to be more universally applied. Leeds also operate a system where they bring in local employers. The prison and local employers try to set up job training, sometimes outside the prison, and then job interviews and jobs to go into. I think one of the biggest problems we face in terms of dealing with prisoners is that if you ask them to serve their sentence, then you just open the gate on the last day, kick them out onto the street and say "You're on your own", that is one of the surest ways of seeing that you get them back fairly swiftly.
Q76 Chairman: One of the things worrying the Committee is something you touched on at the very beginning. Why is it there is so much variation between between individual prisons which are, after all, all part of one Prison Service? We are already hearing from a lot of the evidence that there are individual initiatives, pockets of best practice. Why do you think that it is so variable? Mr Baker: I think there are a number of elements that contribute to that, starting with the governor; because the number one governor is the lord in his own domain. The number of very good governors is limited. One of the problems that I think a lot of prisons face is they start to make progress because they have a good governor, and because he is a good governor he is moved on to tackle problems elsewhere. You have that as the first element of the problem. I think the second element of the problem that we see is the attitude of prison staff themselves, where some are progressive, others are far from being progressive. It is the attitude they take to how busy they are and what they are prepared to put in. There are in prisons an enormous number of very, very good prison officers who work way beyond their brief to help prisoners. The attitude of staff is an important element in it. I think the final element is whether housing departments, social securities and all of the other bodies are prepared to come into prison and work with the prison. As I have said, the Liverpool system tackles it from day one, if you gave us a wish it would be that there was a system that said, "The moment you take a person, male or female, into prison then you start to work with them from that day towards their release".
Q77 Chairman: On that point, the Prison Service have told us that there is an increasing emphasis on joined-up work of just that sort. Is your impression that there is more and more of that joined-up work, or is it pretty much a patchwork, that it is good in places and bad in others? Mr Baker: I think there is some evidence that it is increasing, but I think our view would be that it is not increasing rapidly enough. Ms Berliand: I think there is one element I would add to what Bryan has said. I think the reason why it is not necessarily working in all prisons is because prisons have different roles to fulfil. Where you are looking at, for example, a local prison which is receiving people from courts every day and releasing them back to the courts every day (not the same prisoner, obviously) you have got 50, 60 or maybe 100 movements a day, it is almost impossible for anybody to work with those prisoners; whereas if you have got a Category C trainer, where you have got a static population, there is some brilliant work being done. In my own core local the work that is being done, for example, on first night in custody, first night in prison, you would be amazed at how good it is. What actually happens is people are coming back into the prison late at night; those staff are no longer on duty or no longer available and it cannot work, so we are told. The work that staff put into the policy document of what should be happening is excellent; but what the prison is actually doing is serving the courts and has not got resources really to do anything else. If we could move our prisoners quickly and on a consistent path to other prisons that are providing the courses they need then I think you would see centres of excellence all over the country.
Q78 David Winnick: We are all agreed about the overcrowding in prisons. Can I, first of all, ask you whether you have seen a report in The Times last week which said that the Chief Inspector of Prisons has in fact said she is rather worried that her work would be minimised, that spot checks which she undertakes (rather than stating to prisons beforehand that she intends to visit) could be reduced? Mr Baker: No, I did not see it.
Q79 David Winnick: Does it surprise you at all, that she has expressed concern? Mr Orr: It surprised me, I confess, that she should be concerned. With the Chief Inspector I would say one of the great virtues of it were these surprise visits from time to time, especially in a prison such as ours at Chelmsford which is right down the bottom of the pile. Sir David Ramsbottom, at the end of his time, said that one of his great happinesses was that he saw this getting better and better and better in Chelmsford. He would pop in just like that, so you never, never knew and it kept you on your toes. I would support her in that she should be able to go where she likes, when she likes.
Q80 David Winnick: If I could just follow this up. Successive governments seem to be having difficulties (both ministers and the most senior administrators involved in the Prison Service, previous governments and the present government) with the Chief Inspector of Prisons. To put it as bluntly as possible, is it because the Chief Inspector, in your view, predecessors and the present one, is simply doing the job to which they were appointed and annoy Whitehall? Mr Baker: Yes, basically that would be the bottom line. We place great value on the work of the Chief Inspector and we support the work the Chief Inspector does (and perhaps in some way we contribute to the work of the Chief Inspector through the Annual Report we do each year for the Minister, which the Chief Inspector reads, in which I hope we highlight some of the difficulties occurring in individual prisons which may cause these snap inspections to take place) I think it is far more important that the Chief Inspector is in a position to do unannounced visits to prisons than it is to do the five-year visit which is announced well in advance. I think it was Sir David Ramsbottom who said that the thing he found most appalling about doing the announced visit was the smell of paint wherever he went. That is the sort of difference in the element of just suddenly knocking on the door on a Monday morning and saying, "Here we are". I am not quite sure what the reference was to the Chief Inspector finding overcrowding as a problem. I think it is one of the things the Chief Inspector has highlighted and agreed with us, that overcrowding is a major problem. I expect it to be one of the difficulties that she finds whenever she goes to do an inspection of a prison, that the life and the regime of that prison is affected because of overcrowding.
Q81 David Winnick: Do you feel that prison governors take the view that it is unfortunate, to say the least, that someone is knocking on their door, on a Monday morning or otherwise, and that it is a form of interference with their day-to-day duties? Mr Baker: I would not think they would consider it an interference with their everyday duties. I think all governors are apprehensive of a snap inspection from the Chief Inspector, as all of us would be in whatever walk of life it was that we followed; because you think you are doing a good job and you are quite satisfied and secure in your own surroundings; you do not particularly like somebody coming in and saying, "It's not actually quite as good as you thought it was". The work of the Chief Inspector and the effect that it has had on a great many poorly performing prisons is in itself justification for the Chief Inspector and for the criticisms that the Chief Inspector raises. Ms Berliand: I think particularly the very good governors are very grateful to see the Chief Inspector on their doorstep on a Monday morning, because often the matters that they have raised consistently and persistently with their area manager, or whoever on the main prisons board, have gone unanswered for whatever reason. It is frequently a fact that matters that have been raised by governors and independent monitoring boards get sorted when the Chief Inspector goes in. He or she carries greater clout than any of us, seemingly.
