Oral evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 18 November 2003

Members present:

Mr John Denham, in the Chair
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Janet Dean
Bob Russell
Mr Marsha Singh
Mr John Taylor
Miss Ann Widdecombe
David Winnick

__________

Memoranda submitted by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, the Centre for Crime

and Justice Studies and the International Centre for Prison Studies

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS ANNE OWERS, CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, MS UNA PADEL, OBE, Director, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, and PROFESSOR ANDREW COYLE, CMG, the International Centre for Prison Studies, examined.

 

Q136  Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed for coming before the Committee to give evidence. I would like to thank all three of you for your written evidence, which the Committee has found very helpful. Obviously with three witnesses from different organisations we need to try to draw your expertise and get through the session in a reasonable time, so if I could ask for answers to be brief where possible that would be very helpful. May I start by asking you, Anne Owers, and the other witnesses from the academic organisations, about the purpose of prison itself. I would like to start by trying to tease out an issue that has already come up several times in front of the Committee. In your evidence, Ms Owers, you have said effectively that prison itself cannot deliver rehabilitation, or words to that effect. I think we need to be clear in the Committee whether we are being told that nothing you do in prison really has an effect on the rehabilitation of prisoners, or whether the issue is that what is done in prison can have an effect on the rehabilitation of prisoners but that also depends on what happens outside. Three sets of written evidence will give a slightly different emphasis to this issue, as does the other evidence we have had so far. Could I ask each of you to try to identify as precisely as possible for the Committee to what extent the prison regime can have a rehabilitative effect, and what the other factors are that it may depend on?

Ms Owers: I would say that there are three factors the Committee ought to look at. One is whether there are interventions which are only or mostly available in prison, but which could more usefully be available outside in the community. There I am thinking about interventions in relation to substance abuse, mental illness, or perhaps women with non-violent offences and small children. There is considerable evidence that some of those issues need not be addressed in prison and, indeed, are less effective if they are addressed in prison, because they do not address the real world in which people will have to live after whatever intervention is made available. I think the Committee could do well to look at that. Secondly, I have no doubt in relation to our inspections that prison can be a place where good work is done to provide skills and training to those who do not have them, and to deal with drug abuse problems and various other kinds of interventions that I have raised in my evidence. Crucially, if that is to have any long-term effect on the protection of the public and the prevention of re-offending, whatever has been done in prison has to be continued and strengthened rather than undermined when those prisoners return to society. If you have had drug treatment in prison you must be able to get support for that once you go back. If you have been given skills and education in prison you must be assisted to get employment. We know that employment has a 50% chance of reducing re-offending. Those are the two ways I would look at prison in relation to rehabilitation. The third factor of course, and I think it comes through in all of our evidence, is the effect of overcrowding in prisons on their ability properly to deliver rehabilitation. That may go to my first point, that if you could provide some interventions outside prison and therefore release the pressure on prisons themselves, my view is that they would be able to do a much better job for those people for whom they can do a job.

 

Q137  Chairman: So the issue is not that prison is inevitably so bad that it does more harm than good in relation to rehabilitation, but things can be done in prison that have a positive effect if the conditions are right and if the links with the outside world after prison are right?

Ms Owers: If all of those "ifs" are in place, yes; but, inevitably, prison disrupts people's lives - it must do. Therefore, if you are to do useful work in prison which has a result outside then the consequences of that disruption need to be addressed and minimised. I think we need to look at the kinds of prisons we have; the work that was done earlier on the kinds of prisons that might be appropriate for women who need to be close to their families and who need to keep those family ties going; the kind of institutions that are suitable for children and young people. We may need to look at a different kind of custodial environment, but there is no doubt, from what I have seen, that custodial environments can make good some of the deficits we know that those coming to prison have.

 

Q138  Chairman: Una Padel, would you like to address the same issue? Please do not feel worried about highlighting any differences of emphasis between the three witnesses.

Ms Padel: For me the primary purpose of prison is containment. Obviously prison is used to mark society's distaste for criminal activity, but I am not convinced that it has to be the answer in that sense as often as it is used. In terms of containment, there might be a short-term gain for the majority of prisoners, but long-term major problems; because an awful lot of rehabilitative work is actually geared towards reducing harm caused by imprisonment, and that seems to me to be an incredible waste of resources. I actually left the Probation Service 18 years ago because I was specialising in working with prisoners from a community base and one of the reasons I left to join the Prison Reform Trust was because I felt so angry that I was spending all my time running around trying to keep people's lives together while (because the prisons were then overcrowded as well) what was happening to the people was that their lives were disintegrating as a result of the punishment of the court, and making them more likely to be offenders in the future. I do not think an awful lot has changed in that respect. There are some very good programmes in prisons. Places like Grendon provide a resource which is not available in the community, and the people in Grendon would not otherwise be suitable for community penalties. There are also good programmes in relation to drugs and other things going on in prisons but, as Anne has said, why do people have to go to prison to get those programmes? As I have said in my evidence, there is a real danger that people are sometimes sent to prison in order to benefit from programmes, which is one of the reasons the prisons are clogged up with so many people. While there are so many prisoners it makes it much less likely that an individual prisoner will get access to the programmes they actually need.

 

Q139  Chairman: Could I press you quickly on that last point because it has been suggested anecdotally. What is the evidence that sentencers are sending people to prison to gain access to programmes? It is widely said but is there evidence from magistrates, judges or elsewhere that they are sentencing for that purpose? It is widely repeated by those people who do not like prisons but do we know that it is actually the case?

Ms Padel: I cannot call to mind any research evidence on that.

 

Q140  Chairman: Professor Coyle, I was going to bring you in at this point anyway, but perhaps you could address the wider issues?

Professor Coyle: On the point at issue, I think my opinion is influenced by my own experience over 30 years, almost 25 of which were spent governing prisons - high security prisons and, latterly, what are known as "local prisons" - and more recently looking at the way other countries manage prisons and use imprisonment and contrasting that to the way it is used in this country. I have also read I think the report of every inquiry into prisons, certainly since the Gladstone Report of 1895. I was thinking last night when I had first given evidence to a prison committee and concluded it was the May Committee of 1979. There have been many reports published on prison and rehabilitation; some of them were excellent reports; not many of them have achieved anything. I would probably single out the Woolf Report as an honourable exception. Moving the deckchairs around, as it were, is not going to achieve a great deal, it seems to me. In respect of the question - what is the purpose of imprisonment? - I think we should be very clear that it is to articulate public disapproval of crime. There is something symbolic about the clang of the prison gate - it tells about public disapproval; it is also about protecting the public from serious criminals who pose a threat to society. That is the purpose of imprisonment. To come on to the specific topic of this Committee, rehabilitation, the classical scholars among you will know that rehabilitation rehabilis means putting on again the garb of citizenship. That is what rehabilitation is. If you look at reports like the Social Exclusion Unit Report, about who are in prison and what are the profiles of the majority of people who are in prison, then the reality is that they have never been habilitated, and never had the garb of citizenship in the first place. To talk about "rehabilitation" I think is a bit presumptuous. If you take, for example, a young man (and most people who are in prison are young men) who has been a failure at school, who has been a failure perhaps with his family, who has been a failure perhaps with his church, if he has one, who has never had employment, to put him into the prison setting for two weeks, two months or two years and think that you are going to rehabilitate him I think is disingenuous. The best that one can expect to do is to link prisons in some way with resources which exist in the community. The evidence from other countries is that those countries which do it best do it least. They focus specifically on who has to be in prison and then the "rehabilitative" element (to use that word) is about helping the people who are in prison to plug into the resources which exist in the community. Insofar as there is a positive element to imprisonment, that is what it should be.

 

Q141  Mrs Dean: How do you think the new sentencing options in the Criminal Justice Bill, such as Custody Plus and Intermittent Custody, will impact upon the provision of rehabilitation initiatives across the prison estate? Could you address the need for joined-up services between those in prison and those out in the community, such as drug treatments?

Ms Padel: I confess to feeling very disheartened by the idea of Custody Plus because we know at the moment it is the short-term prisoners who receive the least in terms of any rehabilitative effort at all. So much time is taken just processing and managing them through very overcrowded local prisons, possibly out to a training prison if they are very lucky, for a very short period of time and then out of the system again. These prisoners are going to be in for an incredibly short period of time. The idea that in that time they can be assessed to look at what their needs are and then plugged into and referred to appropriate provision is pie in the sky, to be quite honest, with the pressure on numbers. I feel concerned that sentencers will see Custody Plus as a very good combination of demonstrating a bit of toughness, "We need to mark this, but at the same time we are going to give you a nice rehabilitative sentence which should help you stop offending". I can see that that will be very tempting. Whether that will be a long-lasting effect I am less sure. We saw with the Detention and Training Order in the Youth Justice System there was an initial surge in Orders made because sentencers thought it was a good thing but that soon calmed down again. I guess a similar thing might happen. I do not feel encouraged that there is going to be a major change in the ability of the Prison and Probation Services to manage smooth transitions to start pieces of work in custody which will then be carried through smoothly into the community. I really fear that is not going to happen. As far as Intermittent Custody is concerned, it obviously does not afford the public protection that is really one of the only justifications for locking people up if they are dangerous; it is solely a punitive measure. I find it difficult to see what the advantages of it will really be. It seems to me it is going to be an expensive way of providing any positive rehabilitative programmes, and I cannot really understand why they cannot provide it in the community without the custodial element, which is what makes them particularly expensive.

Ms Owers: Following what Una Padel has said, I think we can learn quite a bit from the reforms of Youth Justice that were put in place some while ago. There are two things which can be learned: one is, you have to be very careful if you give sentencers an option of something that sounds okay combined with detention. They may use it, and they may use it inappropriately, and that certainly happened early on with the Detention and Training Order when the word "training" seemed to be a good thing and those Orders were imposed rather too often. I think then what happened was very interesting, in that what the Youth Justice Board did was to develop some intensive and, what look to be, effective interventions in the community that meant children and young people did not have to go to prison in the first place. The population of children under 18 in our prison is the only one that is now not just levelling off but is slightly going down. I would not want to place too much reliance on that since prison figures notoriously move in directions one does not expect. I think that shows (and goes indirectly to John Denham's question) that if you do provide interventions that sentencers can be confident of, you can deal with some behaviour in a way that means people do not have to go to prison. That is what I shall be looking for in the Bill, to see whether those interventions are available. In relation to your question about joined-up services, I think the other given we have to recognise in all of this is, as my colleague the Chief Inspector of Probation has said, the Probation Service is as overcrowded as prison; it does not show in terms of people in buildings, but it shows in terms of the caseloads that probation officers are carrying, and the interventions they can make. Of course, at present the Probation Service does not even deal with the short-term offenders that Una Padel was talking about, who are among the most persistent and prolific offenders. If you are sentenced for under a year you do not even get a probation officer. The Probation Service, in dealing with those it does, concentrates upon the high risk and the public protection issues. If we are to make that joined-upness work then it will involve not just resources for prisons, but it will involve significant resources for the supervision of people after prison, and also for alternatives to prison following the Youth Justice model. One of the things which my Inspectorate has been stressing is that joined-upness in terms of effective rehabilitation involves more than criminal justice: it has to involve the statutory and voluntary organisations outside prisons who are the people who within their gift have things like employment, drug treatment, housing and so on.

