Oral evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 4 November 2003

Members present:

Mr John Denham, in the Chair
Janet Anderson
Mr John Bercow
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas
Mrs Janet Dean
Mr Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Mr Marsha Singh
Miss Ann Widdecombe
David Winnick

__________

Memoranda submitted by the Howard League for Penal Reform, NACRO and

the Prison Reform Trust

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS FRANCES CROOK, Director, Howard League for Penal Reform, MR PAUL CAVADINO, Director of Policy, and MS JACKIE WORRALL, Director of Prison and Race Services, National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO), MS JULIET LYON, Director, and MR ENVER SOLOMON, Policy Officer, Prison Reform Trust, examined.

Q1  Chairman: Good morning. Would one of you like to introduce your team and then we will make a start.

Mr Cavadino: I am Paul Cavadino. I am the Chief Executive of Nacro, the crime reduction charity. On my left is Juliet Lyon who is the Director of the Prison Reform Trust. Next to her is a colleague Enver Solomon from the Prison Reform Trust. Also with me are Frances Crook from the Howard League for Penal Reform and Jackie Worrall of Nacro.

Q2  Chairman: As you know, this is the first evidence session we are having in the new inquiry on rehabilitation of prisoners. I will try to direct most of the questions to individuals but it would be useful if we could start by asking each of the three organisations to outline very briefly what, in the view of your organisation, is the purpose of prison and the role of rehabilitation within prison.

Mr Cavadino: In relation to serious, violent and sexual offenders for whom the seriousness of the offence and the seriousness of the impact on victims can justify a long sentence, then a key purpose is containment to protect the public. For most offenders courts deprive them of liberty as a punishment. It has often been said that people should go to prison as a punishment rather than for punishment and the deprivation of liberty for a period of time is intended as punishment. Whether it is sensible punishment for many of the people who go to prisons I think is doubtful and some other form of punishment which did not have so many negative side effects would be preferable. However, the purpose of it in most cases is primarily to deprive people of liberty as a punishment. Once people are in prison then, in my view, the regime should be geared to rehabilitation; we should do everything possible to make sure that those who are in prison do not offend again. We should not send people to prison primarily for rehabilitation. If we want to do that then it is normally preferable to do that in a community. Where the court decides that - because of the need for containment or the seriousness of the offence requires a certain level of punishment - they have to send someone to prison, then once they are there we should do everything possible to rehabilitate them.

Ms Lyon: I would underscore that and start where Paul finished in that the Prison Reform Trust sees prison as a punishment of absolutely last resort. We see that the central paradox - something we are addressing today in relation to rehabilitation - is that the danger of improving rehabilitation in prison - education, training for work, mental health, drug treatment - is that until and unless prison is a place of absolute last resort we extend its boundaries. I think there is some evidence to suggest that we have already done that by improving the various aspects of prison regimes. Sadly, on the one hand the prison regimes are not as improved as many members of the judiciary might suppose. At the same time it has led to a kind of making up for other failing public services. The end result can be that people are sent to prison for a second chance education; they are sent to prison for detox or drug treatment or they are sent for mental health treatment or assessment. There is a worry that we have what I call prison creep, if you like, and I would hope that the focus of this inquiry could be based on exactly what Paul from Nacro said, making this an excellent place of last resort, but not extending its boundaries.

Ms Crook: I think you will get some agreement between us. I am not going to tell you what I think prison is for; I am going to tell you what I think prison should be for. It should be for public safety, pure and simple. That is the bottom line. I am also going to put a question into your minds about rehabilitation. You have called this inquiry "Rehabilitation" which I think in itself raises more questions than perhaps even you will be able to answer. Rehabilitation is not about restoring the damage that has been done by crime. That cannot be done through prison. It is not about healing the community or the victim. It is purely about, I think, healing the damage done by the imprisonment. When we talk about rehabilitation and resettlement we talk about undoing the damage that has been done by taking somebody out of their community and locking them up, often for months and months in pretty appalling conditions. It is really about undoing that damage. I do not think that prison should ever be used to change somebody's life or to restore the opportunities that they should have had in education or health care or drug rehabilitation. The fact is, of course, prison is used extensively for all sorts of people whom the Howard League believes should not be there, so we do have to make the best job of it and we do have to offer drug rehabilitation programmes and look at rehabilitation in a whole number of other ways, but prison should not be used for restoring the damage done by crime. If you are talking about rehabilitation I think sometimes you are talking about undoing the damage that you have already done, not undoing the damage done by the crime.

Q3  Chairman: It is quite striking perhaps that none of you, in your initial replies, mentioned either concepts like deterrents against crime nor any sense of prison playing a role in maintaining public confidence in the Criminal Justice System that actions seem to be taken against those who commit crime. Would you believe those are entirely fallacious concepts and the prison has no role to play either in deterrents or in maintaining public confidence in the Criminal Justice System? Can I just say, as a general rule throughout this morning's session, if you agree with what somebody else has said just stay quiet and then we can move on.

Ms Lyon: I was just going to say very quickly that I think the re-conviction rates probably answer both of those queries at once in that we can see quite clearly from the re-conviction rates that prison is not working terribly well. It is not surprising that the public are not hugely confident if we are looking at six out of ten people being re-convicted within two years of release, but very particularly looking at young offenders where 74% of the under-21s are re-convicted within two years. Looking at burglaries, we are looking at a 75% re-conviction rate. We are looking at a prison system that, for whatever reason, is not working either in relation to public confidence or in relation to deterrents.

Mr Cavadino: May I comment on the deterrent point? Obviously one element of deterrent is the deterrent of potential offenders, what are often called general deterrents as opposed to the deterrents of the individuals in prison from doing it again. My view, to put it simply, is that the role of general deterrents is over-rated. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, many offenders offend in situations where they do not think rationally and calculate ahead; they are often people who have chaotic lifestyles who commit their offences without a great deal of planning and calculation, and rational considerations of deterrents do not enter very highly. There are other offenders who do calculate and plan what they are doing carefully. They plan not to get caught; they tend to believe that they can avoid conviction. It is interesting that some of the research which has been done recently in the United States which has compared trends in crime in different states compared with trends of imprisonment in different states has found no connection between the extent to which a state has increased the use of prison and a reduction in crime, but it has found a strong correlation between the extent to which states have increased detection rates and a reduction in crime. We suggest that insofar as general deterrents are an important part of the factor, it is related more to the certainty of conviction than to the severity of the sentence.

Q4  Chairman: Juliet Lyon, you talked about the developments of rehabilitation in the last ten or twelve years and prison creep. Can you just highlight for us what you would see have been the main developments of rehabilitation policy and say a little bit more about where your concerns are?

Ms Lyon: I think the obvious improvements are looking at the partnerships that have been struck leading to the take over of responsibility: the Department of Health taking over prison health care and the Department for Education and Skills taking over prison education are landmarks in relation to prisons which previously - and still are to a certain extent - have been inward looking and not attached to any other services. If I could just give you a very brief anecdote, Martin Neary spoke to a group of magistrates in regard to Feltham Prison and told them of the improvements that have been made there. There certainly have been improvements which basically have been about managing to get a good governor to stay put long enough to effect change, ringfencing the institution so that young men are sent to Castington rather than kept at Feltham from the south London courts. The net result is that Feltham itself is a better place. Martin Neary talks to the magistrates about improvements that have been made and they say, "Thank you. We feel very much better now about sentencing a young man to Feltham." That seems to me to illustrate the dilemma faced by anyone - and that was when he was Director General of the Service - who wishes to improve a public service. If you improve it how do you avoid promoting it? I think, for the morale of the service logically the person in charge of the service will tell people about the number of basic skills hours that have been achieved in education which are tremendous. They do not, in fact, mop the increased numbers - which I know we are going to get on to when we get to overcrowding - and the impact of that. What we are seeing are improvements that are constantly eroded by ever increasing numbers. I think it is problematic, and there is a central problem of how to keep the morale and the integrity of the service without promoting imprisonment.

Q5  Chairman: Could I move on to Frances Crook of the Howard League. Your opening remarks do sound a bit like a council of despair; there is not really a lot that you can usefully do with somebody once you send them to prison and you probably should not have sent them there in the first place. Is the reality not that there will be a significant number of people who have to be committed to prison, and we do not need to focus policy on the best efforts that can be made in the context of prison to give those people the best chance of not being offenders when they return to the community?

Ms Crook: I absolutely agree with that and I think it is essential that when people are sent to prison they are given a good and useful life; they are able to lead a good and useful life, and they are given activities which are purposeful and their life is enhanced so that it gives the best chance when they come out that they will be a useful citizen and will not create more crimes nor more victims. It is absolutely essential that their time in prison should be usefully served. However, I do not think you should send people to prison - as, I think Juliet implied some people do - in order to get an education and work experience. Nor, I think, can you sent someone to prison in order to appease victims in some way or heal the crime; I think that is impossible and that is not what prison should be for. If you had 20,000 people in prison - even 30,000 - you could do something very useful with the people who have committed serious and violent crimes. They could be rehabilitated effectively and the chances of them committing a further crime would be reduced. However, with a population of 74,000 and nearly 200,000 people going through the system at any one time you have to question why those people are being sent there and what is happening to them while they are there. If we were talking about hospitals with a 60% to 75% failure rate, we would not be doing it; people would be up in arms and I think the general public is beginning to realise that prisons are a very bad and expensive failure in the way they are operating at the moment.