Q82 David Winnick: On overcrowding and rehabilitation which we touched on during the course of questioning, do you feel that the amount of overcrowding in prisons now is at the highest number it has ever been? Mr Baker: Yes.
Q83 David Winnick: That the chances of successful rehabilitation of the majority of prisoners is minimal? Mr Baker: Yes. Mr Orr: Chelmsford, which has a certified normal accommodation which is what we were built for (422 prisoners), was told that they must now take 576 prisoners. That means the receptions going through that prison are going up from 60 a day to 80 a day - that is an increase of 30%. In that time the amount of staff that were profiled at the prison two years ago was 142 and is now 135, which is a 5% decrease. We have a 30% increase and a 5% decrease in staff so how does it affect the prison? If you are going to your rehabilitation we have 80 workshop places for 575 prisoners; because of lack of staff they cannot be staffed fully so they are working at under 60%. We have 60 education places which, again, are working under 60%. Only 20% of the prison population are getting purposeful activity. If you look a bit further than that, 60% of hospital appointments are cancelled because there is no officer to take the prisoners to the hospital appointments. If you look at drugs, drug dogs cannot be used in the way they used to be in reception because there are not the officers to support them. Mandatory drug testing cannot be done to the level it should be done because the officers are being taken elsewhere to do duties elsewhere in the prison. This is very noticeable with the overcrowding. The staff are there to maintain security, which they do very well because they are very well run, but they have not got time to do the rehabilitation, resettlement and that sort of thing. Mr Baker: It is all part of a bigger picture, I think. I think the Prison Service is trying very hard to introduce training and the proper courses. We had a prisoner arrive at Stafford last week who is halfway through a course that he needs to complete before he has his parole hearing. He was moved to Stafford, where they do not run the course, because there was a draft-out to make room at the prison he was in so they could take prisoners in from the court. That is a nonsense, because there has already been an investment in that man and he is halfway through a course. Now we as an Independent Monitoring Board are trying to get him moved out to another prison so that he can finish the course. A manpower survey of staff in prisons has set levels against some standards that only the manpower service people understand and they work, as long as nobody goes sick, as long as no-one decides to have a fight on one of the wings, as long as nothing happens that disturbs the equilibrium of the prison. If any one of those things happen then association is cancelled, education is cancelled and visits are cancelled. You can have people coming 200 miles to see a prisoner and get there and find "There was a fight this morning so the officers didn't go to lunch until one o'clock instead of going at 12 o'clock, therefore they will be an hour late back so visits are cancelled". You have done 200 miles and this happens. The problem is that the attached staffing is now so tight that is fine if it works, if nothing goes wrong; but if it goes wrong then the whole of the rehabilitation process is likely to be affected.
Q84 David Winnick: The outcome presumably is that far more will come out of prison and go back to crime and re-offend than would be the case perhaps if rehabilitation and education had been more successful? Mr Baker: As I said earlier, if they could have a programme that is properly planned for them and you know that it is going to work from the day they go in until the day they come out, one would hope that re-offending would be reduced and their rehabilitation would be a lot more successful. In the evidence we put in we have said that some prisoners regard this transfer halfway through a course as the Prison Service having a laugh. The actual language they use is a little more Anglo-Saxon.
Q85 David Winnick: You stated, with the Prison Reform Trust, "many Boards of Visitors reported that not only were prisoners being held in inappropriate accommodation within prisons, but that significant numbers of prisoners were being held in the wrong type of prison altogether". Is this a very large problem, would you say? Mr Baker: Yes. I think Jill knows more of this than I do. One of the biggest areas is lifer prisoners who are held in locals because there is not room in lifer units to transfer them to those units. In those units they begin a very significant and very skilfully worked out rehabilitation process, but they are held sometimes two or three years. Mr Orr: We have about 41 and some of them are held over two years. Really in a local prison people should be there for about three months. Ms Berliand: If I could add to accommodation, for example the Prison Service collects information on how many cells designed for one person are doubled up. They collect that information. What they do not collect is how many cells designed for two have three people in them. In my own prison cells designed for two are now holding three, and in that three-man cell there are two chairs, one table and two lockers. The third man sits on top of his bunk and takes all his meals sitting sideways on his bunk, and all his kit is in a Prison Service plastic bag tucked underneath another man's bunk. That is how he can live for 23 hours a day. Nothing the Independent Monitoring Board does to raise that seems to get through to anybody.
Q86 David Winnick: This is certainly not my view because if it was I would say so, but what would you say to those who take the view, "Too bad. They asked for what they got"? What is your response to that? Ms Berliand: I think what most of us really feel is to keep anybody in those circumstances is absolutely gross. We are told as independent monitoring boards that the questions we should be asking are: Is it fair? Is it decent? Is it reasonable? I think we have to come up with three noes.
Q87 Miss Widdecombe: I am interested in what you say about three sharing a cell designed for two. The reason, as I am sure you will appreciate, is that in 1994 that practice was eliminated altogether. Although we still had 2:1, we did not have any 3:2. When did 3:2 start coming back; and how widespread is it now? Ms Berliand: I can only talk as a specific in my own jail; I do not know what Bryan and Neil would add to that. I can tell you that in HMP High Down, which is the prison I am involved in, I would say that it has happened ever since High Down opened which is ten or 11 years ago, from the moment it was fully full; and we have been raising it in our annual reports from that time.