Professor Coyle: In looking at the draft legislation one always tries to say, "What is the purpose of this? What is it meant to achieve?" I assume that it is meant to be a contribution to the Government's policy on crime reduction. We all know the figures, that something in the region of 55-56% of prisoners are re-convicted within two years of release. In Scotland, interestingly enough, the Scottish Executive has just begun quoting four-yearly figures - and the four-yearly figures show almost 80% of prisoners. What that tells us is the very narrow role which prison systems and maybe probation systems have to play in crime reduction. I think we have to be very cautious about saying that any of these initiatives will actually affect crime. There are, I think, interesting parallels in other countries which the Committee might usefully look at. I could name a few and one, for example, is Finland where there are two options available to the sentencing board - one is the fine, and one is imprisonment, very simple. Sentencing to imprisonment is only passed for a relatively serious offence; but once the sentence of imprisonment is passed then lots of other options kick in. For example, the assumption is that any sentence of up to eight months will be converted into community service; that sentences of up to two years are very often suspended with various conditions, such as attendance at drug courses in the community, and not within the Criminal Justice System. 50% of all sentences are suspended. That, as it were, is the other side of the Custody Plus coin. Instead of saying, "We'll give you a little taste of prison" - and the question I am asking is, "Why are we doing that?" - we are going back to this notion of the symbolism of society's disapproval. The prison sentence is passed, but we are actually going to deal with it in a different way. It would be interesting were the Government to look at all these other options rather than simply tweaking the edges of the existing structure.

 

Q142  Mrs Dean: Is that what you mean in your written evidence when you suggest "the importance of linking programmes, activities and the provision of resources in prisons ..."?

Professor Coyle: Yes. Going back to one of the comments which was made earlier, where other countries are more successful is where they do not have parallel criminal justice structures, say for accommodation, hostels, drug treatments or whatever, where actually what is done is to switch the offender into the resources which exist in the community. So that you are seeing the person involved as someone who has committed a crime but also as someone who actually has another persona which is much bigger than being a criminal. What we actually should be looking at is not extending the Criminal Justice System or debating whether it is better to provide this criminal justice resource in prison or in the community, but saying how can we get all the resources which already exist in the community and are provided in the community, (and I am thinking primarily of local government who are responsible for accommodation and the other resources which prisoners need), and how can we get the offender plugged into the resources which already exist in the community rather than providing parallel ones within the criminal justice structure?

 

Q143  Mrs Dean: You mentioned Finland - are there any other countries which are good examples?

Professor Coyle: One of the disturbing things for people like me who spend a lot of time internationally is that we find ourselves more and more having to explain to our friends abroad why we do what we do in England and Wales. I think those of us who are restricted to this country are perhaps not aware how out of kilter we have become in this country. One can look to quite a number of continental European countries who are very clear that imprisonment is a place of last resort, is primarily a place of punishment, and the best that can be done in the prison system is the link the person who is in prison with other resources. One can look at things which have been done in France, in that respect; and one can look at things which have been done in a number of the Nordic countries, and Sweden is a case in point. The Netherlands is another one where they are looking not at joining up the Criminal Justice System but at joining up the Criminal Justice System with all the other resources. For example, in the Netherlands they are now creating clusters of prisons which are contiguous with the local authority boundaries. That, I think, was exactly what Lord Justice Woolf, as he then was, had in mind when he talked about community prisons 12 or 13 years ago. We never really explored what the Woolf Report meant about community prison. I think it was this linking up with all the other resources in the community.

 

Q144  David Winnick: Arising from what you have been saying my question at the moment is directed at the Chief Inspector of Prisons. You obviously visit prisons, that is very much part of your job first and foremost, and you see things being done, rehabilitation and otherwise. I wonder if I can ask you this question: there have been reports in the press, I believe it was in The Times some two or three weeks ago, that there are some restrictions being considered about your visiting prisons without notification. Is there any truth in that?

Ms Owers: That is not precisely what I was raising. What I was raising was that there have been, as Baroness Scotland said in answer to a question in the House of Lords some discussions about different arrangements for criminal justice inspecting, which could include a merger of the Prisons and Probation Inspectorate or (I think the word used was) a commissioner model. Within that context, I have been determined to protect the inspecting of prisons as something in itself which is different from inspecting other services; and it is different because those in prisons are held in the custody of the state, and there are international as well as domestic obligations on independent monitoring of those conditions. What I did in the speech that was reported in The Times was to set out the absolute fundamentals of prison inspecting that have to be preserved and have, indeed, to be ring-fenced if there is to be any change at all; and those were that a Prisons Inspectorate must continue to be able to inspect by its own criteria; that it must, as you say, be able to go into any prison establishment in England and Wales without warning; that at any time it would be difficult to say we should inspect prisons less often than we do now, but certainly with 74,000 people in prisons I think any diminution of the number of times we are able to go into individual establishments should not happen; and finally, that we have a broader custodial remit, which now includes the Military Corrective and Training Centre in Colchester and Immigration Removal and Holding Centres. There is a role of inspecting custodial establishments for safety and respect as things in themselves, which is the core of our work and which absolutely has to be preserved. If there is to be any change, as I said in my speech, I think it is for those proposing the change to be able to show that those changes will not affect that important ring-fenced activity of prison inspecting.

 

Q145  David Winnick: Would it not be right to say that much of the value of the very important work that you undertake of visiting prisons, which we all recognise, lies in the fact that you are able to do so without any notification at all - because otherwise everything is prepared for you?

Ms Owers: Absolutely. I think there are two kinds of inspections, and they are both valuable. I think the announced inspection does allow a prison to get its own house in order. The purpose of inspection is not just to expose what is going on, but also to try to get improvement. We are pretty good at being able to sniff past the wet paint. I sometimes believe that there is a peripatetic band of pool tables and noticeboards that precedes the Prison Inspectorate around prisons! We are pretty good at sorting that out. You are absolutely right, that more than half of our inspections are without warning, and some of those are big inspections and some of those are short follow-up ones. I have had assurances, and I do not believe that there is any imminent plan to prevent that. What I want to make sure is that that is built in to any model of prisons inspecting. It is, as you say, a crucial part of what we do.

 

Q146  David Winnick: I wonder if I could put this question to you as delicately as possible, and I am sure your answer will be even more delicate. The relationship between the Executive and your predecessors in both administrations has not been, I would have thought, a very happy one. We have heard evidence from some of your predecessors. Are you having difficulties at the moment?

Ms Owers: No, I can say there has been no attempt to change or alter what I say. When I present things to ministers they are accepting of what prison inspections find. I genuinely do not believe that it is the intention at the moment to diminish the robustness or the independence of what the Prisons Inspectorate does, because I think it is valued so much and so widely. What I fear in those changes is, that while it may not be the intention, it may be the consequence. If we focus solely on the Criminal Justice System as a system and as a process then we may lose the important thing that is special to prisons about looking in hidden places, which is what the Prisons Inspectorate does.

 

Q147  David Winnick: If you do have difficulties I hope you will keep the Chairman and ourselves informed?

Ms Owers: You can be assured that I will!

 

Q148  David Winnick: Without intruding, and if I am the Chairman will soon tell me, Professor Coyle, you gave us a very interesting profile of so many prisoners having led lives which have been, to say the least, unsuccessful. I was particularly struck in your paper about the project which Middlesbrough Council have undertaken where clearly, perhaps for the first time, those in prison were doing work which was useful and recognised as such. Is this a one-off or is this being done elsewhere, to the best of your knowledge?

Professor Coyle: Very briefly, the background to that project was an attempt to discover whether the experience of imprisonment - taking account of everything I said before about when prison should be used - could be restorative as well as punitive. By "restorative" we meant the opportunity for the prisoners to give something back.

 

Q149  Chairman: Given the time constraints, and Members of the Committee will have read your evidence, perhaps could address directly Mr Winnick's question as to whether this is a one-off?

Professor Coyle: The answer is no. What we have done is to pull in the Local Government Association to get them involved in what is going on in Middlesbrough. Middlesbrough Council has been very active in pursuing through the whole local authority network the benefits which have accrued from this. We are now extending this throughout the country.

David Winnick: I am most impressed by what was done there.

 

Q150  Bob Russell: Chairman, we have had a bit of a flavour of joined-up services already - the Government was talking about joined-up government. Is there evidence, as the Prison Service claim, that "increasing emphasis" is being placed on inter-agency working?

Ms Owers: I think there is. I think there is an interesting process of devolution going on in the Prison Service, which has two aspects to it. The first is that many of the services now provided in prisons are not provided by the Prison Service at all, or indeed the Home Office, but by other government departments and other agencies. Prison health care is now funded by the Department of Health, and over the next two or three years will be taken over entirely by local primary care trusts and mental health trusts. Prison education is now funded through the Department for Education and Skills, which has required each prison to have a head of learning and skills, and those programmes will be delivered by local further education colleges and, when we inspect them, are inspected by Ofsted and the Adult Learning Inspectorate just as though they were schools or FE colleges. I think those joined-up processes are happening within prisons already. I think the other bit of devolution is the regional agenda, where some prison governors and area managers in the Prison Service are now seeing that, in order to provide effective resettlement, they must link in with local services and local bodies - whether that is the government office of the regions, local crime reduction partnerships, local drug service providers or local employers. I have been in prisons where they have had open days for employers, for example, and seminars for employers. I think those processes are happening. They are happening certainly in terms of resettlement. They are happening patchily. You could not see a national strategy.

 

Q151  Bob Russell: So this is not structured. This is very hit and miss and is local initiatives. Who is usually driving those local initiatives of joined-up answers, if you like, in prison resettlement and rehabilitation?

Ms Owers: It can be the area office and the area manager. Increasingly area managers are being encouraged to do that. It can be funding that the Prison Service as a whole has obtained from, for example, the European Social Fund. The problem with that kind of funding, as those of us who have worked in the voluntary sector know, is that it is almost always time-limited, and it is suitable for getting things off the ground but the key question is: how do you keep it in the air once it has got off the ground? There are good initiatives going but I would not say we still have a national strategy.