Q6  Chairman: That is an interesting point. Do you think that is what the general public actually feel? I have to say that as a constituency MP I think, if anything, I am in the position of restraining the general public's view that we have not locked up anywhere near enough people. Do you really think the general public are forming that view of prison at the moment?

Ms Crook: I have to admit here that in a personal capacity I was an elected politician as a local councillor for eight years so I do know about constituency surgeries. I think people are frustrated; I think they are angry; I think they see crime and they want something done. However, I do not think they are satisfied with the Criminal Justice System. I do not think anyone would come away from your surgeries and say that they are pleased with the way things are working and they feel safer because people are going to prison. I think what we get is a sense of frustration and anger.

Mr Cavadino: Could I make two points, first on public opinion. If you ask people generalised questions such as are we too harsh or too lenient towards offenders they will tend - we have found - to say that we are too lenient. If you ask people detailed questions about what currently happens - as some very thorough research has done - it indicates that people underestimate the degree of severity of sentencing at present; they think, in other words, that the courts are more lenient than they are in fact. Secondly, when you ask them about individual cases with some detail, then their view about what should happen is much closer to what courts do; they are much more sympathetic to a sentence with a constructive element that will do something to reduce the likelihood of re-offending rather than looking at it only in terms of how severe the punishment is. They are ready and do want to look at whether it will do any good in preventing re-offending. The second point is in relation to the broad question that you asked Frances Crook about the extent to which prison can reduce re-offending by rehabilitation. There is no doubt that with the right regime it can. We know from strong world-wide research evidence that there are some ways of dealing with offenders which reduce the likelihood of re-offending much more than others. We know that the most effective ways include highly focussed work on offending behaviour and attitudes; work to help offenders to restrain impulsive and aggressive behaviour; work to enable offenders to have more empathy with the impact of what they have done on victims; work that can help offenders to tackle effectively drug and alcohol problems. We also know from research that if somebody leaving prison gets into and keeps a job then the likelihood of re-conviction is between a third and a half less than it otherwise would be if they remained unemployed. We know, depending on which research study you look at, that if somebody leaves prison and gets into stable accommodation their likelihood of re-offending is cut by somewhere between a fifth and a half what it would otherwise be. We know from one recent study that offenders with basic skills deficits who get education to remedy those deficits are about a third as likely to re-offend as comparable offenders who do not get that kind of educational help. We know, depending again on which research study you look at, that offenders who are released with support from a family have a likelihood of re-offending which is between a sixth and a half what it would be if they left prison as comparable offenders but without family support. There is overwhelming evidence that what we do in prison to rehabilitate prisoners can make a difference.

Ms Lyon: Can I ask leave to put in the MORI opinion polls and the re-thinking crime and punishment opinion polls which will respond to your questions about public confidence.

Q7  David Winnick: The prison population now stands, as I understand it from the latest figures, at 73,987. Is that the position?

Mr Solomon: As at last Friday it was 74,147.

Q8  David Winnick: This is the highest ever in the United Kingdom, is it?

Mr Solomon: It is, yes.

Q9  David Winnick: So far as overcrowding is concerned, taking the statistics given by the Prison Reform Trust, 85 of the 138 prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded.

Mr Solomon: From the latest figures, as at the end of October, it was indeed 83 out of the 138.

Q10  David Winnick: Leicester Prison, again going by your paper, was overcrowded by 94%. There were four hundred in Leicester Prison, a prison intended for 206 prisoners.

Mr Solomon: That was correct as at the end of September.

Q11  David Winnick: I do not suppose it has varied a great deal.

Mr Solomon: No.

Q12  David Winnick: Preston Prison is overcrowded by 87% you told us. Shrewsbury is overcrowded by some 85% as well.

Mr Solomon: Yes. They have gone up marginally.

Q13  David Winnick: That is a pretty alarming picture. If I may ask Ms Crook, you said from your long experience - as we know and we respect, as we do all the witnesses, all the work which is done and which is not very popular with the general population - that those who go to prison should, in effect, be only those who have been convicted of serious and violent crimes. What I would like to ask you in particular is that those who persistently offend, those who commit burglaries without any violence at all but refuse to take any warnings from the court, those who are the subject of anti-social behaviour orders and treat those orders with total contempt, are you really saying that unless it is very, very exceptional, the person has been convicted in court of the sort of offences which you mention - which obviously we all believe, you included - should be imprisoned, but these other people should not be?

Ms Crook: I think you are looking at the symptom rather than the cause. If we look at the offence rather than the person, if someone is committing a series of non-domestic burglaries, for example, to feed a serious drug habit, locking them up every now and again in prison is going to do absolutely no good at all and is probably going to make things worse so you will guarantee they will go on doing it when they are released after six months, a year or two years. What you do is that you do not interrupt the cycle of offending, you guarantee it will continue because it does not solve the problem. People do get off drugs while they are in prison, but they go back on to them when they come out. What you have to do is interrupt that pattern of behaviour somehow and it will depend on the person and what their circumstances are; there is no one simple answer. I think the trouble with prison is that it is always put forward as the answer to everything, but actually I think the problem is much more complicated than that and you have to deal with whatever the problem is and solve the problem. It is like taking your car into the garage and saying that it is going wrong and asking them to change all the wheels. You can do that every time but it still carries on going wrong. I do think that prisons should be reserved for serious and violent offenders.

Q14  David Winnick: Only? Can you be more precise? You have talked about those who feed their drug habits and you have given that explanation, but what about those who are not feeding their drug habits but who simply pursue a course of anti-social behaviour - some of them throughout their adult lives - who are not likely in any way to be rehabilitated and refuse that. You smile, but that is exactly the position.

Ms Crook: I know.

Q15  David Winnick: I am sorry to pin you down, but are you really telling this Committee that only those who are found guilty of serious and violent crimes should be in prison?

Ms Crook: Yes. I think that prison also has a symbolic place. If you look back over a hundred years ago incest and sex crimes against children were not crimes. Over a hundred years ago incest was not a crime. I think the symbolic nature of prison for race crimes and sex crimes and holding it up even for lower levels is very important, and to show that a crime is an offence in that way is very important. For serious violent and sex crimes and for its symbolic value as a separate thing I would say yes. But for people whose behaviour is anti-social, just because you do not like them you should not be able to lock them up.

Q16  David Winnick: I do not quite understand that. If people are harassed day in and day out by anti-social behaviour and Parliament has passed - rightly or wrongly, and in my view certainly rightly - the necessary legislation and those who are convicted of anti-social behaviour orders treat those orders with contempt and people suffer as a result - and none of us would like to be victims of that - are you then suggesting that such people should not be in prison?

Ms Crook: It depends what you want to achieve from this. If you want to punish them because they have been badly behaved but not to interrupt that pattern of behaviour, then of course you should use prison. However, you must recognise that it is simply revenge and is not going to be effective; it will not stop that pattern of behaviour recurring when people come out. It has a 60% to 75% failure rate, particular with young people. With very young people prison has an almost 90% failure rate. If you simply want revenge then that is fine.

David Winnick: Some would call it justice.

Q17  Miss Widdecombe: Some would call it public safety.

Ms Crook: Only for a short time. If somebody is only sent to prison for a few months there is no public safety issue there. In fact, when people are released back onto the streets they are probably going to be more dangerous and more angry and commit more crimes. You are not making things better and I think you have to find more intelligent and more rational ways of responding to people whose behaviour is very troublesome. I recognise that, but what I want to do is to find a better way of dealing with them, which is effective. At the moment the inappropriate and emotional use of prison is ineffective; it is not stopping the behaviour.

Q18  David Winnick: The Chief Inspector of Prisons states, and I quote, "at every level of the prison system overcrowding is having an effect on the ability of prisons to deliver rehabilitative programmes". There was at least one report in yesterday's papers - in The Times - that the Government is intending to put restrictions on the Chief Inspector of Prisons, that the sorts of visits she makes - and rightly so - like her predecessors without giving notice is coming under some criticism from the Home Office and probably at the most senior level. Is there any truth in these reports?

Ms Lyon: There is certainly a review proceeding at the moment. We know that but we do not know the full outcome of the review. We know the question has been raised in the House - and certainly recently in the House of Lords - and we do have concerns about any proposed amalgamation of the inspectorate. It seems most extraordinary timing with prison numbers reaching their absolute highest ever level even to consider in any way curbing or reducing the powers of the independent chief inspector. What we find, certainly from our office when we have international visits from the Foreign Office and British Counsel is that they are continually impressed and see it as a model for development in their own countries, that level of independence and that rigour of inspection. It is something that we feel very strongly about and are trying to keep an eye on as best we can.

Q19  David Winnick: Would it be right to say that successive governments - that includes this Government - seem to have difficulties with chief inspectors of prisons? Perhaps that is a leading question. Would it not be right to come to the conclusion as well that they are having difficulties in the past and currently because the chief inspectors of prisons are doing their job to which they have been appointed?