Q88 Miss Widdecombe: How widespread is it? Mr Baker: I do not think it is very widespread. Certainly there are none in the Midlands that are holding 3:2. Mr Orr: We do not have 3:2. Q89 Chairman: We will pursue this point at a later time. Mr Baker: It is more isolated certainly than general.
Q90 Mrs Dean: You have mentioned the pressure on prison staff through overcrowding. Is that general in all prisons? Mr Baker: Yes. Certainly the pressure on staff is widespread in all prisons, not necessarily always because of overcrowding but it is a contributory factor and a very major contributory factor. It is the profiling of the prison that also contributes to this. The general idea is that when the prison has been profiled and the staffing level set for that prison then as more budget cuts come in then the reprofiling takes place again and staff become reduced. If nothing goes wrong the prison will run; the trouble is I do not know a prison in this country where nothing ever goes wrong. I know 138 prisons where something goes wrong day-by-day; but I do not know one where nothing goes wrong.
Q91 Mrs Dean: So it is variable depending on what other pressures there are. Are those other pressures such things as high levels of staff sickness and staff shortages; do they play a part as well? Mr Baker: Undoubtedly one of the greatest problems the Prison Service has faced over many years, and I do not think it is any better today despite some rather vigorous efforts to do something about it, is the appallingly high level of sickness amongst staff, particularly long-term sickness amongst staff.
Q92 Mrs Dean: In how many prisons does that affect the rehabilitation of prisoners? What percentage of prisoners are affected at any one time because of staff shortages? Mr Baker: Insofar as high sickness levels mean that there are not a full range of staff available in the prison at any one time, everybody is affected because something will have to go. Ms Berliand: When staffing levels were set by this wondrous concept, that none of us are actually party to, what has happened is that you get your Prison Service uniformed staff and then you get what are called "operational support grades". Many prisons have in fact got the 120 members of staff they need, or the 300 members of staff, but what they have not got is the same divide of staff. Operational support grades cannot necessarily do everything that a custody officer can do. If, as Bryan has said, there is a fight on C Wing operational support grades cannot go there. They cannot escort prisoners to work or education or visits. They can do the mail room and that sort of thing. It is not necessarily how many staff walk into the prison in the morning, but what division of staff walk into the prison in the morning and how the governor manages them. Mr Orr: The other great drain on staff is the sickness of prisoners. If a prisoner goes out to hospital that will probably take nine officers out of that prison . You might have two or three at one time, each with a three-man watch, three times a day. The other thing that has taken an immense amount is self-harm. If you have people at very, very high risk of self-harm that need permanent watch, and I mean "permanent" and not every 15 minutes but all the time, you cannot have one person looking at two different prisoners. I have seen as many as four officers side by side looking through windows 24 hours a day. That takes an immense amount of staff who could be doing things elsewhere. Mr Baker: Profiling the prison does not allow for that.
Q93 Mrs Dean: Is staff turnover greater in private prisons? Mr Baker: Much greater.
Q94 Mrs Dean: You mentioned earlier the importance of prison governors. Does a high turnover of governors have a detrimental impact on the prison system generally, and the provision of long-term rehabilitation and educational initiatives in particular? Mr Baker: There are governors and governors. There are some governors who are of a remarkably high standard and have introduced enormous initiatives. They are much sought-after and you can see a great improvement in the prison when they are put into place. I think one of the effects of Prison Service policy is that prisons that have performed rather badly in the past and have been given one of these top governors have improved enormously. I do not want to be critical of governors as a whole but if you take any section of people some are better managers than others. There are some who manage the prison but do not drive it forward. There are others who drive it forward. The Prison Service, with great respect to the governors they have at the moment, could do with some additional governors of the high quality level, but most walks of life could.
Q95 Mrs Dean: How significant is the problem of prisoners being transferred from their home area to prisons where there are vacancies, with a resultant strain on family and community ties? Mr Baker: If you take family connections and visits from families and trying to retain the relationship with the family as being an important part of rehabilitation (and I certainly do, because I think if you have got family support when you come out of prison you have a better chance than if you are coming out into a hostel and left to your own devices) it is, therefore, important that you are located as close to your own home area as possible to facilitate visits. The problem is, because the courts are sending so many people to prison, you have to make room for them and that frequently means it is not unusual (and I have been in the prison and seen it happen on more than one occasion) that a bus is filled and off they go to Parkhurst or somewhere at very short notice. When they get to the other end they are able to tell their family where they are but that is not a great deal of consolation to somebody living in Manchester or Liverpool to be suddenly be told "Your husband/brother/lover is now on the Isle of Wight", with all the difficulties of getting there. There is a secondary problem, and my colleagues will probably agree with me, that when you are suddenly told you have to prepare a draft to go to another prison to make room, then there is a selection process that goes on within the prison, and that has nothing at all to do with where they live - it has to do with how awkward the prisoner is. Ms Berliand: The good get moved. Mr Orr: The highest number of applications we had in last year when I wrote our report were on transfers and medical problems. The prisoners say, "I'm starting a course", or, "My kid's ill", all the things, and that is our highest application.