 

Q152  Bob Russell: Are Social Services involved here? Middlesbrough is an excellent example. Is that a general one or is that just local initiative? Do we need to get best practice and get a national framework?

Ms Owers: Social Services I think come into the picture particularly when you are looking at juveniles, when you are looking at children. One of the welcome developments there over the last year, following the judgment in the Howard League case, is that Social Services have been reminded of their responsibilities to all children in their area, whether they are in young offender institutions or in the community or in care homes. There has been a very helpful review by the Directors of Social Services, the Local Government Association and the Youth Justice Board about making sure Social Services recognise those responsibilities.

 

Q153  Bob Russell: I think we recognise that local government and various public services would always claim they could do with additional funding, so what is in it for these various agencies to put money into the Prison Service to rehabilitate offenders when they could argue that is something the Prison Service should be funding? Presumably they are putting money in which is coming out of their limited budgets.

Ms Owers: I think I would go back to the answer that Andrew Coyle gave to you, that the only way we are going to be successful in rehabilitation is if we recognise that these are people who are in prison and simply because they are in prison does not mean they should be adrift from the services that they would have had when they were out, and that they will return to in very short order. If we want to get that seamlessness going that is the mindset that we need to encourage in those authorities, that those people in prison are part of the community and part of the delivery. It may indeed mean shifting resources or ensuring that resources are available for specific purposes.

 

Q154  Bob Russell: If you had a blank piece of paper and were starting afresh what specific steps should be taken to improve coordination between the agencies to facilitate an holistic approach to rehabilitation?

Ms Owers: If I had a blank sheet of paper and a blank map of England and Wales I would not have prisons situated where they are and I would not have them as large as they are. If we are to move towards (and I do believe it is the best option) some notion of a community prison system then people who need to be held in prison should be held close to their communities and not, as I have seen recently, where boys from Feltham are transferred to Castington in Northumberland - good rehabilitation is unlikely to be a consequence of that. You would start by making sure the resources are where the people are; but you would also make sure that there was, if you like, "porousness" with the outside world in providing for the needs of prisoners while they were in prison and also ensuring that there were those outside that would pick up those needs once they leave.

 

Q155  Bob Russell: Ms Padel, in your written evidence you gave examples of prisons which have successfully adopted a multi-agency approach. Can you tell us more about these projects?

Ms Padel: I think one of the prisons I mentioned was Canterbury where there is a short-term prisoner project which brings together police, probation and prison staff to work with people who have been through the prison time and again for very short periods of time - the kind of prisoners who are there usually for too short a time for anyone to do anything with them. They have a programme which involves all these agencies and others, statutory and voluntary sector agencies, coming together. The needs of the prisoners are identified, the appropriate referrals are made and there is a follow-up after the person leaves prison which involves mentoring using local volunteers, contact with local agencies and a total care package and an element of surveillance as well and support. There is a very comprehensive package. Part of the reason they have been able to do that is because they stopped looking at short-term prison sentences as individual episodes of an individual goes into prison and is released, and started seeing that individual as being a prisoner who comes back time and again and is, in fact, serving a long sentence but episodically. They started that person as somebody they needed to pour resources into.

 

Q156  Bob Russell: You have given us a glowing report of Canterbury, so what factors have happened in Kent that have enabled that prison to do this when presumably other prisons have not?

Ms Padel: I think it is probably down to local will. I cannot answer that because I do not know. The person who was going to speak about that in more detail was Tony Pearson, who is unable to come today because he is ill. In my experience I think often this kind of initiative is driven by local enthusiasm from a governor or a member of staff and possibly the local authority as well. Coming back to some of the things Anne was saying, one of the problems local authorities often have is knowing which local authority takes responsibility. A very large proportion of the prisoners in East Anglia, for example, are not East Anglian people at all, they are from London. Should the local authority there take responsibility and provide services, or should it be the London boroughs pouring services outwards into East Anglia to support prisoners? That has always been a bit of a problem when people are held so far from home.

 

Q157  Bob Russell: That would be a interesting area for others to investigate in due course. Are you saying that the Canterbury experience is one which should be looked at for possible use across the United Kingdom?

Ms Padel: I think it certainly should. I think though that one of the fairly unique characteristics of Kent is that most Kent prisoners are held in Kent so it does make it a little easier to tie up the prisoner with the authority that has responsibility for him or her outside prison as well.

 

Q158  Bob Russell: One last question to Anne Owers. The Military Corrective Training Centre at Colchester, which I visited as recently as Friday, should be a role model, I suggest, for the Prison Service because the way it is run and the service it provides are excellent. I do thank you for your kind words there. You have recently been quoted, following on from Mr Winnick's question, as expressing concern about the consequences of a possible merger of the Prison and Probation Services. Do you think any such merger may affect educational and rehabilitative provision in prisons?

Ms Owers: My concern was specifically about the Prison and Probation Inspectorates, for the reasons I gave Mr Winnick when he asked me. With regard to the merger, I find that difficult to answer partly because, in terms of the short-term prisoners we have been speaking about, the Probation Service have so little; and the Probation Service have not been perhaps concentrating so much on welfare and skills as part of their portfolio of work with offenders. That would depend crucially on how that was developed.

 

Q159  Mr Singh: Before I come on to my set of questions I was interested in your earlier answers on the purpose of prison. I heard the word "containment", and I heard the words "public disapproval". I did not hear the word "punishment". Is not the purpose of prison punishment? Does rehabilitation not follow, that it is a good idea for prisoners to do?

Professor Coyle: I think the record will show that I did say the purpose of prison was to punish. We should not be afraid to say that. That is the reality, and I think those are the three main features of imprisonment: first of all, public disapproval, punishment, and public safety. Those are the three main considerations in why a person should be sent to prison. Once that person is sent to prison all sorts of other issues kick in about how can we make this a positive experience? During this literally captive period when perhaps for the first time the person is standing still, how can we give this person access and make sure that this person wants to have access and to change his life. I think it is possible to balance out all of those things if you say what the priority is. Obviously for the more serious criminals, about whom there is not really a great deal of debate, the primary objective may be protection of the public and the punishment; but they are not the vast majority of prisoners. For the vast majority of prisoners what we are trying to do is to make use of the time for rehabilitation. That is why this linkage with local communities is so important. That is the answer in respect of Kent. A number of factors come together. In a way you have almost the Kent Prison Service, it is a geographically clear area; it links with all the other services which are also geographical; and most of the prisoners come from there; and there is a will to actually make use of all of this. When all of those things come together then you can have the positive effect that you have there.

 

Q160  Chairman: I would like to be quite clear that we are using the same language. When you talk about "protection of the public" we are all, I suspect, agreed we are talking about murderers, rapists and so on. The debate nearly a year ago was whether jailing a burglar was protecting the public or not. When you talk about people from whom the public need to be protected, do you include burglars or not? Are you simply talking about a higher level of violent crime than that? The debate can be quite confused unless we know exactly what we are protecting the public from.

Professor Coyle: I would be very reluctant to give hard and fast answers about specific groups of people, because I think it does depend on the individual. You have mentioned burglars, there is truth in saying that when a burglar is in prison that burglar is not burgling your house. What the public is really interested in is making sure that there are less burglaries in future; that there are fewer victims; and what you need to deal with is the issue about whether sending individuals to prison for a set period of time is actually going to reduce the likelihood of more burglaries being committed. It is not a clear answer, but that is because I do not think there is a clear answer. You have to follow that to its conclusion of saying, "Are we going to lock up all potential burglars for as long as it takes so that we have 300,000 people in prison in this country, as they do in the United States?" That is an option we can take, and the United States has chosen to take that option. We should realise in taking that option that is exactly what we are doing.

Chairman: I am not sure that one logic follows from the other.

 

Q161  Mr Singh: Una Padel, in your evidence you state that "there is no reason why rehabilitative work should normally be impaired by the system being overburdened" presumably you mean overcrowded. What do you mean by that statement?

Ms Padel: I think what I meant was that not all prisons are overcrowded. I do think that there are knock-on effects on all prisons from overcrowding, because people move through them more quickly; or perhaps the sort of person who ends up being sent to some of the lower security prisons is slightly more demanding then they perhaps normally can deal with. All those things have been said in the past. Just because a prison is full should not mean that it cannot do what it is supposed to do. It is when it is overcrowded that the problems really kick in.

 

Q162  Mr Singh: Are you saying there are problems within prisons which are not overcrowded in terms of the delivery of education and rehabilitation programmes?

Ms Padel: Yes, I am sure there are. I think there are a number of problems. We know that sometimes prisons have found it very hard to recruit decent teachers. Sometimes inspections of prison education have revealed that it is not what it should be. We know there simply are not enough places on an awful lot of courses and programmes in prisons. Yes, I think that is the case.

 

Q163  Mr Singh: Previous witnesses have identified administrative problems such as the failure of records to follow the prisoner on transfer. Is that administrative problem due to overcrowding, or is overcrowding being used as an excuse for administrative failures?

Professor Coyle: I can answer some of those questions from my practical experience. The answer to your question about education and other services is, yes, there are problems which are not related to overcrowding; because prisons, of their nature, are not places of education; they are places of coercion and deprivation of liberty. The education and the other programmes which are delivered are delivered despite that environment, not because of it. The answer to your question is, yes, there is an inherent problem in delivering all these rehabilitative resources in a prison setting. That is then compounded by issues to do with overcrowding which may mean, for example, prisoners moving at very short notice from one prison to another. I notice in reading the previous evidence that you raised the issue specifically of medical records. Yes, I know from my time at Brixton Prison that prisoners would leave Brixton in the morning without us knowing whether they were coming back to Brixton, they would then go to Wormwood Scrubs, Swaleside or Manchester and their medical records would be left in Brixton. I would suspect that that problem has been compounded by the overcrowding which we now experience, rather than administrative.

Ms Owers: I would say that the answer to your question is both. We come across prisons who are not managing the resources they have as well as they could. They are not, for example, unlocking prisoners at the right time to make sure they get to education on time, so you are slicing off bits at both ends of the day. They are not being creative enough in using the opportunities that they have and in ensuring that those opportunities for work, for example, will provide skills. I think I have said in my evidence to you that when we were compiling the material for the Annual Report, which is not yet published, we inspected 19 training prisons whose functions should be focused on training; and only in five of those did we find that there was actually enough of the right kind of education and training happening. We found those that were managing those resources well, and those that were managing less well. However, I think all prisons are managing in the context of the difficulties caused by overcrowding. When you look at local prisons, which are the ones where the short-term prisoners we have all spoken about this morning will all serve all or the best part of their sentence, I have not recently inspected a local prison which is managing to do much more than what I would call "humane containment" at best - sometimes it is not even very humane - because of the churn of prisoners through the prison. I quoted Leeds Prison in my evidence, which is 60% above its certified normal accommodation and that is common, and training prisons that are receiving people much earlier in the sentence, before their sentences have been planned and who may then be moving around. It is basically making it much more difficult to manage but there are certainly management issues involved.