Ms Lyon: I think that is very fair. There is an expression "shoot the messenger" but rather than shooting the messenger I think we need to listen carefully to the message that this Chief Inspector - and previous inspectors - have put very very clearly. It is the level of detail, the particularisation of the problem that they are out to do, whether it is tasting the food, listening to offenders, in some cases thematic reviews when they listen to families. There is certainly scope for thematic reviews which involve amalgamated work by inspectorates. A very good example of that, pertinent to this inquiry, is Through the Prison Gate, a thematic review from probation and prisons of re-settlement opportunities for prisoners. Any dilution of the powers of the chief inspector we would resist most strongly.

Q20  David Winnick: I wonder if I can just touch on a matter which has inevitably already come in the evidence, namely that given the overcrowding in the prisons and what the Chief Inspector has said, how optimistic are you that any effective form of rehabilitation will have any effect on more than a small minority of prisoners?

Ms Lyon: We are not. Building new prisons has not proved a solution. There have been 13 new prisons built in the last ten years and nine of them are already overcrowded. What we are saying - and we said at the beginning of this inquiry - is that prison has to be regarded as a finite important resource. We did a study last year of all the independent monitoring boards to ask them for their views on the impact - if there was one - of overcrowding in their establishment. More than three quarters of those boards were very concerned at the impact of overcrowding on rehabilitation. They named in particular: distance from home, reduced level of contact with families; they raised issues about the fact that sentence planning and personal officer schemes - which are the bedrocks of a decent regime, which involve staff actually working with and on prisoners - were massively reduced. What we are seeing is a picture of a prison service which is able to reduce the number of escapes. In the short term it can guarantee the public that it can deliver in that it can guarantee public safety for the short period of time that the majority of people spend in prison. What it cannot in any way guarantee is that it will reduce re-offending by holding people in these conditions. If 16,000 people are sharing a cell designed for one person, if the number of sentence plans and personal officer schemes reduce dramatically, the purposeful activity has reduced yet again, then we are looking at a service which, at best, is coping against pretty intolerable pressure.

Q21  David Winnick: We all agree that there is an acute crisis in the prisons and I do not see how anyone can challenge that. Without wishing to divide the witnesses - I have already said and I meant it that this Committee has great respect for the organisations that you speak on behalf of - can I ask you, Ms Lyons, do you take the same view as the Howard League? You heard the exchanges about people going to prison, do you take a more flexible approach?

Ms Lyon: We would agree with the Howard League in relation to the idea of reserving prison for serious and violent offenders, but we would respect the views of the judiciary in courts in terms of what they see as the best in the circumstances for that individual offender. We have some fears that the powers of the courts to actually make those decisions is in some way becoming increasingly limited, but we would see that in relation to public confidence a re-balancing of the Criminal Justice System - not only re-balancing the system but actually enabling the public to see that community penalties can work well - is incredibly important, whether it is restorative justice, whether it is enhanced community service, the public needs to know what has been done by offenders, what the results are and feel that something is actually being done to pay back or call people to account. In relation to our sorties into public opinion on the radio or on television what people want from the system is to prevent the next victim. If they are confident that the next victim can be prevented by a community intervention that is well organised and well targeted and actually does some good to the community, they like that very much indeed. They also like drug treatment and testing orders because they can see that that is getting at the root cause of crime and the courts like the provision for review within that order. It seems to me and to the Prison Reform Trust that there is scope for a very wide variety of responses ranging form early prevention right through to imprisonment, our fear is that imprisonment has crept down the tariff and we have just expanded prison boundaries to the point that they can scarcely cope.

Q22  David Winnick: Do you think the Home Secretary - and his predecessors for that matter - could do more to do what you have just said - which clearly you are unable to do - to get across the message to the general public? Could more be done by the Home Secretary and other cabinet ministers?

Ms Lyon: Yes, most certainly. We commissioned a report by Professor Michael Hough - The Decision to Imprison - which was a series of interviews with judges and magistrates. It was quite clear that while they said they were acting independently they acknowledged they were acting in regard to what they called public opinion and the political climate. We find it very, very confusing to have currently a Home Secretary who will state publicly - as he did last Monday on Start the Week that he would like to reduce prison numbers. He has not fought shy of saying that, but in reality the kind of measures he is introducing and the kind of opportunities to talk very tough in the popular press we feel lead to conflicting messages. We think embedded in the Criminal Justice Bill there are at least two major provisions which will increase numbers yet further. One is the remand provisions and the other is the exceptionally long sentences that are being introduced which, after all, are already a prerogative of the court. By introducing very much higher start points for certain crimes we fear a tidal pull in relation to sentences. Professor Hough made it very clear in his report that it will not be enough to get short sentence prisoners out on community penalties; we have to look at making sentences more effective but not necessarily longer.

Q23  David Winnick: So professional politicians are also to blame for vying with each other to see who can be tougher.

Ms Lyon: Yes, the political football of prisons has had a hugely deleterious effect over the last 12 years; there is no doubt about that.

Mr Solomon: In 1991 when the prison population dropped it was a conservative government - a conservative Home Secretary - who actively did more to promote alternatives to custody and we saw the prison population drop by as much as 5000.

Q24  Chairman: Just before we leave the Criminal Justice Bill, it does, as you say, introduce new measures, particularly the issue of rehabilitation with Custody Plus which will change the whole regime for leaving prison from the current parole regime for many prisoners. Can you give us any idea from your experience as to how advanced the Home Office is for challenging the changes to the rehabilitation regime that might be necessary both inside and outside prison following the introduction of Custody Plus? Have you been involved in discussions with the Home Office about those changes and how confident are you about where they have got to?

Mr Cavadino: I would comment first on the provisions and then how far the Home Office has got with them. The provision for Custody Plus, as you know, will involve replacing short term prison sentences of up to 12 months which are currently followed by a period of supervision, by a Custody Plus sentence which will involve spending up to three months in custody followed by a period of supervision in the community under the supervision of the Probation Service which can include a range of conditions. From the point of view of resettlement of offenders that is a more sensible approach than locking somebody up for a short period of time and then releasing them without supervision or support. It clearly will have resource implications for the Probation Service. It is worth emphasising that the Halliday Report Making Punishments Work - which proposed the new Custody Plus sentence - also emphasised that it had resource implications for the voluntary sector. The Report emphasised that it would be vital to have effective partnerships between the Prison and the Probation Services and the voluntary sector, particularly over areas such as employment, accommodation and mentoring of offenders which make such a crucial difference to their likelihood of their completing a period of supervision successfully. He proposed that whatever the precise structure of the financial arrangements it would be appropriate to have a substantial earmarked funding component for partnerships with voluntary organisations. It will have substantial funding implications. At present, so far as I am aware, the timetable for implementation of Custody Plus and the other provisions in the Bill that will involve greater supervision of offenders on release is not clear; it is an issue which depends on when and whether the Home Office can get the resources to do it.

Q25  Mr Bercow: I am not sure whether to direct this question to Frances Crook or Juliet Lyon. I say in the most polite way to Frances, I am not sure from her initial reply to the Chairman whether she thinks that prison can have any sort of rehabilitative or educational function, so if you would like to come in on the question please do. I would simply like to ask whether you believe that the Prison Service has recently made education and skills provision a priority and whether, as a consequence of that, improvements have been achieved or not. I wonder if, in answering, you could focus on the question of the churn whereby large numbers of prisoners who have been put on worthwhile education training or rehabilitation programmes are arbitrarily taken off those programmes because they are shunted out of prison or to another institution presumably in accord with the dictates of administrative convenience but obviously not in their own interests.

Ms Lyon: We have just published a report called Time to Learn which was a survey in 12 prisons of prisoners' education from a prisoner's perspective. I think the two things that are of most interest are the value that prisoners place on education, it is a resource that they value and wanted more of. That was followed immediately by the level of discontent and disappointment about the lack of opportunity. Maybe it was lack of opportunity because there were not enough staff. I think it is important to put that point I because staff sickness last year ran at 17.2 days which is extraordinarily high in any public service; it is higher than any we can think of. So there is an issue about whether people actually get taken to classes; there is an issue about people's movement around the system (which I will come on to). The sense was that there were a loss of valued opportunities, opportunities missed. We made some recommendations there about how that could be rectified to some extent. However, so far as we can see, given the proposals and the resources in place for DfES to carry forward prison education, it will still fail to benefit about half the prisoners in the system as the numbers are currently. In relation to the churn, that was a factor that the Independent Monitoring Board was most worried about. I would just like to read you something very briefly from Stoke Heath Independent Monitoring Board: "We have witnessed effects on individual's programmes of rehabilitation, training and education and courses such as offending behaviour. When these are suddenly disrupted midstream an inmate has to go through reassessment and allocation at the new establishment. Such action flies in the wind of the policy to try to address individual's problems and carry out rehabilitation to enable them to re-enter society as better citizens." This is a refrain we are hearing time and again. We have 4000 prisoners and their families contact our office every year and probably the biggest central theme in a number of letters and calls we get is about transfers to establishments and the business of being re-assessed and re-assessed and re-assessed so that people never move beyond an assessment stage. Yesterday we heard from the mother of a young man at Feltham who, in just a few days, had moved between Feltham, Reading, Onley in Rugby, Rochester, Feltham again and in each establishment he had been assessed. He barely got started on anything before it stopped. If I might leave this letter with the Committee I would appreciate that opportunity.