Q96 Mrs Dean: What percentage of educational and rehabilitative programmes would you estimate are disrupted by prisoners being transferred? Mr Baker: It is a difficult one to answer because the ones that come to our notice by and large are the prisoners that have been transferred and have had their rehabilitation or their family connections disrupted because they have been transferred. That is a high proportion of the applications that come to boards. If I had to guess, and it is a guess, I would think that probably 20% of rehabilitation programmes are probably affected by transfers, which were for no other reason than overcrowding. Ms Berliand: If I could just pick up on that. One of the newer rehabilitation programmes are for home detention curfew. What so often happens is that a person can only be considered for home detention curfew at a certain level in their sentence. They begin to be assessed in a certain jail for this. They are inevitably the better behaved prisoner, because that is what they are working towards. As we have already said, the better behaved prisoner gets moved, they then find themselves, let us say, moved to Ford an open prison. For whatever reason, we are told, their papers do not come with them - this is what the Independent Monitoring Board is told - and until their papers come with them they cannot continue with that assessment. They are risk-assessed, and that takes a further six weeks, by which time they have lost their point for home detention curfew. There is never any time to go back to the prison they have left and say, "Where are their papers?", so they start again at the point of reception. That is a very real pressure on a prisoner who has done everything right. Mr Baker: That happens with parole as well as home detention curfews. You have been in the prison for a fairly long period of time and the staff have to prepare reports that go to the parole board and you are moved a month or six weeks before those reports should be written. The new prison takes the view, "We're not qualified or able to make this comment on you so you miss the parole date, and in six months' time you can have another go". Ms Berliand: With the home detention curfew in six weeks' time they have missed the point of going out. If we are looking specifically here at overcrowding and rehabilitation in conjunction, you must see that you are overcrowding a jail by holding those who are possibly suitable for HDC, I quite accept the possibility only of release either on parole or home detention but you are perhaps losing a window there.
Q97 Mrs Dean: Getting the management better to do the paperwork would ease the problem? Mr Baker: Enormously.
Q98 Mrs Dean: Are there any other ways that the transfer system could be better managed? Mr Orr: I think most prisons have a system of blue carding; and particularly the rehabilitation programmes that really work are ring-fenced. People on those ETS and career workshops are blue carded so they will not be transferred until their course has finished. Where it really hits is if somebody is on an NVQ course in the kitchen or in the gym to go out and work in an outside gym as an instructor, they are the ones who suddenly find themselves being pushed away because they are not blue carded. There are facilities for keeping people there. Ms Berliand: As I am sure you will know we have a three tier enhanced privilege scheme. When you are moving somebody on an overcrowding draft, which is quite different from a disciplinary move, you have prisoners who have already behaved so well that they are now on an enhanced programme and hold enhanced status. Again at the receiving prison, where they have gone through no fault of their own, they do not necessarily carry that enhanced status with them. They should, but many governors are saying, "Not in my jail you don't. I will assess you until you go back on the status". You are looking at a great feeling of anger, because you have taken away any prisoner's control within that system. "I have done well. I've got my status. You've moved me and you've taken it away and I've done nothing wrong except get on that bus this morning".
Q99 Mrs Dean: Do the Prison Service and prison governors view rehabilitation programmes and education as "soft options"; and are they therefore sacrificed when the budgets come under pressure? Mr Baker: As with the evidence we have put in, certain parts of education are regarded as soft options. Those areas that deal with crafts and the arts are a very soft option that goes quite early. The difficulty you find in budgets now is that a great many areas are ring-fenced, and that is useful in terms of the individual prison, in that it means you will carry out that work because the money is not actually under threat. Then as budget cuts come it reduces the area from which you can make cuts. The last thing anybody wants to try and cut is on staff. That is the most important element yet that is the one that has been cut. The things that would concern me, and have concerned me in the prisons I have seen particularly around the Midlands, are that those elements of education such as arts and crafts, painting, modelling and these sorts of things have gone. They are the first things to go. A great many prisoners, as evidenced by the work they have produced, have shown enormous talents in these areas. One of the problems we identify among prisoners who come into prison is that they enjoy a very low opinion of themselves. They enjoy a low opinion of themselves because they have been told since they were children that they were useless, that they were non-achievers and there was no point in them going to school because they were not going to learn anything and they were disruptive. They then suddenly find that they can paint or model and somebody actually says to them, "Well done, you have a talent. Here's a certificate. Look what you've produced", and their self-confidence and their self-esteem starts to build up. This, to me, is one of the first and major elements of rehabilitation.
Q100 Mr Singh: Is it not unrealistic to expect arts and crafts alike not to be sacrificed when budgets come under pressure? Are they not a luxury? Mr Baker: I think it has often been said that that type of thing is a luxury. If you are a prisoner who has been sent to prison for three or four years and you want to try and improve yourself and improve what you can do when you come out, I do not think you would regard them as a luxury. I cannot paint and I cannot model so I would probably regard them as a luxury, but I think someone who can paint and someone who can model would not regard them as a luxury. I think we should be trying to cater within prisons for all the elements of a prisoner - anything that will help him to restore himself into society, and that might be art and modelling.
Q101 Mr Singh: Notwithstanding that some of these areas can be cut, the Prison Services claims to have made considerable progress in terms of education and learning. Is there any evidence of that at all? What is your opinion of that claim? Mr Baker: I think you can see that in the work of prisoners, and you can see that in the attainment levels of prisoners. My colleagues may have different views from their own prisons, but there are two areas where clearly there is a lot of progress which you can see which is in basic learning, the actual reading and writing. We should be able to use the time that anybody is sent into prison to ensure that they can read and write by the time they come out. They go to great lengths to hide the fact that they cannot read or write and the Prison Service has now developed some wonderful methods of ascertaining whether they can or not. The systems they use to do that now - not only through education but through other prisoners and through bringing voluntary organisations in to help - I think have a major effect. The achievements in the Prison Service in that area are well worthy of recognition. In terms also of computer work and fitting people to be able to manage themselves and be able to manage businesses when they come out is good.
Q102 Mr Singh: I take it that, despite overcrowding and the transfers, good work is being done? Mr Baker: Yes, it is.
Q103 Mr Singh: Is the reason for that, that the money for education skills has been transferred from the Home Office and that it has been ring-fenced; or is the reason that the prison governors have made education skills a higher priority themselves? Mr Baker: I would like to think it is both of those reasons. Certainly ring-fencing has protected it. You asked whether arts and crafts are a luxury, if you are sitting facing a reduction in your budget, if you are not inclined to the arts you would think "That's one of the first areas we can get rid of". Ring-fencing has protected, and I think it is advantageous that it is ring-fenced and the more areas that are ring-fenced the better.