 

Q164  Mr Singh: In your written submissions, you say that in spite of additional resources, the gap between the number of prisoners and the spaces available are making it very difficult to provide sufficient positive activity for enough prisoners. What can you do to counteract or alleviate that problem?

Ms Owers: I do not think there is a simple answer, except the portfolio of things that we have all been talking about this morning. The point is, when you expand prisons, and it is training prisons in particular where the numbers are being expanded really quite dramatically, you are always going to face a differential between the space you have got to house people and the space, resource, trainers and teachers that you have got to provide them with skills. Almost invariably the people arrive before the resources do anyway so that you are playing catch-up. Even with that, it is going to be incredibly difficult, and it will be extremely difficult with any government, to persuade the Treasury to release the kind of resources that you might need really to properly train and skill-up the numbers of people we have got in prisons at the moment. That is why, like the other witnesses this morning, we need to look at alternative interventions for those people who do not need to be there.

 

Q165  Mr Singh: In your experiences, is overcrowding having an impact on staff sickness levels, on their morale and on their will to carry out educational and rehabilitative programmes?

Ms Owers: I think it is certainly impacting on stress levels of staff within prisons. As I said, even providing a safe and decent environment, which is the bottom line, can be incredibly difficult if you are looking at a reception area where prisoners are arriving until late in the night. Leeds Prison, to quote an example, was settling in 436 new prisoners a month. That is a task in itself, and the rise in suicides within prison is one testimony to that. Undoubtedly the stress on staff is greater. The thing that concerns me, and I think concerns the Prison Service, is that stress on the good staff is the greatest. If your idea of turning up to work in the morning is you simply want an easy life and want to lock people behind a door for 23 hours a day then, sadly there are prisons in our prison system where that will be precisely what you can do. If actually you want to do more then the pressure of overcrowding is making that more difficult. I do not think it is so directly affecting what you call the "will" to do education and training, partly because that is actually being delivered increasingly by educationalists and trainers, and that is where I see a lot of commitment and very positive work happening but under a lot of stress.

 

Q166  Mr Singh: In the last four or five years we have seen 44 prisons have a change of governorship. Is that normal or unusual? What impact does that have on training and educational programmes?

Ms Owers: It can have quite a dramatic effect because governors can have particular programmes or relationships with organisations outside and particular areas of work that they want to develop. Yes, you are right, a change in governors is fairly dramatic. I have been in my job for less than 21/2 years now and I have been in my job longer than over 90 governing governors of prisons. The change round is actually very dramatic.

 

Q167  Mr Singh: We have a huge number of transfers in our prison system. 60,000 prisoners have been transferred in the last year or so, which is absolutely flabbergasting. I presume that has a huge impact on rehabilitative and training programmes. Can you assess that effect? If this is going to continue is there any way we can minimise the impact of transfers on education programmes?

Ms Owers: You are right that transfers do have a huge effect. They can mean that people cannot get the prison which has the programme they need, or that they are transferred away from a prison before they have a chance even to start or are in the middle of a programme they need. It also means that, in terms of the work we have all been talking about of rehabilitating or, as Andrew Coyle said, habilitating prisoners, if they are held far away from home that task is much more difficult. I do not think it is always managed as well as it could be. I do recognise that the pressure on the front end of the prison system at the moment means that the pressure on managers and those managing the population is to find spaces, but it does have a very damaging effect. I think we need to look at it more from a regional area focus. I have seen young men, for example, in Ashfield Young Offender Institution literally waking up in the morning shaking with fear in case there is going to be a knock on the door and they are going to be removed to another prison that they do not want to go to. That has a subtle undermining effect too. It means that building up relationships, and having confidence in a programme is diminished because all the time you are looking over your shoulder wondering where you may be moved to next.

 

Q168  Mr Singh: I am interested in why we have such a high level of transfers. What is the reason? I can understand sending someone to the nearest prison as a holding measure, but with transfers on top of that, to me, the system seems quite chaotic?

Ms Owers: It is, but it is partly because people are having to move in order to accommodate what is going on at the front end; and also because in parts of the prison system - women's prisons, young offender institutions and so on - there are relatively few of them and the movements can be fairly dramatic. You may be moving someone to the nearest prison and from there to the next one and the next one in a process that is a bit like dominoes.

Professor Coyle: I think one of the regrets about the Prison Service in recent years is that it has given the impression that they can cope, and we have seen the numbers going up almost inexorably with the feeling that the prison system can cope, but I am not sure it actually can cope. We use euphemistic words like "operational capacity", whereas what we really mean is a "safe overcrowding level". Operational capacity is not the actual number of places you have got but how many beds you can squeeze in. What that does not take account of is the pressure on the kitchen, the pressure on the visits, the pressure on reception and all the other activities in a prison. That is what contributes to the increase in moving prisoners around, as the Chief Inspector said. If two prisoners are released from Preston today and another two extra prisoners come to Wandsworth then the two beds are at Preston and not in Wandsworth, and you have this domino effect down the line.

 

Q169  Chairman: Could I just stop you there. I think the Committee is getting the impression that if you have two beds in Preston and two prisoners come into Wandsworth, that somehow about 20 prisoners move all round the country in order to fill the ones in Preston. If it was as simple as going to Preston we might understand. Could you say a little bit more about why there is such a knock-on effect around the system? I am sure there is a very good answer, and I think it would be very useful if we understood that.

Professor Coyle: There is an answer but I am not sure it is a very good one, Chairman. There is a dedicated group in prison headquarters whose job is to make sure that every prisoner has a bed each night, that is the overriding priority. So clearly it is not dealing with my simplistic example of two prisoners in Preston, it is dealing with 138 prisons with all of this going on. You cannot divorce this from the way the court system operates. The decision about moving these prisoners back from court to prison is probably not made until late in the afternoon and then everyone has got to swing into action and say where are the beds, who is going to be released tomorrow morning etc. So there are all these different elements in the equation. Sometimes, unfortunately, it does mean that you have 20 moves in order to fill these two places.

Ms Owers: The other thing is that although there may be 1,000 people in the prison, only a proportion of those in a local prison will be sentenced. The remand prisoners have to be kept in that local prison because they have to be near the court at which they are going to have to appear. The proportion of prisoners that you can move is precisely those who you could do most work with, the convicted prisoners who may be a minority of prisoners in some prisons, but they are the only ones that you have got the flexibility to move.

 

Q170  Chairman: Is it the case that the Prison Service, with honourable exceptions like Canterbury, have largely given up on doing anything with their short-term prisoners? Chief Inspector, you said that the prisons where short-term prisoners are held are struggling to provide the basics of decency and safety let alone purposeful activity and rehabilitation. Is that a reflection not just of what is happening but a general sense in the Prison Service that they cannot be expected to do any more than that?

Ms Owers: I do not think that is strictly true, no. I do see prisons and whole areas of the Prison Service trying to provide something better for their short-term prisoners, trying to ensure that re-settlement, rehabilitation starts at reception, that a custody plan is drawn up trying to link in with the local area even though they do not have to do a sentence plan for anyone who is serving less than a year. There is a lot of work going on with voluntary organisations but that is becoming more difficult. I think re-settlement in some ways is better developed in local prisons now than purposeful activity - actually being able to provide skills and education. Local prisons are trying to focus on that but our reports over and over again find that the deficits that exist are the deficits in purposeful activity and sometimes in being able to do effective re-settlement work. I do not think it means the Prison Service has given up on it because there is a strong commitment in some areas.

 

Q171  Chairman: There has been the suggestion, mainly coming from an NAO Report, that short-term prisoners should commence courses in custody and complete them in the community. When Custody Plus comes in that should become the norm in many cases. When you were talking about Custody Plus earlier you were pretty sceptical about whether that would work. Is that because the policy is badly designed or just because your experience is that no one will actually manage to get it together and organise a proper system so that there is a programme in prison that is followed through in the community?

Ms Padel: I think it is a bit of both. I think there is a lack of synergy at the moment between the Prison Service and the Probation Service, the same programmes are not necessarily available in the community as in prisons, different programmes are available in different areas of the country and different programmes are run at different prisons, so it would be quite difficult to manage that at the moment and there simply are not the resources at the moment as well, I think that is the thing.

 

Q172  Chairman: If any of the witnesses were to suggest one thing that the Committee could recommend that would make a significant difference to the approach that is taken to short-term prisoners, both remand and convicted prisoners, what would it be?

Professor Coyle: First of all to have less of them.

 

Q173  Chairman: Let us rule that one out. The Committee has heard all the evidence that has been made about sentencing policy when the Criminal Justice Bills goes through and it is therefore faced with the problem we have got at the moment. What is the one thing that we should be pressing for when we report that will make a significant difference to what everybody agrees is a major problem in the prison system?

Professor Coyle: Structurally it is very difficult for prisons to deliver programmes which will reduce re-offending, that is not really the purpose of the prison system. What it can do particularly in terms of short-term prisoners is use the time that they are in prison to introduce them to the resources that exist in the community which might make it less likely that they will commit crime in the future.

Ms Owers: I think I would like to get back to some of the debates that were happening before the over-crowding crisis in its present form hit the Prison Service, which is to look at alternative models of dealing with people, holding people in different kinds of custodial environment or within the community and for those to be available to sentencers and not necessarily, as Andrew Coyle said, run through criminal justice but through other means. If we do not crack that, if we do not provide alternative places where people can get the kind of intensive supervision and treatment they may need and places which can provide that support once they leave then we are in that circle and that circle will not be broken.

Ms Padel: I agree with both points, but I think the third thing that I would say is that prisoners must be kept close to home, short-term prisoners particularly so that they are able to make use of the community resources and maintain their family links or any links in the community they may have. I think any approach with short-term prisoners needs to look at what they have going for them already and maximise that. All too often, as I have said in my evidence, visits and family ties are given very low priority. Prisons are very bad at doing things like making sure that booking lines operate well for visits. The few positive things that some prisoners have got in their lives are fundamentally disrupted by the process of imprisonment and then they are much more likely to go out homeless.

 

Q174  David Winnick: In the evidence which has been given to us by the Howard League and other organisations like the Prison Reform Trust the emphasis is on the fact that part of the obvious problem is that people go into prison who should not be in prison and you have touched on that, Professor Coyle. Do you believe that to a large extent people are going into prison who otherwise could be treated by alternative means for the offences they have committed and been convicted of?