Mr Cavadino: May I simply add on this issue of moves around the system that it impacts badly on education courses when they are disrupted or when people have not yet got on them because they are on a waiting list for a course which does not exist at the prison they are going to. It impacts badly on family relationships because it is harder for families to visit and keep in touch if the offender is much further away from home. It is also very important for the potential of prisons to reduce re-offending by the most prolific offenders. If I can give you an example, we are involved in a project in partnership with the West Midlands Police and the Prison Service in Blakenhurst Prison which is working with a small number of the most prolific offenders from the Solihull area. They are, as you would expect, heavily drug dependent offenders so their individual offences are not always the most serious, but there are a large number of offences and they are the most prolific offenders in that area. Their offences cause a massive amount of distress to victims in the local community. The project is an intensive one; it involves drug rehabilitation work but also a great deal of practical work with them on family relationships, on education, training, preparation for work, accommodation and so on. However, we can only do that if all those prisoners are in one place in the same prison. The system that has been worked out is that when one of the most prolific offenders in Solihull is imprisoned then the West Midlands Police notifies Blakenhurst Prison. They could have gone anywhere in the prison system and they would frequently have gone to a wide variety of different prisons. There is an agreement with the Prison Service that the offender can be transferred to Blakenhurst so that he can take part in this programme. That is practicable in a situation of overcrowding. If you make a special arrangement for a small number of prisoners the research findings show that the prisoners in that group, after the programme, commit a sixth as many offences as the whole group did before they went into prison. It is estimated over a three year period to save the criminal justice agencies in Solihull about £6 million. It makes an enormous difference to the level of crime in that area, but it is only possible because, contrary to the trend of putting prisoners wherever there is a vacancy, we have been able to make a special arrangement for that small group of prisoners. Overall what is happening is that prisoners are being transferred because the prison service is under such pressure of numbers to wherever there is a place rather than wherever is the most appropriate place for them.

Ms Crook: Can I answer the question? I do think that prison can be constructive if it is used appropriately. If it is used inappropriately it is destructive. There does not seem to be a half way. I think that is what I am saying. I want to put in a little bit in addition to what Juliet was saying about how important education can be. This is a small issue but it effects quite a lot of prisoners. Please could you increase the pay rate for people doing education? At the moment if you choose to do education you are financially penalised. If you are only on £5, £6 or £7 a week and you can go and earn £12 a week in a workshop, you will go and earn £12 a week because you can get your extra phone card to call your family or buy your tobacco or whatever. That is a huge issue for people. If we really want to offer improved chances in prison a small issue like that can make a huge difference.

Q26  Mr Bercow: Thank you very much for that; I had not considered that point at all. Leaving aside the very important issues of staff sickness on the one hand and the operation of the churn on the other, and trying to pull together a number of different questions, I wonder if I could ask you whether you think that there are improvements that can be achieved that are not resource dependent? They may not be the major improvements that you seek or you think necessary, but are there improvements that can be achieved without additional resources? Secondly - and relatedly - when you talk in your report about significant extra resources that you do think are required, is it not the case that the increase from 97 million - that the Government plans - to 137 million in two years' time would be the sort of step change that you have in mind? Finally, can we look at two other aspects. First, what about the content of the courses; not just the quantity, the amount that is available and whether people can get it? Are the courses sufficiently tailored? Can they ever be sufficiently tailored to the needs of the individual prisoner? Is there in any measure at all a problem with the motivation of prisoners which needs to be addressed but in fairness should be distinguished from the question of insufficiency of resources? I am sorry that that is rather a large batch, but it encapsulates what I wanted to put to you.

Ms Lyon: You will have to help me along if I miss out some of the questions, but in terms of not resource specific, yes, to an extent, would be my answer to that one. Linked to this and what I was saying before about re-balancing the Criminal Justice System we know that Moira Wallace who heads the National Probation Directorate estimated that there would have to be an increase of 30% in resources for her work to actually take up the kind of opportunities that they need to take up following the Criminal Justice Bill, particularly in relation to Custody Plus. What is not resource specific - and so much is - is that if the Government is able to affect re-balancing of the Criminal Justice System and prisons maintained their current budget, they would be able to cope within that budget. What they are seeing is the possibility of a 3% cut next year which is leading to prisons already reducing staff numbers. The Director General of the Service, Phil Wheatley, has said that he is in a position where, because so much is ringfenced money - ringfenced for education or ringfenced for health or ring fenced for security - then the only give in the system is going to be staffing and staff numbers. That takes me back to my point about personal officer schemes and sentence management. If the staff were cut back further there is not much hope there. In relation to non-resource specific, probably my first point of the lot would be leadership in prisons. If schools in the country had the same level of inconsistency and instability we would go quite crazy. Following a parliamentary question we learned that of the 138 prisons last year 44 had four or more governors or acting governors within the last five years. That level of churn within the leadership of the prisons is, I think, unacceptable and it leads to all manner of things unravelling. If we could actually look at provision for enabling people to stay put and possibly be rewarded for staying put - the sort of succession planning that actually focuses on the importance of stability of leadership in regimes - we would get somewhere I think. If we looked at recruitment of new governors into the system and really focussed on who do we need to lead these very complex institutions, not only nowadays to lead the institutions but also to make all the links that we have talked about with outside agencies. That is not resource specific but it is problematic in personnel terms. Linked to the leadership issue there is an attitudinal issue. One of the things we know is that on the whole prison staff are motivated to help prisoners change. There is a significant minority of staff, however, who are not motivated to help prisoners change and, at the most extreme, should not be in the service. Those are the ones who are racist, the ones who are doing very little, the ones who are using sickness as an opportunity to avoid work altogether, and that is a problem for the service. I think the new leadership of the POA would recognise and try to address that along with the PJA and along with the Service as well. There is an attitudinal issue and that is obviously linked to leadership. If you have strong stable leadership you can take the staff in the direction you want them to take.

Q27  Mr Bercow: Does the transfer in funding for prison education from the Home Office to the DfEE make a practical difference? On this question of leadership - I am sure you would accept it is not only about the governor, although that is very important - does the Government's proposal to appoint Heads of Learning and Skills to each and every prison offer a prospect of a focussed responsibility and therefore a greater prospect of delivery? Lastly, can you offer us a few examples of the successful peer support schemes in education to which reference has been made?

Ms Lyon: Yes, in answer to the Heads of Learning and Skills. We can already see that beginning to make a tremendous difference, both in relation to people being brought in from outside the system and bringing in very much a fresh perspective. Also, the level at which they are appointed gives them some kind of power and authority which previously education did not have. It was very much a kind of sideline part of the prison; this is making it much more integrated and giving it a different sort of status. We see huge potential for that. It is too early to say what the results are but it is clear from seeing some of the people and meeting them in post that the calibre of people being appointed alone will make a difference. That certainly was the view of the Prison Library's Group. I spoke at their annual conference a couple of weeks ago and there was a very positive mood amongst librarians about the new emphasis on prison education. However, as I said, when you ask prisoners it has not reached them yet. When we did the survey of prison education in terms of peer support we found that one of the schemes was the 'Toe by Toe' reading scheme which was started in Wandsworth and is now in a number of prisons. What I would be very happy to do is produce a short list of schemes that we have encountered. One of the things that was quite obvious from the report was where prisoners had the opportunity to help one another - in much the same way as the Samaritan listeners work, in much the same way as the Inside Out Trust workshops work - it was something that was valued and appreciated and made a huge difference.

Q28  Mr Singh: I want to talk about the disparate access to education programmes. In the year 1999 to 2000 the amount spent per head in Category C prisons alone varied between £205 to £1595. That is a staggering variation. What do we have here? Postcode access to education in prisons. It is a staggering difference.

Ms Lyon: That is true and you are very right to raise that point. It is true in relation to funding for libraries as well, but particularly in relation to education. It is something we cannot understand. You find it in young offenders' institutions; you find it in many institutions. You have a double problem really. You have the kind of extraordinary variation in funding which allows only certain things to happen in certain places and also - as the Chief Inspector has pointed out now in a number of her reports - you have prisoners being inappropriately allocated so that you do not get Category C prisoners in a Category C prison necessarily; you do not get people ready for resettlement necessarily in an open prison any more. You have an even more disparate group of prisoners with an even more disparate set of needs and you have this variation in funding and provision. It does not make sense and you are right to raise it. I do not have a solution but you are absolutely right to raise it.

Q29  Mr Singh: In your opinion is there a difference in terms of quality in what can be provided for £205 and what can be provided for £1595? Are prison governors making a choice on costs? Are they getting the equivalent quality in terms of cost or is it just some kind of a whimsical approach to education?

Ms Lyon: There is a governor's discretion and there certainly is in relation to the issue that Frances raised about prisoners' pay. You will find that will vary from prison to prison. There are examples of prisons where prisoners are paid the same amount to go to education as they are to go to a workshop and others where there is an extraordinary disincentive to enter education and it is much better to do something which is a repetitive boring workshop in terms of pay.