Q104 Mr Singh: You say there is an economic disincentive to attend educational skills training. Why is that, and what can be done to address the problem? Mr Baker: I think two things can be done to address that problem. If I were speaking on behalf of prisoners, the first thing a prisoner would say would be to increase prisoners' wages because they have not been increased for a great many years. The second element of this is that the work within a prison is categorised by the prison itself into how much you are paid. If you take the prison I associated with the last time, and I have not looked at for some time, you got £7 a week if you were on education and £12 a week if you were in the machine shop. Prisoners are anxious to earn as much as they possibly can. Their earnings are what they can spend in the canteen, on phone cards, tobacco and on what they regard as the luxuries and essentials of life, therefore, they want to go for those areas of work which pay the most money. Education has suffered over the years because it has been at the lower paid end.
Q105 Mr Singh: So we need to increase what we pay for that? Mr Baker: Yes. Mr Orr: This is individual for prisons. We as a board raised this with our governors - and we have had three governors and three deputy governors in the last four years - and we negotiated that education had very much the same pay as work, so there is not this incentive to go and do other things.
Q106 Mr Singh: That is happening and is possible? Mr Orr: It is perfectly possible. Ms Berliand: Each prison can manage its own pay scale.
Q107 Mr Singh: I understand that there is a wide disparity in terms of funding and curriculum between prisons. Why is that, and what can be done to address that? Some prisons spend more money and have a better curriculum than others and the disparities are very wide. Ms Berliand: I think it is largely to do with the categorisation of your prison. I am sorry to reiterate what I was saying earlier, but it is less likely that a core local will spend as much on education perhaps as a Category C trainer. That is at its simplest. It may also be that some educational authorities just charge more to provide the same services, but we would not necessarily know that. We are monitoring what is in the prison rather than driving what we think think, as a board, ought be in a prison, that is not our role at all. We are just there to monitor what is in a prison.
Q108 Mr Singh: Is there any cause to look at options such as the national curriculum for prisons? Mr Baker: When you speak to the Prison Service you will probably find they do in fact have very strict guidelines that they operate for the prisons. Prisons seek tenders from colleges, and there are differences from college to college by terms of cost and achievement and what they are able to offer. I suspect that the levels will vary greatly from one part of the country to the other, dependent upon what you can get out of your particular college. I would not want to go further than saying, I know it is an area that area managers and governors look at very closely, and governors are monitored very closely. Chairman: We can ask for a detailed memorandum on this issue, about costs, investment and so on, from the Prison Service before they give evidence.
Q109 Miss Widdecombe: Can we turn to the issue of work in prisons. You mentioned earlier on that wages had not much gone up in several years, and the answer is that they are not wages at all but pocket money. Can I put to you my view of what I think should happen which is that you work towards a situation - and I am not suggesting it can be done by the middle of next week - in which all prisons have self-financing prison workshops, that real contractors bring in real work for delivery to real customers, which means you can then pay some real wages from which you can make some real deductions for victim reparation, savings, upkeep of families etc. You cannot do that if you are simply making socks for the prison population, it is impossible. If you did that, first of all, you would have the benefit that you would get a lot of people from unstructured fairly purposeless lifestyles into the habit of a demanding working day; and, secondly, you would get them into the habit of an orderly disposition of earnings, which is foreign to most of them; that you could get them accustomed to doing work which is actually wanted in the outside world, and therefore there would be some possibility of translating that into the outside world; that when the prison workshop started to become a going concern you then do not hand the money back to the Exchequer but you plough it into expanding the prison workshop and possibly also expanding education, because you look at the two things as being rehabilitative, rather than running the prison. What is your view of that? Mr Baker: We would sign to that immediately. Mr Orr: We do it too in a way. How the money is apportioned when it comes into the prison is not our affair, that is something we cannot plug. As a board we plug that and at Chelmsford we have an extraordinarily good workshop that re-makes old bicycles and wheelchairs, and the chaps really love it and they get wonderful letters from all over the place.
Q110 Miss Widdecombe: How many prisoners does it employ? Mr Orr: It should employ 40 if we have enough chaps to run the thing. We have just started a thing where they are rebuilding and making computers, and they will be able to go and repair computers. Our current governor - and this is a governor-orientated thing - is pushing for things that will be useful and bring money. Of course, doing charity work, like repairing wheelchairs and bicycles is all done with the Inside Out Trust as a charity. It is a question of whether he is going to do these things to bring money into his prison, or give the prisoners satisfaction. Ms Berliand: I think we would all sign up to it, but realistically in the great outside world it is not a prison officer's role to go round local shops or companies and say, "How about if we do some of this work?" It is moving into a professionalism where the Prison Service would need some professional help. To expect a member of staff to go out and tout for business, which indeed they do in some of the good prisons, a) means you have already depleted your workforce, which probably means somebody is behind the door that day, because we are so tightly staffed now that if there are not four or five you will not be unlocked if one person is spending that day looking for business, there is that element of taking that bum off that seat; and b) the Prison Service needs to be more professional to look at better contracts and contracts that are properly monitored.
Q111 Miss Widdecombe: You have quoted a very good example in Chelmsford. There is also Coldingley, and there is Blakenhurst, a private prison, which used to have a glass engravers workshop. What kind of prison work in the generality makes the greatest impact on rehabilitation? Mr Baker: There are a number of prisons which are making double glazing units. There are a number of prisons doing sheet-metal work. I must be very careful (because Jill tells me I express these things very badly) not to get myself into all sorts of problems. It is the sort of work which offers an opportunity. It is the sort of work a prisoner would want to go into when he comes out of prison, which is useful, does make money, and does help with rehabilitation. I cannot, however long I sit and think about it, consider that filling bags with pot pourri is going to help a man to rehabilitate and get a job when he comes out of prison; nor sitting at a sewing machine in Stafford Prison will help him when he comes out of prison. If he is making double glazing units, if he is doing sheet metal working, if he is doing building work in something that gives him an opportunity to work towards that I think is very valuable. I am always impressed (as I am sure you were when you were going round) when you go to these prisons and see these workshops. Featherstone is one where they do steel work. You see what they can do and what effect that has on a prisoner and that is what we should be aiming at. Filling bags with pot pourri is something we should be getting rid of as quickly as we possibly can.