Ms Owers: I think I pointed to two classes of people in one of my earlier interventions who are in prison in many cases because of the absence of effective alternatives elsewhere. Those are people with mental illness, of whom there are many in our prisons and where the closure of the large mental hospitals, as Martin Narey said, has led to care in custody rather than care in the community and those needing treatment for substance abuse problems (including alcohol abuse which is rather poorly dealt with at the moment) and for whom it is not clear that even if the prison system detoxifies them and gives them some kind of treatment they will actually be able to manage those problems once they return to the place from which they came with all the temptations and lifestyles that that will involve. So I certainly think that we need to look at different kinds of interventions. In my view that would be more effective than simply sending people to prison. Undoubtedly prisons are doing some good work and I think undoubtedly they are doing better work than they were a few years ago. However, there is the real danger that, because of that, people will be sent to prison to have good done to them in circumstances where that work could be done elsewhere.

 

Q175  David Winnick: Professor Coyle, you have 25 years experience in the Prison Service as well as your academic work. Do you feel we could drastically cut the number of people in prison and at the same time make sure that those who have offended are punished?

Professor Coyle: I will make two quick comments, if I may, Mr Winnick, one as an academic, which is that we have roughly twice as many people in prison as many Continental countries and I do not know why that is so. I do not think it is because people in this country are more criminal, nor do I think that people in this country feel more safe as a result. Secondly, putting on my former prison governor hat and particularly the last six years I spent as governor of Brixton. Before that all my experience was with high security prisons where there really was no debate that the people who were in prison needed to be there and needed to be managed decently and humanely. The biggest thing that struck me when I went to Brixton was that a significant proportion of people by any measure really did not need to be there. There were 300 prisoners in what was then known as F-Wing who were by any measure mentally disordered prisoners and they were there because there was nowhere else in the system to put them and I think Brixton was not alone in that.

Ms Padel: I agree with what both the others have said. I think part of our problem is that short-term prison sentences are a matter of last resort, but they seem to be reaching the last resort more quickly because everything seems to have moved up-tariff. The Probation Service is now supervising many offenders who have far lower risk of re-offending and far less danger than previously and low level penalties like the Conditional Discharge are hardly used and I think we need to pull it back again and re-balance it a bit so that the people who are going into prisons are the ones who should be there.

 

Q176  Miss Widdecombe: Could I ask you in answering these questions to address the world as it is rather than the world as you might like it to be. There are 74,000 people in prison and the question is how you deploy the days for those people in prison and what good it might do. Do you agree that the majority of people who come into prison are either illiterate or innumerate or they are very poorly qualified, quite often with no qualifications at all? In addition to that, do you agree that an awful lot of them come from unstructured and disorderly backgrounds where they have never seen the pattern of a modestly successful lifestyle around them, to whom order and structure and aspiration are foreign concepts and the sort of daily approach that the rest of the world takes for granted has just never been inculcated, is absent? If you do agree with that, do you agree that what we should be doing in our prisons is having structured days and particularly inculcating the habit of work when in fact there is very little work in our prisons? If you take Coldingley out of the equation and you look at most other prisons, there is certainly insufficient work for every prisoner to be doing a full working day. Such work that there is is largely purposeless though not entirely and because it does not come in from real contractors for delivery to real customers it is not paid for, it is just pocket money supported and it is also, therefore, a drain on the taxpayer because it is not paying for itself. If you accept that, the third proposition is that what we should be doing is having full working days - and this is not something you can do by the middle of next week but it is what we should be working towards - for all prisoners on work supplied by real contractors and for delivery to real customers so that we can pay some real wages and make some real deductions for the upkeep of families, savings and victim repatriation so that you inculcate not only the habit of a structured day in the outside world but that you also inculcate the habits of an orderly disposition of earnings at least at a very basic level. Comment!

Ms Owers: Can I break that up into some bite size chunks, if I may. First of all, yes, of course I agree that most of the people coming into prisons have literacy and numeracy standards well below that which is required in the workplace. It is around 70% of people coming into prisons that have literacy and numeracy levels below Level 2, which is generally regarded as the employability level; and that is very much connected with the fact that a great majority of them have been excluded from school or have truanted from school. So I think that one of the things that prisons have been doing much more of and certainly should continue to do is to provide the education that makes good some of those deficits and provides some of those skills. I also agree with you that the majority of short-term prisoners coming into local prisons have come from chaotic lifestyles in which there has been little order, little trust and little by way of social relationships. I think it was Andrew Coyle who said earlier that they are not habilitated people in the first place and certainly the structured environment that can be provided in a prison and which I would argue could be provided in another kind of environment too is very important in order to restructure those lives. I have seen prisons which get close to a working day, not just Coldingley. I have also seen prisons which are quite well resourced in the system, such as some of our dispersal prisons, which do not get anywhere near that. There are also some prisons that have tried quite ingeniously to stretch what they have at least to get as close as they can, for example a prison which has gone to the local comprehensive school and worked out how it structures its timetable and decided that by stretching the resources they have got they can provide four full working days for prisoners and on the other day they can do visits and meet their probation officers and other things. So at least you provide an eight to four experience and get prisoners out of their cells to do that. I agree with you that the more that we can move towards that model the better, but what I would also want to inject into your equation as well as work is the acquisition of skills, it is making sure wherever possible that the work that prisoners are engaged in, whether it is cleaning or laundry or whether it is something like bricklaying and carpentry and so on and so forth, carries with it the possibility of acquiring the National Vocational Qualifications which employers will be looking for when those prisoners leave.

 

Q177  Miss Widdecombe: Could I ask perhaps Professor Coyle to comment on what he has seen of working regimes in other countries in prisons?

Professor Coyle: There is no argument with the first premise of your presentation because the evidence is there from the Social Exclusion Unit, it is there from the Prison Service itself, Martin Narey trumpeted loud and clear what needed to be done and of course prisons which by and large hold young men should be places of activity. We talk about the Prison Service reaching 24 hours a week activity, that is three and a half hours a day, but that means twenty and a half hours a day locked up in a cell. Whether you can actually reach your vision in the prison setting is questionable, but I wish we could. The evidence in respect of most other countries which do it well is that those countries which do it best are those which have smaller prisons linked to their communities and with strong links not only to the social and other services but to employment and other resources in the community. I am thinking of countries like Sweden where they have a strong link with companies like Ikea, where much of the furniture that one buys from Ikea has been made by prisoners in Sweden or Finland. There are examples of where it does work, but it will not work in isolation, it will only work if that is what the ethos of the system is and that is not the ethos that we have in this country.

 

Q178  Miss Widdecombe: I am glad to know that when we had all those Ikea chairs at the Tory Party Conference we were supporting the prisoners of Sweden. Could I ask you to comment on the German system? Have you studied it?

Professor Coyle: Yes. Germany is usually quoted as an example when one talks about work in prisons. If I may say so, that is largely because some academics in Germany have written about prison labour. It is actually quite difficult to get an overview of the German system because it is a federal system based on the Länder and each state has quite different systems. I anticipated you might ask this question this morning and last night I looked up the latest evidence that we have of what goes on in Germany and I think the best one can say is that it is very patchy. I would find it difficult - and I have some good contacts in Germany - to hold the German model up as an example. Where it does succeed is along the lines I have mentioned before about those small prisons which are linked to the community and which have links to employment and other facilities. There are some patches where it delivers better.

 

Q179  Miss Widdecombe: I do not want to go through each country in turn, but could I ask you to comment on one other country which is Switzerland?

Professor Coyle: It is not a country which immediately springs to mind again in this respect because again it is a cantonal system, there is no national prison system and this may be a lesson for us. Each canton has its own prison system, although it has a relatively low number of prisoners. I think another feature of the Swiss system is that an unduly high proportion of prisoners are foreign prisoners. I would be very happy to go away and do some research, but I am not sure if Switzerland looms large in this area.

 

Q180  Miss Widdecombe: I did see a Swiss prison which I thought was particularly good in this respect, I cannot say that it is typical and that is why I was wanting your input on it. Could you just comment on the involvement of the private sector in delivering work into prisons? An awful lot of prison work is actually done, particularly in Coldingley for example, in producing material for consumption by the Prison Service for obvious reasons, but what about what I might call real work, can you talk about any particular examples you have seen of that and where it works well?

Ms Owers: I have seen some good examples. Again the word patchy keeps on cropping up in our evidence and it will crop up in this contribution as well. You can look at the work that is being done within Aylesbury Prison where Toyota were persuaded by a particularly charismatic instructor to invest in a state of the art motor mechanics workshop within the prison where young men are being trained and being given the skills which are valuable skills in any Toyota workshop or factory, anywhere and are often being taken on in employment before even they leave the prison. That is a model that I think combines with the corporate social responsibility that many companies are now striving to get involved in.

 

Q181  Miss Widdecombe: Where was that?

Ms Owers: In Aylesbury. There is a similar project with Transco, the gas company, in Reading Prison, again offering real skills and often providing employment before people have even left the prison.

 

Q182  Miss Widdecombe: Is Reading not a local prison?

Ms Owers: No, it is a young offender institution.

 

Q183  Miss Widdecombe: And Aylesbury?

Ms Owers: Aylesbury is also a YOI.

 

Q184  Miss Widdecombe: Can you give us any adult prison where that is the case?

Ms Owers: I understand that there is something happening in Hull Prison but I could find out more about that. I cannot think immediately of any examples but I am sure they exist. I will have a look.

 

Q185  Miss Widdecombe: When you think we have a prison estate of 138 prisons and you cannot think immediately - and this is not a criticism of you - of any examples in the adult estate, that is a pretty severe indictment, is it not?

Ms Owers: It may simply be that my memory is not working very well.

 

Q186  Miss Widdecombe: I do not think so.

Ms Owers: I will certainly have a look through recent reports and see if there is anything of importance that I can dig out.

 

Q187  Miss Widdecombe: Would you agree that if you actually lock people up for anything up to 20 hours a day and a couple of years later you open up the gates and say "Go and lead a law abiding life" that it is cloud-cuckoo-land?

Ms Owers: Prison is never a neutral experience. If you want it to be something that is beneficial then absolutely, particularly with young men, you have to provide them with something purposeful to do.

 

Q188  Miss Widdecombe: It might be a worthwhile investment to try and make my vision happen if not by the middle of next week then at least within the foresee future. Professor Coyle, can I take you on a slightly different path for a moment. You refer in your written evidence to the Restorative Prison project. Can you just comment a little on that and its impact please?