Q30  Mr Singh: So the money the state provides for programmes for retraining offenders, I presume that is not ringfenced. If it was ringfenced it would have to be spent on education.

Ms Lyon: It is ringfenced but it is variable. Within a prison's budget there is a certain amount set aside for education, but, as you rightly say, that certain amount will vary from one place to another. Whether the DfES have plans to try to even that up and go for equivalence I do not know, but I think it would be a very good question to ask of them.

Q31  Mr Singh: Do you think standardisation of programmes and costs would be an idea? Would that help?

Mr Solomon: That has happened with basic skills on the requirement and target which are set clearly for each individual prison to get a hundred or a hundred and fifty through basic skills. The problem we found with our report and our survey with that is that as a result funding can just be channelled into basic skills and provision, for example, for art therapy or other education courses can be closed down as a result. I think that what has happened is that funding has been pushed towards meeting targets - specifically basic skills provision - and the diversity and opportunities for other education courses have been closed down as a result.

Q32  Mr Singh: Is that a bad thing?

Mr Solomon: I think it is important to have diversity. Our report demonstrated that prisoners are unique and have diverse needs when it comes to education. They have a whole variety of needs and it was actually found that at the moment only half of those needs are being met. If education is going to be more than just providing basic skills training and is going to be about meeting the whole range and needs that we all know exist there has to be a change in the focus and direction.

Ms Worrall: If I could add to that, I think there is an issue which you raised earlier about motivating prisoners. I think it is unrealistic to expect that young offenders who come into prison often often with a very negative view of education and very little understanding of how to learn will go immediately into education programmes or any other learning opportunities and be fully motivated to take full advantage of them. One of the difficulties about going exclusively down a basic skills route and concentrating very much on literacy is that that is not necessarily in itself motivating enough for young people. Sometimes arts programmes or sports activities or a range of different opportunities in the prison are enough to engage young people - and some adults too - with the notion of learning and the notion of education so that it may be that they then come to learn to read or to develop their numeracy skills later. However, I think we run the risk of not meeting individual needs if a curriculum is too focussed on one particular aspect of education.

Q33  Mr Singh: You have already touched upon transfers and the churn so I do not want you to repeat what you said in regard to that, but in your view do you have an estimate of the percentage of education programmes that are disrupted by transfers? Do you think that disruption is inevitable or could it be managed better?

Ms Lyon: In answer to the second I am sure it could be managed better. One very disappointing response from the Independent Monitoring Boards last year identified a young man at a young offenders institution who was about to sit an A level and he was moved the day before it. That was just shattering, really. Things could be managed better, but having said that and having looked at what population management are trying to manage centrally, they are literally looking for beds for the night in some cases. As we are talking now there are buses going up and down motorways moving people around to try to find a place and when the courts finish at the end of today there will be more buses out on the motorway. One should not underestimate the impact of that crisis on both the number of situations people find themselves in and this business of reassessment which I am sure could be managed differently. One of the recommendations of our report is that prisoners keep their own learning passports so then they have a record of what they have actually learned and have achieved. The actual transition of records from one prison to another through the system of staffing is not working.

Q34  Mr Singh: If I change my GP my medical history would go to my new GP. Are you saying that a prisoner's records in their entirety are not passed on?

Mr Solomon: Absolutely. At its very worse an individual prisoner could be a danger to themselves, could have been on suicide watch. Inquests have found that the documents have not followed to the next institution and at worse people have taken their own lives.

Ms Lyon: We are not saying they are not meant to be passed on; they are meant to be passed on but given the chaos in the system they are often not passed on or will follow later. One of our recommendations is that prisoners carry their own records because in the majority of cases it would be in their own interests to demonstrate to people where they had got to in the system.

Ms Crook: Can I add to that about children because huge resources have been put into the juvenile estate and if there is meant to be a gold standard in the prison system then that is where it should be. Enormous extra resources have been put in particularly in education and if you are going to look at education for adults you should first look at the system for young people. We did a report and looked at the education provided for juveniles in every one of the juvenile prisons and we found a very poor system. We found children who were just about to take a GCSE and were shifted out the day before, exactly the sort of things we have been talking about. I think very worryingly less than 1% of the children who are held in prison get a GCSE while they are in prison. If a system which has had millions and millions of extra resources put into it fails to such an extent, how can you possibly do it in an overcrowded chaotic adult system?

Q35  Mr Singh: I certainly take on board the point you have made but I find it staggering that records cannot be passed on as a matter of routine. That is an absolute disgrace. Moving on, I just want your views on re-conviction rates. I understand the Home Office have done studies which have actually contradicted each other in terms of the impact of the rehabilitation programmes. What are your views on the impact of rehabilitation programmes on re-conviction rates? Are they helpful? Do they have an impact? Or is it just something we are doing because we think it is a good thing to do?

Mr Cavadino: There have been different types of rehabilitation programme and research has indicated that some are more effective than others. Some make a significant difference to the likelihood of re-offending; others seem to make little or no difference to the likelihood of re-offending. There has been an increasing concentration over the last ten years on trying to focus the work both of the Prison Service and of the Probation Service on the programmes which research indicates have the best results. There is a body of evidence which is increasingly acknowledged as being valid about what are the best ways of working with offenders. They include offending behaviour programmes which focus clearly on attitudes to offending, the types of behaviour which lead people to offending, equip them with the techniques to avoid those situations, to resist peer group pressure and effectively reduce the likelihood of further offences. Many offenders are involved in offending because of behaviour which is impulsive; many others are involved because of behaviour which is aggressive. Programmes which effectively teach offenders to restrain those impulsive and aggressive impulses can have a significant effect in reducing re-offending. There are a range of other examples of effective programmes. There are other programmes which have not been shown to have a significant impact on offending, for example general counselling - which may be desirable for somebody's general mental health and well-being - which is not highly focussed in the way I have described with examples, does not seem to have a significant impact on re-offending. The sense of approach therefore is to try to use what we know about what are the most effective types of programmes more widely. The Prison Service and the Probation Service have adopted targets to use them more widely. The problem, as other witnesses have said, is that with the growing number of people in prison, even though more people have been going through those offending behaviour programmes, the proportion of prisoners who benefit from them is much lower if you have a larger total prison population than the same number of programmes would be with a smaller prison population.

Ms Lyon: If I could give an example of that in relation to the sex offender treatment programme, last year there were 879 completions of that programme. The outcomes from the programme, although not totally proven, indicate that there is a reduction in offending when they have completed this programme. Only 879 were completed for the 5000 sex offenders within the system at any one time, so we are talking about more than 4000 people not having the opportunity to enter a programme of that sort. That is a very particular example of the way in which these opportunities are by definition restricted either by lack of trained personnel or lack of resources. We do have a concern at the Prison Reform Trust that the offending behaviour programmes have been somewhat over-hiked, if you like, in relation to other interventions. They have become a sort of jewel in the crown, not very integrated within regimes and very resource intensive. We would like to see them far better integrated with the issues that Paul Cavadino has raised about resettlement, about housing, opportunities for training for work and opportunities to go into employment and about maintaining family ties. Lastly, in the organisation I worked for prior to coming to the Prison Reform Trust, a trust for the study of adolescents, we did a piece of research about young fathers in prison and we focussed on training for parenthood which we saw as a very promising intervention. Indeed it was during the time the young men were in prison. It was valued, they had a high degree of recall when they left, but what we were looking at was the sustainability of that programme in relation to offending and also in relation to continuing contact with their children. Disappointingly we found that because there was no follow up or support after prison, although they had a high degree of recall about the nature of the programme and the things they had learned during it, a lot of them were not in contact with their children and were involved in offending. We did a follow-up study eight months later and we found that a very high number were back in prison.

Q36  Mr Singh: I thought you were operating on a 'what works' strategy. Is this 'what works' strategy not working very well.

Ms Lyon: It is a fabulous title and only psychologists could have dreamt up a term 'what works' because you cannot argue against it. You cannot say that what I want is what does not work or I wanted something else that might work better. 'What works' has been used, somewhat cynically to capture scarce resources and to lead to this kind of jewel in the crown effect which only now is beginning to become integrated with the regimes.

Q37  Mr Singh: Would one of you tell us a little bit more about Therapeutic Communities and their value. At first sight it sounded to me something like a hippie commune on a Hebridean island somewhere so I would like some illumination on Therapeutic Communities.

Ms Lyon: We are currently monitoring the transition of the Westhill Prison at Winchester as the first Therapeutic Community prison for women. It is interesting that over the years that we have seen Grenden and their results that people have not replicated it in the way that we had hoped. There is every indication that that kind of programme, which is not so much a hippy commune on an island, it is a very challenging and demanding programme for prisoners, some of whom cannot hack it and ask to be returned to the main system. Those who can stand that level of confrontation - the challenge to face up to what they have done and the impact they have had on their victims - then there is every evidence to suggest that it is hugely successful and research that has been undertaken on Grenden - but I do not have the figures here - indicate that there is a much reduced re-offending rate from that. The criticism of the research is that to some extent it is a self-selecting population. You have to apply to go there; you have to have a level of motivation and commitment to enter a programme of that kind. There is clearly scope for increasing that kind of activity within the Prison Service but not as a make way for those who actually should be in psychiatric provision.