Q112 Miss Widdecombe: Would you like to comment on the Custody to Work Scheme? Mr Baker: I have no practical experience of it. Mr Orr: No, I do not.
Q113 Janet Anderson: I would like, if I may, to turn to the issue of mental illness and rehabilitation. We touched upon this last week. As we know, it has been estimated that around 90% of prisoners can be diagnosed as suffering from at least one of the five main categories of mental disorder. The Independent Monitoring Boards state that "there is an air of optimism within the prison service that the new involvement of the NHS will improve the care given to prisoners". However, in regard to mental health they argue the need to "find an alternative to prison for those suffering from mental health problems; the prison should not be a dumping ground [for these people]". Is the Prison Service anywhere near to achieving the Department of Health objective of providing comprehensive mental health services to 5,000 prisoners at any one time by 2004? How big a difference has the involvement of the NHS made? Mr Baker: The situation, as we would understand at the moment, is that the various Trusts are building up to doing this. We are being told nationally that they will achieve a better standard of care. I think that is very likely in terms of general health care within the Prison Service. I may be cynical but if I am I think my cynicism is shared by a great many of my colleagues, that we do not believe that the National Health Service arrangement with prisons will cure the mental health problems. It will not cure the mental health problems because it may mean that in some prisons there will be more proficient mental health nursing than there is at the present time; but it will not cure the problem that there are a great many people in prison who are there because they have mental health problems and there is nowhere else to send them. That is not going to change. A lot of those people, very sadly, from our experience are being kept in segregation units because the staff cannot handle them either. They are segregated for their own safety and for the safety of the rest of the prison.
Q114 Janet Anderson: Do you think they should not be in prison? Mr Baker: They should not be in prison.
Q115 Janet Anderson: Where would you put them? Mr Baker: That is the problem. Society got rid of the system where you could have somewhere where you could look after these people properly to a Care in the Community system which manifestly fails, and it is not my position to comment, nor particularly in this arena, and the prison system is seeing the effects of that failure. Ms Berliand: Can I add to what Bryan has just said. There is a also a risk when the Prison Service is running good in-patient health care services (which indeed it is in the prison I come from at High Down) the courts are using good prison medical service rather than dumping on the outside social services and probation services. It is easier to get a psychiatric report by sending on remand somebody to High Down for 28 days for an offence that may not be punishable by imprisonment anyway. One month spent in High Down is actually two months custody, but they cannot get a report, or so social services or probation say, on the out; so they put them into High Down and that way they get a report.
Q116 Janet Anderson: What happens when they leave prison in terms of rehabilitation? What attention is paid to their mental health problems when they come out of prison, is anything done? Mr Orr: We are fairly advanced in our liaison with the NHS in Chelmsford. The mental health units outside and in the prison liaise very carefully, and also liaise with people, with other NHS mental health units where the prisoners are going when they go out. It often falls down, of course, but there are very definite links between the two. One of the best things we do in the prison which is quite a new initiative, which is really a great success but again with ring-fenced money, is in-patient in-reach, where prisoners are not bad but they cannot cope; and they cannot cope on the normal wings because they get bullied and bashed about and end up in the seg unit or end up in health care. They are put in a day care unit where they can get one-to-one confidence-building rapport with small numbers. It has been a tremendous safety valve for people who just cannot cope with prison life which is very tricky.
Q117 Janet Anderson: If I could just turn to the issue of women prisoners. We know that women prisoners commit fewer offences than men and generally have shorter and less serious criminal careers. They are also less likely to be re-convicted than men. Are these differences reflected in the types of rehabilitative and educational programmes offered to women? I think one of you said earlier where prisoners were in prison for a shorter length of time it was more difficult to follow a programme of education and rehabilitation. How much does this apply to women? Mr Baker: I think the problems affecting women, our boards tell us, are greatly different from those of men because of the concerns they have anyway. Boards tell us that what they would like to see more is women's prisons broken down into smaller units. As you say, a great many of offences committed by women are not those where society would be terribly concerned they were in danger. We would like to see hostels operated where the children can stay with the mother most of the time, which we think is a very important thing. I have never been on a board in a women's prison but I have spent some considerable time in a number of women's prisons, and there is nothing worse than seeing a woman after a child has been taken away from her. How that is meant to help her to progress is beyond me. If it were possible I would want to see them operating in a hostel situation and taught (as is often the case so I am told by people on boards at women's prisons, but I do not have first-hand experience of it) how to cope with life, how to manage a budget, how to shop, how to cook and how to do the basic things which many of them do not know.
Q118 Janet Anderson: Many of women are presumably in there for the non-payment of fines? Mr Baker: There are not all that many in for the non-payment of fines. Ms Berliand: Much fewer now.
Q119 Janet Anderson: Finally, you say that concern for their families and their children actually stops them addressing their offending behaviour, is that right? Mr Baker: Yes, because they carry these concerns with them. The professionals, the Prison Service, will probably answer the question better for you than we can. We are observers of prisoners and of prison life. Men's attitude to family problems in our experience is different from that of women. Men go into prison and they expect the women will maintain the house and family and look after all the things while they are in there. It is not true in every case, and it is easy to make generalisations, but the great majority are more concerned about themselves and what will happen to them when they come out than what is happening out there. Women have an entirely different mental approach to it when they go in. They are concerned will the house still be there; what is happening to the children; can they see the children? When you get examples, because of the staffing problems we have been talking about, visits with children are cancelled, that has a dramatic effect on a woman and you cannot expect her to make progress under those circumstances.