Professor Coyle: I think the success has been the involvement of the local community first of all through the local council. The hook of the project was the refurbishment work done in a park which actually was symbolic of the regeneration of the community and what we were able to do was to involve prisoners in this symbolic regeneration of the community. Suddenly Middlesbrough Council discovered it had a prison in its midst, because the prison up there was not called Middlesbrough Prison, it was called Holme House Prison and no one knew where that was. Most of the prisoners there come from Teesside and most of them are going to return to Teesside. So the success was getting the local authority, particularly led by their mayor, Mayor Ray Mallon, involved in this, getting unusual departments in the council involved such as the Development and Urban Regeneration Department which we discovered was also responsible for housing and they then discovered that prisoners were coming out of Middlesbrough without accommodation and they said, "But we have got vacant accommodation. It's not the best but it can be made available." These things came together. As very often happens in prison issues, those involved became enthusiastic and the officials and others from Middlesbrough Council went and began to spread that work through the Local Government Association, through SOLACE and other bodies. The success in a word has been to move outside the criminal justice system into the mainstream.

 

Q189  Bob Russell: Is education and skills provision a genuine priority of the Prison Service, Professor Coyle?

Professor Coyle: Is it currently a priority?

 

Q190  Bob Russell: Or going back to a time when you were active, was it a priority?

Professor Coyle: As far as I am aware the English Prison Service gives a priority to education. The delivery of education historically has been a good model to follow. In many of the prison activities the prison system has not used the community resources but set up parallel structures. It did not do that in education because historically what it did was it contracted to local further education colleges or community colleges to deliver in a prison. It then went off slightly at a tangent when it contracted out. I think it is now coming back and it is giving a priority to education. Where there is a debate going on is in what is meant by education, because there was a period when people focused very narrowly on reading, writing and arithmetic and it was thought that if we could just give prisoners these skills then it would make them employable. There is some value to this argument and that needs to be dealt with. I think there is also an argument for widening and more creative experiences so that the prisoners do not simply have destructive experiences but they have creative experiences where they are actually being stretched. I am thinking particularly of when I was governor at Brixton when we had the Royal National Theatre help us to do a six week workshop and the prisoners did a performance of Hamlet and you may think how inappropriate for a prison. What that actually did is it forced them to learn their lines, it forced them to work together as a team and at the end of it all there was an outcome where they presented to their families and to other prisoners. That was a real benefit.

 

Q191  Bob Russell: Whether it is Hamlet or just basic writing and maths and all the rest of it, that cannot be done, can it, if they are locked up for 23 hours out of 24? How much of a priority is education skills provision? Has performance in this area improved significantly following the ring-fencing of funding?

Professor Coyle: The Chief Inspector is probably better placed to comment on that. The Prison Service, particularly given its experience in the mid-1990s, has been quite clear that its priority has been to prevent prisoners escaping and to have secure and well ordered prisons and it has succeeded in that remarkably well. There has been a price paid in all the other activities, whether they are called purposeful activities or education or whatever. I think the Prison Service is now trying to break out of that. I think at some point your Committee might want to pay attention as to whether prisons are organised for the benefit of staff or whether they are organised for the benefit of prisoners, and there is a big issue about the distribution of staff and the distribution of staff time in that if there are three officers on a landing then the 40 prisoners in that landing can be out doing purposeful things; if there are only two officers, if one is off sick then no one gets out. Those issues need to be tackled a bit more enthusiastically by the Prison Service.

 

Q192  Bob Russell: Hamlet was a roaring success in one prison. Do you support the role for the arts in prison and what benefits do arts activities provide to prisoners that basic education initiatives cannot?

Ms Owers: Yes, I do very much support that. I think when you are dealing with people who have often spent their lives either avoiding or being avoided by education you may need to be quite clever about the way that you introduce them to the skills they need to acquire. It is very helpful that increasingly prisons are being more flexible about that and are introducing basic skills in the context of the workplace for example. Where you have young men of just over 18, above the school leaving age, you are going to have to overcome considerable resistance before any learning starts to take place in the classroom. Putting them in a place where they are learning motor mechanics or bricklaying or painting and decorating and where they have to use literacy and numeracy as part of that and having the learning pod in the middle of the workshop is a way of getting to that by different means. As Andrew Coyle has said, so are pottery, painting, creative work of all kinds which provides that business of engaging somebody in the first place in something that perhaps for the first time they can do well so that they can start to take pride in themselves and their achievements. People come to learning through different routes and it is important we continue to provide all those routes.

 

Q193  Bob Russell: So there is a place for the arts that Mr Barraclough would approve of?

Ms Owers: There certainly is.

 

Q194  Bob Russell: Chief Inspector, you will note that in many prisons there is an economic disincentive for prisoners to provide education and skills training rather than make money through prison work. How would you propose that the Prison Service tackles that problem?

Ms Owers: The simple way of tackling it is to make sure that it is equivalent and in some prisons that happens. Governors have considerable discretion to decide how prison wages are allocated. I have been in prisons where there is no disadvantage to prisoners who chose to do education rather than work.

 

Q195  Bob Russell: Surely the Home Office must issue general directives and guidance to prison governors with 138 different syllabuses.

Ms Owers: 138 different levels of wages. There are not 138 but there are significant differences between prisons. One of the things prisoners very commonly complain about is the difference in the wage levels from the prison they have come to and the prison they have left.

 

Q196  Bob Russell: We have got differences on the wage levels. We are told there is a wide disparity in funding and curriculum between prisons. Is that again the lack of guidance and direction from the Home Office best practice around the country? We have heard excellent stories about Canterbury today.

Ms Owers: I think those discrepancies are being ironed out particularly because the funding for prison education and training is now not provided by the Home Office at all but by the Department for Education and Skills. The Department for Education and Skills is insisting on certain levels of qualifications for teachers and so on and that budget is ring-fenced. In the past it was not unknown for the budget that supposedly existed for education and training to be used for something else entirely. Governors now cannot get at that budget, it is ring-fenced. The problem is more that in many prisons they are not geared for education and training and so the process of actually getting the prisoner out of his or her cell and to the place where education and training is happening may not happen at all if prisoners are not unlocked or it may happen very late so that you get bits cut off both ends of the workday or the education day. It is about making sure the prison as a whole sees itself as a place where education and training is happening rather than if you can manage to get people there at all or on time.

 

Q197  Bob Russell: You are indicating there is a huge gap between the best and the worst.

Ms Owers: There is.

 

Q198  Bob Russell: What are you doing to ensure that the worst match the best?

Ms Owers: We are continually pointing out where they are falling short and in that I think it is very helpful that we inspect along with the Adult Learning Inspectorate in adult prisons who are quite consciously comparing the services that prisoners in prisons might get to the ones they would get in a further education college and they are not very tolerant of the excuse, "But this is a prison so we cannot do it any other way."

 

Q199  Bob Russell: Basically we are down to the priorities of the governors. We have already heard that there is a rapid turnover of those governors, so surely there should be some markers and some general best practice which all governors can follow in order that we repeat the successes that we have heard about such as Canterbury and I have indicated for the training centre in Colchester.

Ms Owers: There are some basic standards and I am sure the Prison Service will be able to tell you about them in more detail when you take evidence from them. For example, prisons are given a certain number of completions of basic skills, Level 2 completions. The problem with those is they can be too rigid since some prisoners need Level 1 and some need Open University. So the problem when you set standards across the piece is that you do need some flexibility for governors in prisons to decide what their population is. What we say as an Inspectorate is that each prison should do a needs analysis of its prisoners and the provision it applies should be consequent on that needs analysis which will be different in different kinds of prison and different for different prisoners.

 

Q200  Miss Widdecombe: Can I just take you up on this problem of equivalence in payment to education and work. If you had my system and you had real wages being paid you could not achieve equivalence. Is there not an argument for saying that what you could do is instead of breaking people rigidly into education or work you could provide a mixed week and the wages cover the week and therefore there is that not tension between do we go into education and get paid less or do we go into work and get paid more, the mixed week idea is actually the answer to that?

Ms Owers: Possibly, but I would go even further in mixing and I would look to education to be delivered in the workplace wherever possible.

 

Q201  Miss Widdecombe: I can see training in the workplace but what about education?

Ms Owers: Education, yes. It is happening in prisons where literacy and numeracy tutors are basing themselves in the workshop and in any kind of work you need to have those skills and that is the way people get excited about acquiring them.

Ms Padel: I think that happened in Aylesbury at the car mechanics workshop. The students there have to have a certain level of literacy and numeracy before they are taken on. As I said in my paper, they are long-termers so they have an incentive to acquire those skills, but I think the learning continues in the workplace when they are on the car programme as well.

Chairman: The Committee is going to be going to Aylesbury so it is useful to have a pointer as to what we might look at.

 

Q202  Miss Widdecombe: Can we now look at offending behaviour courses which have been met, if the reports are to be believed, with extremely mixed success. A report by Richard Ford in The Times said, "The Prison Service since the early 1990s has allegedly spent £150 million on psychological sessions and the net result is extremely disappointing. The evidence seems to suggest that it has not worked and that in some cases those who have been through these courses actually have higher re-offending rates than those who have not." I find that extremely disappointing because these courses were hailed as a breakthrough in getting prisoners to address their behaviour and to understand that there were other ways of reacting. Laying aside the grunges of this world for a moment but looking much more at your bog standard course on anger management being delivered in your average prison, can you just comment?

Professor Coyle: What Richard Ford was referring to was the Home Office research finding 226. He picked up the one which came out two months ago, 206 which suggested that the benefits were questionable and 226 came out quietly without any press release. One of the problems in the Prison Service is that one is looking for a panacea or something that will resolve all the problems and the mistake that I think some people in the Prison Service and the Probation Service made in the mid- and late 1990s when these courses were first introduced from Canada was to suggest that these were going to be a panacea, it was going back to the old medical model that psychologically if we could take prisoners' minds apart and put them together again then all would be well. That was an unfortunate claim to be made and in fairness to the people who pushed that claim, both the governments were looking for something which they could grasp and considerable funding was given for these courses. The reality and what has now been proved is that some of these courses work some of the time for some people in some circumstances if they are very well targeted, but simply to argue that if you put a prisoner through an anger management course or a thinking skills course it will make any difference is very questionable. The Home Office now, seven or eight years down the line has been doing objective research and has come up with the answer that of themselves these courses are actually not going to make any difference, but if you take them in context and if you do all the other things we have been talking about this morning then some of them will work some of the time. The mistake that was made was to claim too much for them and to put too many resources and for the Prison Service to measure their success by the number of courses that ran, that is the key performance indicator, not what were the outcomes, not even how many people finished but how many did we push through.

 

Q203  Miss Widdecombe: Outcomes are very difficult to measure because they rely on research years down the line. Obviously the target was going to be based on trying to deliver the programmes, was it not?

Professor Coyle: It is interesting that it is the Home Office's own research unit which is producing these findings.

 

Q204  Miss Widdecombe: I was trying to suggest that the target - God forbid that I should defend the Government - is not quite as stupid as one might think.