Mr Cavadino: The other element of Therapeutic Communities is the increased opportunity for prisoners to take responsibility for what they are doing and for running the regime on their wing, for working together, for seeing the impact of what they do on other people and how their behaviour - if it is negative - can spoil the environment for other people. There is a great deal of emphasis therefore on making joint decisions about the facilities on the wing, about the way in which the wing is run. Normally during a prison sentence when you are told when you are going to get up, you are told when you are going to have breakfast and what you are going to have for breakfast, you are told when you can be unlocked and when you cannot be unlocked; you may have some limited element of choice about opting for one kind of activity over another but it is very limited and the risk there is that when the prisoner comes out he or she is even less able to make responsible decisions for themselves than when they went in. That is not conducive to a positive constructive hard-working, law-abiding life.

Q38  Mr Singh: Finally I have some questions on purposeful activity. What counts as purposeful activity? The national target is that it should be 24 hours per week. Is that a fair target? Is it a challenging target? There has been some slippage over the last couple of years and 22.6 hours per week is what has been achieved. Given the increase in prison population, given the transfers, given all the churn, is that quite a remarkable figure for the Prison Service to actually achieve?

Ms Lyon: What constitutes purposeful activity is anything that could be remotely construed as purposeful. That will range from cleaning the wing through to engaging in an educational programme or training for work. It does have a fairly wide definition. You are right that the achievement was 22.6 last year as against the target of 24. Up until last year what we had seen over ten years was an increase in just ten minutes a day per prisoner in purposeful activity and that is not for want of the service trying. I do not have the extra number of purposeful hours they have increased but it is thousands - if not more than thousands, tens of thousands - of hours that they have increased opportunities for purposeful activity. That had been completely mopped up and now actually eroded by the increased number of prisoners. This year you have a reduction of one hour on last year; just under an hour reduction over a year as the numbers have absolutely spiralled. It disguises the average of course at a tremendous range from places like Levington Grange and other resettlement prisons which really have a very high number of hours and it would include those prisoners working outside the prison on community service, for example. If you take somewhere like Belmarsh which managed only 11 hours average purposeful activity which is, on any definition extraordinarily low. It would be fair to say that for many of the people on remand - and we are talking now 53,000 awaiting trial last year - for many of those just getting out of the cell for more than an hour a day is an achievement. I do not think we should forget those remand prisoners; the numbers are staggeringly high. It is only 12% of the population at any one time, but given the shortness of stay - on average 49 days for the men, 39 days for women - we are talking about a vast number of people being held in the system and possibly being held for assessments that could take place outside.

Q39  Miss Widdecombe: Could I turn specifically now to the issue work in prison and I put this question specifically to Paul Cavadino. Do you agree that not only are the majority or prisoners illiterate and innumerate or, if they are not that, they are unqualified, but also they have come largely from unstructured lifestyles? They have never seen around them the pattern of a modestly successful lifestyle; they do not know what it is. They have had very low levels of parental supervision; they have bunked off school so they did not get into the habit of an orderly day at school; they have not been employed for anything more than very sporadic periods of time so they have never actually had the experience of a structured day at work. One of the most important things you can do in prison for that particular group is to get them into the habit of an orderly working day.

Mr Cavadino: The short answer is yes. To elaborate on that we have carried out our own surveys of prisoners and their characteristics as part of our resettlement work in assessing people's resettlement needs and a very high proportion of prisoners have a combination of educational problems: 60% of prisoners do not meet the most basic levels, level one, in relation to literacy and numeracy. They have problems of family conflict, problems of parental neglect, problems of drug and alcohol abuse, problems of either having been excluded permanently from school or having persistently truanted or being absent from school and they have no educational qualifications of any description. In a significant number of cases they have been abused physically, sexually or, as a result of neglect, emotionally. We did a survey of juvenile prisoners two years ago which we called Wasted Lives which drew up 11 features of the kind that I have just listed. On average the young prisoners in our sample had six of those 11 and even if you only take one of them it makes it significantly more likely that somebody will go off the rails or will find it difficult to cope with a normal structured life and will be in a position where they are much more likely to re-offend. If we are going to turn that round then it is vitally important that we give people the opportunity of more structure in their lives; that we give them the opportunity not only of educational courses which will enable them to gain qualifications and become more employable, but also alongside that we give them the support and role models of people who are working with them which can give them an example of stability to aspire to. There is no doubt that providing prisoners with the kind of structure that can move them towards a more normal experience than the one they have had in their upbringing is crucial to reducing their likelihood of re-offending.

Q40  Miss Widdecombe: Do you think that the average sort of work supplied in prison - take away Coldingley for a moment and take away some of the private prisons with special workshops - provide anything near (I will put the standard that low) a structured working day for prisoners that would actually be of any use to them both in terms of the hours spent and the work done when they are actually pushed out of the prison gates and invited to lead an industrious and useful life?

Mr Cavadino: No, it is only a minority of prisons who could be said to be anywhere near the ideal which you have described.

Q41  Miss Widdecombe: Can you give us any idea why, given that in other countries full working days are taken for granted in prisons, we do not do it?

Mr Cavadino: Clearly in order to do it you need a policy priority which sets the priority of achieving this. When we set performance indicators for prisons, then prisoners may or may not achieve them but they know they have to try to achieve them and they know they are going to be measured and judged on whether they achieve them. At the moment we do not have a performance indicator for prisons which says you have to provide a full working day for people so that they can work towards a more normal work experience. We have spoken earlier on about the stage from which people start and it is important to realise that many people cannot suddenly and immediately go into a full working day without a great deal of support, without a great deal of preparation, without - if you like - pre-learning, learning to learn both life skills and learning skills. We have not set a performance indicator which says to prisons that they have to achieve this, we are going to give you a certain number of resources which we have realistically assessed will enable you to do this and this is what you have to do. We have performance indicators for a range of other things: we have them for security, we have them (as we described earlier) for certain numbers of hours spent in purposeful activity and so on, but we do not have a policy priority or a specific requirement to achieve a full working day.

Q42  Miss Widdecombe: It comes down to political will.

Mr Cavadino: It comes down to political will.

Q43  Miss Widdecombe: It comes down to political will. Stop there; that will be wonderful.

Mr Cavadino: It probably would be wonderful but in fairness I think I need to do justice to the question by saying a couple more sentences. It comes down to political will. Political will obviously involves looking at the priority for use of resources. It involves looking at the number of prisoners which the Prison Service has to cope with and whether the Prison Service is adequately resourced and equipped to provide the sort of regime that you and I would like to see for all those prisoners. If I gave the impression that I was thinking this was political will simply to put down a measure and expect the Prison Service to achieve it miraculously, obviously I did not mean that.

Q44  Miss Widdecombe: Can I test this one on you: this is my vision for what the Prison Service should be doing in terms of work. All prisons should work towards - before you tell me that the local prisons do not have the place to do it - self-financing prison workshops. That the money that is made by those workshops should be ploughed back into the workshops, into purposeful activities so that more prisoners can be taken on. That the work is not making two million socks for consumption by a prison population of 74,000; but the work should actually be supplied by real contractors for delivery to real customers. That would then enable us to pay prisoners a more realistic wage from which we could then by law - which we can - make deductions for savings, for victim reparation, for the upkeep of families so that not only do you inculcate the habit of an orderly working day but you inculcate the habit of an orderly disposition of earnings. That is what we should be working towards excepting that there is not a magic wand. Would you agree with that vision? Can I ask all of you if you would agree with that vision?

Ms Crook: Ann Widdecombe knows that she and I agree on this and both of us feel very strongly about it. The Howard League did some work a couple of years ago and looked at prison workshops and we published a report. What we found was that the quality of work and the quantity of work in prisons was so poor that it was underscoring the lesson that work pays badly and is boring and that crime is more exciting and pays better. I do not think that was the intended experience. I think it is very worrying and it is right to say that the emphasis has been on education which we would all support because education in prisons is absolutely critical. However, it is education usually to enhance people's lives but also to enable them to work, to be a useful part of the workforce when they come out and yet work in prison is not that kind of experience. Nobody who is employed in prison today as a prisoner pays tax. They do not save for a pension. They are so unlikely to be employed when they come out that we, as tax payers, are going to have to keep them while they are in prison and for the rest of their lives and then we are going to have to pay their pension for them. I think this is completely mad. I think that people who are going to be serving long sentences while they are in prison they should have the work experience that Ann Widdecombe has suggested and they should pay tax and they should be part of the economy, experiencing real life like the rest of us. They should have all the benefits we get from work which are more money, social interaction, a sense of purpose; it does not have to be the world's most exciting job at every possibility. Not everybody will want to do that; some people just want to work or are capable of working at a piece rate but at least they should be paid an honourable and lawful wage and, exactly as Ann Widdecombe has suggested, they could make reparation to victims, they could support their families. There are all sorts of possibilities then and the Howard League Penal Reform is going to set up - if somebody will give me £350,000 - a workshop to show how it can be done. We are going to set up fair trade social enterprise inside a training prison.