Q120 Janet Anderson: It would be better to have hostel-type accommodation and mother and baby units? Mr Baker: Yes, I think it would be. Ms Berliand: When we are talking about hostels it is much harder for a women to get a hostel place. Therefore, when she is coming up to the possibility of being sentenced to custody or not the alternatives are not as open as they are for a man. Frequently a woman will go into custody because there is no alternative address for her. I think that makes a big difference. We did a survey not very long ago of bail officers for women in women's estate prisons, and the facilities for bail officers were deplorable. In my local prison if a man wants to apply for bail he has only got to ask to see the bail officer who will come up and see him, tell him what to do and how to apply for bail, done and dusted. Many women's prisons have a bail officer maybe for one afternoon a week. Women need to apply for bail and they need help. Bryan pictured it so well - it is difficult for a woman to think past that block of "I've got to get out and sort out my family". They cannot think past their behaviour or anything. They cannot move forward until that is sorted. We need bail hostels and we need bail officers in jails, we really do. Q121 Chairman: Can I ask you about juvenile offenders. There is one group of prisoners in the prison population where we produce particularly bad results in terms of re-offending, the 18-21 year-old males. What is your assessment of the current state of the rehabilitation and education services for them; whether they should be improved; and why is it going so badly wrong for that group? Mr Orr: I would entirely agree that it is very, very poor for the young. Young remand prisoners do not have to do anything. Remand prisoners do not have to go to work or do education, and they are perfectly happy to sit in their cells with their television. Once they are convicted then they should be encouraged, but it is difficult to encourage them when there are not many things for them, except for these primary skill courses with computers. The ones that really work are when you can put a young man in front of a computer and teach him how to read and write; teach him how to write his CV; teach him how to write a letter of application for a job and eventually build up a portfolio. That is where they really shine and come into their own. One or two I have seen have gone out and one into full-time education in the university, having come in illiterate. It can be done but it is very limited and needs more funds. Mr Baker: From my experience of seeing Young Offenders' Institutes lately, and Jill is probably the best one to speak about Young Offenders' Institutes partly because her daughter was on the board of one of them, a great deal of work is done by officers now and a lot of progress is being made, and education is good, but you still face the problem of peer pressure. You cannot actually be seen to be doing it because that is not quite the macho image.
Q122 Chairman: Listening to Ann Widdecombe's questions earlier about real work in prisons would you regard this as having any particular significance for this group of young people whom, I guess, will have the highest proportion of people who have never been in work in their lives? Mr Baker: I would surmise, and it would only be my view, that when you get them at the next stage, 21 onwards, and they come into the male prison that is the time when you will start to have a greater effect on them then you will at 18 where they are still very conscious of what the boy in the next cell thinks, and what the gang thinks. "You're actually working; you're actually going to education. You've got to be mad". Mr Orr: I do not entirely agree with my colleague on that one. I went round the MCTC in Colchester yesterday, the Military Corrective Training Centre, and there are these young men, 18 and 19, doing just the sort of things that Ann Widdecombe was talking about - fitting exhausts into cars, fitting windscreens into cars and learning how to build walls, sign writing and decorating, things they can go out and do at once and they see their peers doing it too and it works very well. You cannot do a lot of these things unless you can write and apply for a job or read a notice. They can work the two in together, but they are actually doing something and that is what they really like. Ms Berliand: There is a dichotomy between Young Offender Institutes - which I think are doing for the most part some very good work indeed, driven by good officers and good governors - and the male local which is holding 18-21 year olds. There is this dichotomy that while you are on remand you are a young adult and, indeed, you go to the adult court. The day you are convicted you come back to that same jail, to that same cell but you are a young offender. That makes it enormously difficult for governors to manage. When you are a young offender you have to be educated separately and live separately.
Q123 Chairman: Let us move on. From your evidence you clearly regard short-term prisoners in general as a bit of a disaster for the Prison Service whether they are on remand or short sentences. I do not want to distort what you say but that is how I read your evidence! What should we be doing, firstly, about remand prisoners that would be different? Presumably there are reasons they are on remand rather than out on bail. Secondly, what should we be doing about the short-term sentence regime to make it better? Ms Berliand: Can I answer about the remand prisoner. It may be a need to look at whether it is right ever to remand into custody a prisoner for an offence that is very unlikely to receive a custodial sentence when he or she is sentenced - if, for example, you have shoplifted £2.50 in Marks and Spencer that should ever carry a remand in custody; because it is highly unlikely that the actual offence would carry custody. If some looking at was done to that, that might help remands. Long-term remand prisoners who change their briefs regularly because they know that time spent on remand counts as double time and are actually spinning time out. Mr Baker: It comes back to what we said at the beginning, we are there to monitor what happens in prisons, in the same way as the Prison Service is there to hold the prisoners of the courts sent to them. Short-term prisoners are achieving nothing in prison but disrupting the service.
Q124 Chairman: They are achieving nothing anyway. You have in said in some places the management can do something quite useful. Are there any places that you hear discussed at your annual conferences where people think they have to choose an alternative regime for short-term prisoners? Mr Baker: No, you are talking largely about people doing three months, or six months, and there is not sufficient time for the Prison Service to do anything with them. One of the things that needs to be done (and this is a personal opinion, and not the opinion of the organisation but it has been widely discussed at our conferences) is to make community service acceptable to the general public. I think one of its problems at the moment is that the general public does not consider it acceptable. If it can be given some credence then that would be the way to move forward with short-term sentences.
Q125 Chairman: There was an idea from the Public Accounts Committee last year that one thing we might do, even somebody on a six-month sentence, is to start a course that they could continue presumably at an FE college or similar. Are you aware of any moves in that direction? Has anybody explored that in practice? Mr Baker: I have not heard anybody say that. Mr Orr: I can see some of these young people on our careers workshop are going into full time education afterwards. That, I reiterate, is ring fenced and the chaps who are running it have outside contacts and are making all the bridges there need to be. If I could do that for everybody, it would be wonderful. Ms Berliand: They are not being moved because frequently people are being released in the north of England perhaps when their homes are in Devon.