Professor Coyle: It was in the early stages. I think we can now change the target to make it more specific. The evidence should be coming out now.

 

Q205  Miss Widdecombe: Agreed. If it was said before that evidence was available that these were going to make a difference then your target had to be to deliver them.

Professor Coyle: The claim made by some people was that it would deliver that difference and there was no evidence of that.

 

Q206  Miss Widdecombe: Chief Inspector, do you have anything to add to that?

Ms Owers: Nothing much. I agree that we need to see offending behaviour programmes as part of a package of interventions and crucially something that addresses what prisoners do when they are outside prison as well as when they are inside prison. I do not think there are any magic solutions nor do I think we should dig things up to see if they are growing. I think we need to continue to have that as part of a toolbox of interventions for prisoners but it needs to fit into the much wider areas that we were talking about.

 

Q207  Miss Widdecombe: Does it need a more rigorous assessment of who goes on the course?

Ms Owers: I am not expert enough to say that. It may not be immediately apparent who is going to benefit from it. In terms of sex offender treatment programmes, there is considerable evidence that they hit the middle of the range rather well and they are not appropriate at all to those at the bottom and top of the range. On all the other kinds of interventions we were talking about like arts and education and so on it may be difficult in advance to predict what will be an important factor for an individual prisoner.[1]

 

Q208  Miss Widdecombe: Can we just turn briefly to alcoholism, which is certainly at the root of a lot of crime. Unlike drugs, alcohol is not widely available throughout the prison system and therefore people who come in with an alcohol problem and who are there for any length of time effectively dry out and that is considered to be it. Can you just comment on what provision you think should be made available for people with that problem?

Ms Owers: I think it is very important that the Prison Service develops a national strategy for alcohol harm reduction in the same way as it has got a national drugs strategy. As you say alcohol is a significant driver for crime, particularly for violent crime and particularly for younger people. We do prisoner surveys in all the prisons that we inspect and one of the questions we ask young people is whether they expect to have a drug or alcohol problem when they leave prison. In a recent prison inspection nearly half of those young men told us they expected to have an alcohol problem once they left prison. At the moment all that is available is tied on to programmes designed for other kinds of substance abuse, for drug programmes, there is nothing specifically ring-fenced and I definitely think there should be.

Ms Padel: It is also true that many people who have alcohol problems also use other drugs as well and drug users also use alcohol. I think simply drying out has never been a cure for alcohol problems because everybody knows that there is always a pub within close reach of the prison gates and many prisoners head straight to it. If the psychological aspect is still there then it is not going to be resolved. Yes, I agree there is an urgent need for a strategic approach and tying it to drugs work as well.

Professor Coyle: I absolutely agree. The Prison Service has focused on drug issues because there has been a national strategy to deal with drugs, there has been a drugs czar and the Prison Service has made use of the resources available. I think alcohol abuse is a much more fundamental problem and the Prison Service really has only begun to bite at the edges of that.

 

Q209  Mrs Dean: You said earlier that mentally ill people are in prison because there is nowhere else for them to go. Should the NHS be able to take the costs of prison for a mentally ill prisoner and use it to provide secure NHS places?

Ms Owers: Secure NHS accommodation is considerably more expensive than prison accommodation, so the sums do not quite add up in that way. I think it was once suggested by one of our medical inspectors that if the Prison Service charged the NHS in the same way that, for example, the police charge the Prison Service if they use police cells it might concentrate minds wonderfully though I think that is a counsel of last resort. One of the benefits that is appearing to emerge from the closer links between prisons and their local health providers is that - and it is a difference I have noticed in the short time I have been doing the job - more prisons are now telling me that it is easier to get people into secure NHS provision than it was and that has largely been accomplished within three months of someone being sectioned. That is still much too long. People who are severely mentally ill deteriorate very seriously in three months in an environment which is not therapeutic and in which they cannot be treated effectively. During that period they deteriorate, they are a danger to themselves, to other prisoners and to prison staff. It is still too long a period but it is an area where there has been an improvement. The area where there is not an improvement and indeed where there is hardly any provision at all outside prison is in relation to young people, particularly under 18s but also 18 to 20 year olds. There is simply not sufficient bed space to deal with those severely disturbed young people who are found in all prisons but I think proportionally there are more in women's prisons: among girls and young women it is a very serious problem. However, the severely mentally ill are the tip of the iceberg. Much more common is a kind of chronic mental disorder which is quite often linked with substance abuse or other kinds of abuse. There are some benefits from the working together of prisons and health services outside in the sense that more of the prisons I go to now have mental health in-reach services which are both supporting prisoners and also training staff in the best prisons. We must not get away from the fundamental dilemma that prison is not where most of these people should be and the dilemma of somehow making it 'acceptable'. There is an acute psychiatric unit in Styal women's prison called the Reeman Unit and that was set up because of the acute psychiatric problems which many women have there, but it suffers from being a prison environment which is not a therapeutic environment and which is at most containing those problems. When local magistrates went around Styal the prison authorities were somewhat disturbed by the fact that they said, "Oh, good, that means we can feel okay about sending mentally disturbed women to Styal." So I think the messages need to be clear even while the provision improves.

 

Q210  Mrs Dean: How close are we getting to the idea of "equivalence" between prisoners' mental health care and that available to the general public through the NHS?

Ms Owers: It is certainly moving in that direction with mental health in-reach work and so on, but the difficulty in a custodial environment will always be the fact that people are held in custody, that they are behind their doors a lot of the time. More prisons now have day care facilities for people with mental illness. A lot of prisons are closing down in-patient facilities or cutting down significantly on in-patient facilities which by and large is a good move because prison health care centres were used as dumping grounds for people who were mentally ill by people who did not know how to or could not cope with them elsewhere. Some prisons are opening day care centres instead but there is still not enough by way of constructive activity, therapy, interventions and so on that you need in order to manage people with mental illness.

 

Q211  Mrs Dean: What measures are in place to ensure continuity of care when people leave prisons?

Ms Owers: That is always the difficult thing to arrange and it becomes more difficult the further away from home a prisoner is held. It is getting better, as many things I have said are, because of the involvement of local mental health trusts, but it is still extraordinarily difficult because there are not the places outside prison where those people can have a structured, slightly protected life of the kind that they need if they are to cope with their mental disorder.

 

Q212  Chairman: Ofsted is now going to inspect the education provision. Is the Commission for Health Improvement or its successor now going to inspect mental health provision?

Ms Owers: Ofsted has always inspected with us, they inspect as part of our inspection team depending on the prison and that has been the case as long as I have been there and I think that is very helpful. We are in discussions with CHI about health inspection. I do not think there is any immediate proposal for CHI to take it on. They have, frankly, enough to do with their new remit.

 

Q213  Chairman: If we are aiming for equivalence, it would make more sense for the Commission for Health Improvement to inspect the quality of mental health provision.

Ms Owers: We certainly need to work closely with them and at the moment we are working closely with them. I have three specialist health inspectors and all of them are primary care and mental health trained and have experience of working in regions and with the Commission for Health Improvement. So we are making sure that the standards by which we inspect are the standards that CHI would expect outside.

 

Q214  Chairman: There has never been a thematic inspection of mental health provision in prisons.

Ms Owers: There was a thematic inspection of health generally in prisons which was one of the drivers ---

 

Q215  Chairman: But not on mental health?

Ms Owers: Not specifically, although mental health was a pretty important part of it.

 

Q216  Mr Clappison: Could I turn to the subject of women prisoners who commit less serious offences than men, fewer violence and sexual offences and probably fewer offences of burglary as well and who are by and large serving shorter sentences. I am tempted to ask you in the light of that if we are not sending too many women to prison, but I will resist that temptation and simply ask each of you for your reflections on the rehabilitative issues facing prisoners.

Professor Coyle: It is important to take account of the fact that prison is primarily a male environment in this country even with the numbers of women prisoners. It is still the case that 90-95% of all prisoners are male and prisons are organised on a male ethos. When prison instructions are issued, on issues like, say, security then they are applied across the board but they are primarily written with men in mind. It happens not only in England and Wales but in every country that women are an add-on. The reality is, as you have hinted, that both the profile of women who are sent to prison is quite different from that of men and also the needs of women who are in prison are quite different. The Prison Service have tried to deal with this with the encouragement of the Chief Inspector's predecessor by setting up what they call a woman's estate, but I gather that it has been announced that that is no longer to continue because, despite the fact that there are now, I understand, 50 people at prison headquarters responsible for women's policy, the treatment of women has not really improved and in many respects has got worse. Much of the discussion we have had today has been focused on male prisoners. There needs to be specific attention paid to the needs of women prisoners.

 

Q217  Mr Clappison: How is it getting worse?

Professor Coyle: I read the Chief Inspector's report.

 

Q218  Mr Clappison: Then I will pass on to the Chief Inspector.

Ms Owers: The conditions and treatment in many women's prisons fall far short of what we require, partly for the reasons we have been talking about earlier, the extent of mental illness, of self-harm, of substance abuse in women's prisons is much higher even than that of men's prisons. The statistics are astonishing. I was in New Hall Prison in Yorkshire last week. 80% of the women coming into that prison go straight to the drug detoxification unit. That is the level of needs that the prison is responding to. In answer to your question, yes, the needs of women prisoners are different and, as an example, when the Prison Service first set targets for resettlement, the target that it set was that prisoners should go into a job. Prisons had targets for prisoners going into employment. Employment is not necessarily the first aim of women coming out of prison. Indeed, it may not be an aim at all for some. Given that 60% of women in prison, as I said, are primary carers of children under 16, the first thing such a woman wants to do coming out of prison is to get a home by which she may be able to get her children back and then, once she has re-established a relationship with her children, employment. That immediate target of employment is simply not appropriate to many women in prison. That is one example of where you need to set the targets around the needs of women.

Ms Padel: There are a number of issues. First of all, the number of foreign nationals in women's prisons is very high and they tend to be the women who are serving longer sentences. There has been some talk about alternative ways of dealing with that issue but I really think that the fact that there are so many in our prisons is not doing a great deal for anybody and it is very expensive. With them come many problems such as children who are born here while they are in prison who are in care in this country. There are all sorts of difficult issues there and although there have been efforts I do not think they are receiving a particularly good service being in prison here. A number of women's prisons run children's visits. At Holloway they stopped two years ago and they have still not been re-started. For many of the women who pass through Holloway Prison with young children it is the first place that they go to when they enter prison, and those children's visits, where they can have a bit of decent time with their children, not just sitting round a table in the visitors' room, are terribly important. That is a very basic rehabilitative opportunity which has now been lost in Holloway and I do not know when it is going to be reinstated. That is a real problem. The other thing is the number of drug users. As Anne said, there are enormously high numbers of drug users in the women's prisons. Many women who are in prison have been abused in the past. There has been quite a lot of research which has shown that. A prison environment is a very bad place. Women tend to find it much harder to adapt to being in prison than men. I am not quite sure why, whether it is because women who end up in prison often are some of the most damaged women, even more so than the men, or whether it is something about the way women behave; I do not know, but women seem to operate in a very different way when they go into prison. They make different demands of the people who run the prisons and they have a higher incidence of self-harm and suicide, so I think the sorts of prisons that we operate now are very unsuitable for women. Women should really be held, where it is absolutely necessary, in smaller units near to home with good access so that they can keep some of those relationships and links going.