Q45  Miss Widdecombe: Is that the Mount?

Ms Crook: Yes, we are working with the Mount Prison to do that. There are people there who have committed serious or violent offences and therefore have to be in prison and we will pay them a minimum wage and give them a real work experience. Hopefully that will help towards rehabilitation. We will set it up as a pilot project to show that it can be done as a prototype for the rest of the Prison Service.

Ms Lyon: I would like to respond just to add two points. I would not wholeheartedly agree with you - almost, but not wholeheartedly - insofar as you particularly identified outside contractors. I would like to add into that equation, if I might, the voluntary sector and in particular thinking about the Inside Out Trust workshops - the RNIB braille workshops, the community service volunteer schemes, pre-release volunteering which we are monitoring at the moment - I think there is a huge amount of scope for prisoners to engage in activity which is for the good of the community and for the first time sometimes experience what it is like to give something back. We did a study of volunteering by prisoners of active citizenship called Barred Citizens which scoped the whole prison estate last year. We found that there were opportunities, but not enough. It was like bright lights on a dark landscape, if you like. One prisoner we interviewed said, "I have learned to communicate. Before I was like a block of ice. I'd listen but I wouldn't hear. Now I want to do something positive." That was not an unusual comment. People really felt that they were doing something and people like the Inside Out Workshop are at pains to demonstrate to people the outcomes so that they know where the wheelchairs go, they see the people receiving wheelchairs - if only on film - and they understand that they are doing something that is of value to somebody else. I would like to add that in. The second point, which is not related to the first except tenuously in that it is about work, is that we at the Prison Reform Trust are victims of prison workshops. We provide information for prisoners, prisoner information books. We produce the material for these books and the Service print in the prison workshops and disseminate. We signed off one particular book last September (which is perhaps the worst example of all) about visiting and keeping in touch - an information book for prisoners' families - because it is absolutely vital for them to know contact numbers and so forth - and it is now over a year in production, and is delayed (and these delays are completely normal within the prison system) to a point that all the prison telephone numbers have changed. Having experienced as a contractor what it is like trying to get goods out of the Service, I do despair actually.

Q46  Janet Anderson: I would like to turn now to the issue of mental illness in prison. It has been estimated that around 90% of prisoners can be diagnosed as suffering from at least one of the five main categories of mental disorder. I am sure you will agree that is quite a staggering figure. I think this is a question for all of you, but I did note that Juliet Lyon said earlier in terms of education provision that you thought there was a need to move towards a policy of equivalence. Could I ask you what progress has been made towards meeting the objective of equivalence between prison mental health care and that available through the NHS to the general public? Also, linked with that, is the Prison Service anywhere near to achieving the Department of Health objective of providing comprehensive mental health services to 5000 prisoners at any one time by next year, 2004?

Ms Lyon: Yes and no. We welcomed the assumption of responsibility by the Department of Health for prison health care. What I said at the beginning I will say again: we do not see prison as a psychiatric facility. We have had to look at this very closely recently thinking about the Mental Health Act and the discussion of compulsory treatment for prisoners. A forensic psychiatrist who is on our board of trustees has looked into it very closely and in his view equivalence is unlikely to be achieved. Whether it is equivalence in terms of actual services or whether it is equivalence in terms of safeguards to people, either in relation to advocacy of representation or people directly having a choice about their treatment, there is no doubt that there have been huge strides taken. However, there are also prisons where nothing has happened as yet. I was in Brockhill Prison for women recently and saw women who were much more ill than women I can remember in a hospital when I worked for mental health. A woman had set fire to herself, she had very little hair, no eyebrows. She had set herself alight in a police car park so she was in prison because she was rather easy to catch. She wanted to be dead and spent her time walking round the prison saying that it was only a matter of time before she would be. For staff who are not trained to deal with women in such distress it is dreadful for them too. It is professionally compromising for them. I talked to the Samaritan listeners and other prisoners who said they were doing their best with her, but she was only one of a number of women I met in that prison who were in a dreadful state. If prisoners are as ill as that I think it is questionable whether we should invest resources in trying to turn prison into a healthcare facility and whether we should not be talking about redirecting resources into community mental health provision into court diversion schemes right across the country - they do work well where they are situated - and into increasing medium, secure and if necessary high secure beds. I think it is questionable to continue trying to make it a health care facility when, on so many levels, it cannot deliver.

Q47  Janet Anderson: Could I go on to ask you to what extent do arrangements for rehabilitation and resettlement take account of the special problems of the kind of offenders you have described? What measures are in place to ensure continuity of provision of mental health treatment for prisoners once they are released? Is there any kind of continuing care?

Ms Lyon: It has been recognised as a gap so that is a start point. Prisoners not having a GP for example, that has been recognised as an identifiable gap. Prisoners do not have resources afterwards. The gap has yet to be closed, whether it is in relation to immediate drug treatment and support on release or whether it is in relation to psychiatric care. That is a partial answer to your questions and others may want to come in and answer as well.

Ms Worrall: We ran a project some years ago now for mentally disordered prisoners who were returning to the West Midlands. One of the great concerns was the lack of follow-up support for prisoners in those circumstances. There were all sorts of practical problems in terms of their rehabilitation and resettlement because many of them came from very disrupted backgrounds, they did not have homes to go to, it was very difficult to identify community psychiatric nursing facilities or even GPs unless you could first identify where people were going to live and because they had a number of particular needs it was often difficult to find anywhere for them to live so there was something of a vicious circle anyway. One of the things that we did find quite significantly was that a lot of the provision in the community - a lot of the services that were available - required somebody to go with the ex-prisoner and settle them in the project. Many places would say they were not prepared to have somebody turning up on the doorstep; they wanted a person to come with them and maybe stay with them for part of the day or a day just to make sure they are properly established and they can be reasonably certain that they are going to benefit from their service. The lack of follow-on support is actually quite critical and it may make the difference between somebody accessing services at all and not being able to access them.

Q48  Janet Anderson: Does that happen? Do people go with prisoners once they are released in the way you have described? Is that service provided?

Ms Worrall: That is not a routine provision, no.

Q49  Janet Anderson: Is it more of a problem with women prisoners? Are they more likely to suffer mental illness problems or is it too difficult to say?

Mr Cavadino: A higher proportion of women in prison have serious problems with mental illness and serious histories of mental illness than is true of the male prison population. As you began by quoting the statistics, you will know that the rates of the incidents of mental disorder is high in both.

Ms Lyon: We know that 40% of women have attempted suicide prior to prison.

Q50  Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I want to continue the theme of mental health problems. I think the statistics are extremely grim: the Prison Service say 20% of prisoners have with severe mental health problems, with four out of five prisoners exhibiting some form of mental health problems. To what extent would that preclude prisoners from engaging in any form of constructive rehabilitation?

Ms Lyon: It does on two levels, I think. It does in terms of their ability to concentrate and their ability to be in anything other than distress. If you look at any sort of research about purposeful activity and education people have to be in a position to engage in it and there are powerful ways that you can be prevented from engaging. If you feel unsafe - the level of assaults in prison needs to be weighed into this, I think, in terms of people's ability to be mentally healthy in that environment - and are frightened of being assaulted and you have a diagnosable mental illness then you are less likely to engage in rehabilitation. That is coupled with the fact that often - although again it has improved to some extent - heavy medication can be used which have very powerful side effects (often the older types of medication). So again people may not be in a position to really engage in something because of the level of medication that they are experiencing.

Q51  Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I think I am asking you to guess here, but in your view how many people are in prison precisely because they have a mental health problem?

Ms Lyon: It is difficult to talk in exact numbers but it was a highly predictable and tragic outcome of so-called care in the community that we closed places - although probably many of them needed to be closed - which did provide some form of asylum for people. As a direct consequence, people who would have previously been held in a Health System entered the Criminal Justice System. If you look at the graph there is this sort of swathe that went across into the system and have ended up in and out of prison who are also homeless, who also have drug and alcohol dependency problems. I am not giving you an exact number but it would be fair to say the vast majority of people in prisons have mental health problems and could be treated elsewhere if there were the right sorts of treatment and the right kind of interventions, particularly early intervention.

Q52  Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Finally I would like to make an observation. I visit quite a number of prisons and meet with a lot of prisoners. From general observation the most saddest observation I generally hear, particularly from young people, is that prison is the first time they have ever felt safe. It is the first time they have had access to regular food and it is the first place they have ever felt free from physical or sexual abuse. Some of them do not want to leave because that structure simply does not exist for them outside prison which goes to the point you made about asylum. The other concern I have is the role of drug abuse in terms of rehabilitation. I go to some prisons where there appears to be a very liberal drug regime and, in fact, the circulation of drugs is positively condoned as a means of managing a population. That is at variance with what we are supposed to be achieving, which is a drug free Prison Service. In your view, as a percentage of all the prisons that we have, how many of them have an active drugs sales programme?