Q126 David Winnick: You said the general perception is that community service is seen as a soft option. Is that your view and that of your colleagues? Mr Baker: That is the view of my colleagues and it is my view as well. The people I talk to and suggest to that these people should not go into prison but they should do this, in the general conception of the public, that is just a holiday.
Q127 David Winnick: That is your view to some extent as well? Mr Baker: When you see footballers who are sentenced to giving 20 hours of teaching people to kick a football and that has been their life and their love, I cannot see personally that that is a penalty. Chairman: James Beatty is continuing to coach in Beavis Town Primary School months and months after his community service finished, so possibly there are some examples which give the lie to that.
Q128 Bob Russell: I would like to put on record my appreciation of the whole voluntary concept and so many volunteers in the whole prison set-up, both at prison and post-prison, and in particular the visitors' centre at Chelmsford, which I am hoping that the Committee may in due course visit to see the excellent work that is being done there in appalling conditions. The prison service has recently established a voluntary and community sector strategy group. Have you seen evidence of an emerging partnership between the prison service and the voluntary sector as regards provision of educational and rehabilitative initiatives? Mr Baker: Yes. This is in part individual to the prisons and how far it has developed. There are two areas of voluntary work which are making an outstanding contribution to prison life. One is in the provision of people to go in to help with the learning of reading and writing, which is spreading very rapidly and having remarkably good effects. The other two organisations which make an outstanding contribution that we see day by day in the work that we do would be the Samaritans, who perhaps make the greatest contribution in the way that they train listeners and provide help for those who have the greatest problems in prison. Their work is absolutely invaluable. Prison visitors spend an enormous amount of time over a very long period with people who have problems and no one else that they can turn to. They also help and they are very important parts of the rehabilitation process.
Q129 Bob Russell: It is obviously early days but do you see that the prison governors as a group welcome the emergence of this new strategy or do they think it is just a nuisance? Mr Baker: My experience of prison governors as a whole is that they welcome anybody who will help the better running of the prison, to improve the life and prospects of prisoners. Mr Orr: As long as they do not have to provide the funds. We had a very good YMCA presence in prison for two years and it was withdrawn last year because the prison provided £3,000 and the YMCA provided £3,000 and the fund has dried up. That excellent service has been taken out.
Q130 Bob Russell: The prison funds dried up or the YMCA's portion? Mr Orr: It was probably: "You do your bit and I will do mine." They decided that would fold. The Samaritans are very effective with their listeners. You probably do not know at the moment but at the visitors' centre that you mentioned, the East Region Families Trust, which is a charity, has come in with a very, very large donation of £45,000 a year for seven years, to support and increase the liaison between families and prisoners. That is a very considerable step forward.
Q131 Bob Russell: That is charitable funding? Mr Orr: Yes. Ms Berliand: It is also true that where you have volunteers coming into the higher security prisons, if there is nobody to escort them, they can spend long periods of the day, which is inevitably quite a short day because of prisoners being behind their doors through lunch and stuff, and if there are no operational support grades to escort them, then they get no further than the gate and that is another management problem.
Q132 Bob Russell: That is the voluntary sector when the prisoners are in prison. Has the voluntary sector a role to play in providing assistance and guidance to prisoners post-release? If so, how do you see the voluntary sector getting involved there? Mr Baker: It is one of the things that we would probably like to see made stronger than it is at the moment. Any area that gives support to a prisoner when he comes out of prison is valuable. That is when they are at their most vulnerable. There are a lot of organisations that associate themselves with prisons that could help - church groups are a good example - just to contact somebody they can talk to, somebody they can seek help and guidance from, somebody who will just go and talk to them so that they have company. Sometimes they are moved away from areas and all sorts of things when they come out. There is a great deal that could be done in that respect and again it should be part of a coordinated programme.
Q133 Bob Russell: We have been told that more than 40 per cent of prisoners lose contact with families and friends in the course of a prison sentence. Can you tell us about the structures or initiatives that are in place across the prison system to assist prisoners pre-release with planning for resettlement in terms of helping to find accommodation, employment, access to education, rehabilitation programmes, so that the build up to their release and their post-release is a continuation, and the involvement, if any, of the voluntary sector in helping them? Mr Baker: The largest area involved with the release of the prisoner is the Probation Service which is often under great pressure.
Q134 Bob Russell: That is part of the system, is it not? Mr Baker: Yes, but that has to be the coordinating factor when you are looking at releasing a prisoner, because they have to ascertain and satisfy the prison service that there is a proper release plan, that he has somewhere to live that is acceptable. It is at that stage that the group that we were talking about earlier, a professional group, could involve the voluntary sector to say, "This man is coming out into your community. Can you help giving him contacts or a job?"
Q135 Bob Russell: It strikes me that the voluntary sector is more structured within the prisons when the prisoners are there than it is when they come out. The prison system seems to welcome the voluntary involvement, but does the Probation Service also welcome the voluntary support that may be available? Do they encourage it? Ms Berliand: I think they work well with housing associations and those sorts of challenges. They are looking at any voluntary group in the community but it is the Probation Service that brings together what is available in the area of that prison. I am sorry to go on about it but so many prisoners do not want to stay there because their homes are somewhere else. That is a very real problem. Mr Baker: The point you make is a very strong point, that there is a very coordinated help system within the prison. When you ask the question and make us stop and address it, we think: hang on a minute. They are not there when you release them from prison, so there may well be grounds for building up a support group network that adopts a prisoner when he comes out of prison, to help him through that first initial period. Chairman: A subject that we will pursue, I am sure, with other witnesses and the voluntary sector and so on in later hearings. Could I thank you very much? It has been very useful. |