 

Q219  Mr Clappison: I find what you say, particularly about the loss of family visits at Holloway, very disturbing. Can I ask, Professor Coyle, if you could comment on your suggestion about the case for holding women in smaller units?

Professor Coyle: That has been an issue which the Prison Service in many countries has grappled with over the years. It was an issue which the Woolf Report raised. When you have a small number of women do you create three or four medium sized prisons in the whole country and then send them to them, Holloway in the south, Styal in the north, for example, or do you create smaller units and, if they are small units, are they free-standing small units which will be expensive, or are they small units in male prisons? There is no easy answer to that. In an ideal world women would be held completely apart in different institutions from the men, but I think that the requirements of keeping women closer to their home and their families override that and there should be a way of creating that. There is no need for the relatively high security which exists in most male prisons for the majority of the women's estate. We have an opportunity with women (and you may be going to come on to juveniles in a moment) in respect of how we deal with women - and we can always use that as a pilot for how we might deal with men - in much smaller institutions where there is sufficient security but not the 17-feet walls and CCTV and so on.

 

Q220  Mr Clappison: I am indeed going to come on to juveniles but before I do I think you have agreed that you are going to let us have a paper on your views on comparative international experience. Perhaps you could also let us have some views on how women are dealt with in other countries and where examples of best practice are.

Professor Coyle: I will.

 

Q221  Mr Clappison: Moving on to juveniles, the Chief Inspector mentioned a moment ago the inspections which are carried out by Ofsted and the inspections that she carries out herself of juveniles and young offenders. Do you think enough is being done to provide education and training for juveniles and young offenders?

Ms Owers: I think I would want to split that into two answers. In relation to juveniles, under-18s, there has undoubtedly been a great improvement. That is because the Youth Justice Board have put increasingly more money into education for those young people. It is proportionately still less than a similar young person would get if they were detained in a secure training centre or a local authority secure home rather than in prison. There are still huge differentials between those provisions but it has undoubtedly improved. There is a new youth justice target of 30 hours of education per week. Very few establishments are yet hitting that, although more of them are hitting the previous target of 15 hours of education per week. I think though that throws into stark contrast what is not available for the 18-20s who we know to be among the most prolific re-offenders and those for whom education is a particular priority, and there have not been the same resources, the same focus, on education and training for them. When we inspect so-called split sites which hold some under-18s and some over-18s, the differences are usually visible. Some governors are trying to use the juveniles as a way of bringing up provision for the young adults but it is very difficult to do because the funding is provided specifically for the juveniles and what has been tending to happen is that because that contract with the Youth Justice Board is rightly very tight and very demanding, if there is a shortfall of staffing or too many bed-watches, too many staff sick, then you pull over staff from the young adult side in order to meet your contractual obligations in relation to the juveniles. The juveniles show what can be done within prison even though it is still far less than is available elsewhere although the good thing too about the juvenile estate is that there has been less of it because children are being dealt with outside prison rather than within prison and those interventions are being provided outside in the community. However the young adult estate is still a very impoverished one.

 

Q222  Mr Clappison: Many of the juveniles and young offenders have special educational needs, as we have heard, implicitly. Is there specialist provision for that and is it satisfactory?

Ms Owers: Again, if you are looking at the juvenile estate there are now, certainly in the two recent juvenile establishments I have inspected, special needs co-ordinators and learning support assistants provided by the Youth Justice Board to try to deal with those children who have got special needs as opposed to those children who have simply missed out on education and have never been through the education system at all. It is a focus and it is being provided and it is visibly improving the service to those young people, but, as I keep saying, there still is not enough of it.

 

Q223  Bob Russell: Professor Coyle, and indeed all three of you, on the role of the voluntary sector in the rehabilitation of prisoners, what is the present relationship between the Prison Service and the voluntary sector as regards provision of educational and indeed rehabilitative initiatives? Indeed, in recent times, since you have been an active governor, has that improved, remained the same or got worse?

Professor Coyle: My colleagues are probably better able to comment on the present situation than I am. The only comment I would wish to make is that this links in with the hypothesis in a way which I have been pushing through the whole of this meeting about the need to link with community provision and part of that is statutory and part of it is voluntary. In recent years an increasing amount of the provision in the community has come through voluntary organisations. Certainly from my own experience as a prison governor latterly in Brixton I was always convinced of the need to involve local groups of local people on two counts: one, that the prisoners saw that they had some involvement in the community, but also that the local community did not see the walls of the prison as built to keep them out. It is a cliché to say that they are built to keep the community out as much as to keep the prisoners in, and Una Padel talked about the porousness of the prison walls and I think the more we can encourage that the greater hope we have for rehabilitation.

Ms Owers: I agree that the role of the voluntary sector is very important. I think the Prison Service does not always appreciate though how best it can use that resource. It has tended to be something that has been allowed in if the governor says so, and we have talked about changes of governor. I think the structures that are now being created regionally require a much better and different partnership but one of the difficulties for the voluntary sector is that such funding as is available is short term funding and the problems of recruitment and retention of staff, knowing that your project is going to last beyond the three years, make it very difficult for the voluntary sector to be a true partner in this enterprise rather than something that is always on the edges, always somewhat fragile and in some difficulty.

Ms Padel: Enormous moves forward have been made. There has been a tremendous amount of progress in the last few years. The creation of a voluntary sector co-ordinator post at headquarters in the Prison Service has been a very important piece of progress, and there are local co-ordinators in most prisons in many areas now. These are people who are tasked with making sure that the voluntary sector does have a role and co-ordinating that role and making sure that the voluntary sector agencies come in and have far fewer grounds for complaint than they have perhaps had in the past. There are still difficulties though. Funding Anne has already mentioned. Contracts with the voluntary sector cause problems. The Prison Service sometimes has difficulty identifying all the differences between the private sector and the voluntary sector, and it is a difficult and fine distinction perhaps, and so sometimes they expect voluntary sector agencies to act like private sector agencies. Many of them do actually in relation to their contracts with prisons, but not always. Sometimes these voluntary sector agencies are very small and so, for example, they need to be paid in advance for their services. They cannot bill retrospectively because they have to pay staff in the interim and simply don't have the resources unless they are paid for their services in advance. Many of these things are covered by the voluntary sector compact but I am not sure that many prison governors are aware enough that the voluntary sector compact exists. There is still patchy provision around the country. The voluntary sector obviously has an important role to play because it can provide the key to so many diverse services but again the location of prisons makes this difficult. Very rural prisons often do not have voluntary sector agencies coming out in droves to offer services in their areas, and many of those agencies are not based in the areas prisoners will return to. Because voluntary sector agencies are often local rather than national, although there are the big national agencies, they cannot provide opportunities for housing in Birmingham or whatever if they are based in the wilds of Norfolk. It is an encouraging picture. There has been a great deal achieved. The Prison Service needs to remember that most voluntary sector agencies have their own identity and their own priorities and that they are not always entirely consonent with Prison Service priorities and that is perfectly legitimate. Also they cannot expect any one agency to speak on behalf of the whole voluntary sector, and that is part of its beauty as well as part of its problem. I think the signs are good for the future.

Bob Russell: Thank you for that very encouraging answer.

 

Q224  Mr Clappison: Can I ask each of the witnesses what more in their view can be done to assist with the resettlement of prisoners?

Professor Coyle: Three very quick bullet points if I may. First of all, we need to recognise that the environment of a prison does not lend itself to rehabilitation. We do what we do despite the coercive environment of the prison. Secondly, linked to that, we should be very cautious about what we expect the prison to do and we should be careful not to send people to prison for rehabilitation. Sir Alexander Paterson said, "You cannot train people for freedom in conditions of captivity". Finally, rehabilitation comes best through initiatives to resettle prisoners back into their communities and that is done best through involvement of community agencies, particularly those which are not criminal justice agencies.

Ms Owers: I would echo much of that. Resettlement will only work when the prison is seen as part of its community and the prisoners are seen as people who will very shortly return to their communities, so I think the effective resettlement projects are those which are not something that happens to people when they are inside prison and then goodness knows what happens when they are out. They are ones where the community outside, whether it is the Health Service or education or local employers or whatever, are engaged in what is happening to prisoners and where the links are made outside. It is making those links that is the critical thing.

Ms Padel: I agree but I will add greater involvement of people who are directly involved with the prisoner in the community, mainly families. I will use families as an overall term. Families are often the ones who can most identify what the prisoners' needs and issues and problems are likely to be both in prison and after prison. They are far too peripheral at the moment. Families should be more closely involved from the outset when somebody first goes into prison. They have got the greatest investment in making sure that the person does not re-offend generally. I know there are families who are quite happy with a criminal lifestyle but many families really are not and every time that person is arrested or goes into custody that is a tragedy for them, it is similar to bereavement for the children, it is a major problem and causes them an enormous amount of expense as well as pain. I think we should involve the families from the very outset, get them to contribute to custody planning in terms of what is required and improve visiting arrangements. Many improvements have been made but more could be done, and do not expect that families are just going to reconstitute themselves on the day of release because imprisonment does cause enormous difficulties. There are all sorts of expectations around when somebody is about to be released, there are all sorts of things which have not been spoken about during prison visits because it is not an atmosphere which is conducive to telling somebody how sick you are of their behaviour or whatever, or even airing suspicions about what else might be going on. There is an awful lot of work that needs to be done before release with families and that would lead to better resettlement, less homelessness after release because, although many families immediately try and make a go of it when somebody comes out, they often break down very soon afterwards and that is a major problem.

Ms Owers: Could I just add to my answer? I talked specifically in respect of a local context but what we and the Probation Inspectorate said in a report we issued nearly three years ago now was that what we also need is a national strategy that encompasses the major services, the major service providers and that feeds down into prisons and the outside agencies. That is what we are lacking at the moment, that overall strategy and commitment, and resources that match commitment to make it work.

Chairman: Can I thank all three witnesses very much indeed. We have had a very lengthy session but the Committee is very interested in all that you have had to say.

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[1] Note by witness: However, the Prison and Probation Services are about to introduce a joint and improved assessment tool, OASys, which is designed to identify at the beginning of sentence which interventions a prisoner needs.