Ms Crook: I was in Leeds recently and the governor told me that 70% of the people who come in are actually on drugs as they are received through the prison gate - usually a cocktail - and have a serious drug problem. However, I think you have to be very careful about trying to rehabilitate and get people off drugs whilst they are in prison because the other side to it is shown by looking at coroners' statistics. I was talking to the coroner of East Anglia recently and he was saying that an increasing number of deaths from drug overdose are people who have very recently been released from prison and although they can get off drugs whilst they are in prison when they come out the first thing they do is go for the fix that they had before but their tolerance is not the same and it kills them. That is the worst extreme and it is certainly the case that getting people off drugs whilst they are in prison is not a long term answer by any means. You need the follow-up and that is simply not available.

Ms Lyon: There is anecdotal evidence about the switch from softer to harder drugs following the introduction of mandatory drug testing which is still of concern to the Service.

Q53  Mrs Dean: Mr Cavadino, can I turn to you first and perhaps others may wish to come in. Turning to the issue of women prisoners we know that although women are over half the population in England and Wales they are only 6.1% of the prison population. I know that has increased dramatically in recent years, but women prisoners commit fewer offences than men and generally have shorter and less criminal careers and are also less likely to be re-convicted than men. Are these differences reflected in the types of rehabilitative and educational programmes offered to women?

Mr Cavadino: If you ask women what their resettlement needs are then you get a different pattern of responses from if you ask male prisoners what their resettlement needs are. The biggest single reason for that is the responsibility for children. Two thirds of women prisoners are primary carers for young children so the separation from their children and the need to get them back on release dominates their thoughts when they are thinking about their resettlement in a way that is less true of the male prison population as a whole. Whereas if you ask women prisoners what are their two most important resettlement needs then the two, far outstripping all the others that they identify, are care of their children and suitable accommodation. In relation to the male prison population, accommodation is up there but accommodation for the prisoner as opposed to accommodation for the prisoner and a small child or children. Employment is also up there as one of the two. If we are looking at what women need by way of resettlement then a high proportion of women need to be in a situation where they can be reunited with their children in accommodation which is suitable for that. So far as the programmes that are available to women in custody are concerned, there is a difference in pattern and certainly when I went round prisons some years ago the pattern was more extreme than it is now but it is still there. It was noticeable going round establishments for young women at that time there were far fewer - even than in similar male establishments - courses which were vocationally geared to practical work. The situation is not as extreme in its disparity between the two now, but there are still considerable differences and it is still broadly true that women prisoners do not have access to the same range of opportunities for work and education as happens in many male establishments. If you are looking at what is needed most to resettle them then the biggest single need is to enable them to get into some kind of decent accommodation in which, if they have small children, they can be reunited. That is something which can make a great deal of difference to the likelihood of re-offending because if you have an incentive like that, an incentive not to go back to crime and not to go back to prison in order not to wreck again your contact with your children, that is a very powerful incentive to avoid crime.

Q54  Mrs Dean: How successful is the Prison Service in actually delivering those needs in resettlement terms for women? Is one of the problems with actually delivering the work and education opportunities in prison the fact that women are not there as long? Is that one of the issues involved?

Ms Lyon: It is certainly true to say that three quarters of the women are sentenced to 12 months or less. They are much less likely to be there for violent crimes than men. Following up Paul Cavadino's comments about women as mothers, I think it is hugely important to think about the social outcomes: 16,000 children on our estimates are affected by their mother's imprisonment. The vast majority of the women are primary carers and whilst these children do not go into care - we know that only one in five stay in their own homes, the vast majority are moved around - there is an issue about how can we enable women either to be diverted into community penalties or, if they are imprisoned, how do we address their resettlement needs? We employed somebody from prison about 18 months ago. She was in a resettlement unit and I stress that point because one would imagine that as a prisoner in a resettlement she would have more help than other prisoners. Her release had been planned for some time and it came to within three days of her release and her help to find housing was two pages faxed through from the Yellow Pages by a probationer officer she had never met. There was a list of housing associations she might try to phone. When she came to work for us - she was working from prison and then in the community - her hostel accommodation was so poor when she first came out she could not possibly have had her daughter back (she was living with her brother) and it took her six months to find appropriate accommodation. She was - and is - a very determined woman. She regretted what she had done and managed to stay clear of offending and kept her job, but the effort she put into that and the scarcity of help she got shocked me, even though I know the facts and figures.

Mr Cavadino: On the length of sentence, of course it is more difficult if someone is in prison for a short time to provide, for example, an educational course that will meed their needs. In my view, everybody going into prison - and this includes people on remand - even for very short periods should have some basic assessment of their needs that can be met either in prison or on release. If you look at the housing situation, for example, every prisoner should be interviewed immediately on release to see whether they have accommodation outside; whether steps can be taken to retain that accommodation so that they have it on release; whether arrangements for avoiding rent arrears building up by giving immediate notice to surrender a tenancy can be made; if there are already rent arrears, making agreements with the housing provider to start deductions from prison wages - obviously they would be token reductions - on the basis that when the prisoner is then released if the housing provider rehouses them the amounts of the payments will go up which can make a key difference to whether a housing provider will re-house somebody or not. Where prisoners are homeless, where they do not have accommodation, then planning for accommodation on release can be done even if somebody is in prison for a short period of time, and it should be done straight away and systematically. You an assess people's educational needs; you can assess their employment and training needs; you can assess their health needs, their needs for help with addiction to drugs or alcohol, for example. You can assess a range of things which, even if you cannot then meet them in prison, you can do some emergency first aid work of the kind I have described to stop them getting worse and make arrangements by liaison with community agencies that can help with those problems if the person is going to be released within a short time. I think that we need to be very much more systematic about this. Every prisoner - male or female - needs to have a team of people with the specific responsibility of taking the immediate steps that are needed to stop matters from getting worse, to retain accommodation, to retain employment (because a third of people going into prison do have a job) and where it is possible to retain it contact the employer and arrange for that to happen. Also, then to set up a practical resettlement plan for the prisoner's release. I believe that is possible for every prisoner - including remand prisoners - if the arrangements are there in place and if every prison is required to do it and somebody in that prison has a responsibility to ensure that it happens.

Q55  Mrs Dean: I wonder whether Ms Crook wants to comment on the fact that only 15% of women are held for violent offences?

Ms Crook: We have said for many years - and I think we would have some consensus here - that the vast majority of women who are sent to prison simply should not be there. There should be alternative ways of managing them in the community which would mean that they could be safe and could atone for the wrong they have done, they could do something constructive to deal with it. Then we would not be looking at issues to do with homelessness. When we did some work with young people - boys and girls - we found that more of them were homeless on release from prison than had been when they went into custody. I saw a recent report on Dartmoor. Can you imagine being released from Dartmoor? You would not know where you were for a start. A huge percentage - the majority - of the prisoners coming out of Dartmoor were homeless as well. It is a problem with women, it is a problem with young people and it is a problem with adult men.

Q56  Mr Clappison: Can we take it that there is a consensus between you that given that women commit less serious types of offences - in particular not so many violent and sexual offences - they are in prison for much shorter periods of time and in the majority of cases, as you have told us, they have care for young children. You would think it was just as important to look at ways of dealing with them by community sentences which enable them to make reparation in the community as looking at the question of rehabilitation. Is there agreement on that?

Ms Crook: Absolutely, yes.

Q57  Mr Clappison: Is it still the case that young girls, some as young as 16, are held in adult prisons?

Ms Crook: No.

Q58  Mr Clappison: Has that stopped now?

Ms Crook: Yes and no. We are very pleased that the Government has finally honoured its promise to take 15 year old girls out of the prison system; there are now no 15 year olds in prison today. There are a handful of 16 year olds, they are going too. There are still some 17 year old girls, both under sentence and on remand, who are held in prisons. At the moment there is a court case pending, a judicial review against the Government taken by the Howard League on behalf of a young girl who was put into an adult women's prison. At the moment they still can be. We are very optimistic that from this month, when the judgment finally comes through, it will no longer be lawful to hold juvenile girls in adult women's prisons. At the moment they are, but hopefully by the end of this month they will not be.

Q59  Mr Clappison: Amongst other things it must be very difficult to provide them with education and training when there are only small numbers of them in adult prisons.

Ms Crook: They are put in with the adult women. We had a 16 year old girl who was put in an adult education class with adult women who had committed quite a range of offences.

Q60  Mr Clappison: Moving on from that, can I turn to juveniles - both boys and girls - and ask Paul Cavadino what the current status of education and training programmes for juveniles is across the prison estate?

Mr Cavadino: There are statutory requirements for juveniles to have a certain number of minimum hours education. The arrangements in practice are very variable. There are some young offender institutions which have an extremely good range of educational opportunities for young offenders and others where the opportunities are, in practice, very much more restricted. The Youth Justice Board, since it became responsible for young offenders, has put more resources into custodial establishments to enable some improvements in the regime, but the number of juveniles in custody is considerably larger now than it was a few years ago and obviously with a given number of resources and a much larger number of young prisoners than we were talking about a few years ago, those resources have improved the regimes but not to the extent they potentially could if the numbers were smaller. Where we have found a significant difference in relation to re-offending is when young people are provided not only with educational opportunities but with the kind of intensive support on all of the other problems that they have which enables them to take advantage of those educational opportunities and enables them to be motivated to take advantage of them and because other areas of their lives are being coped with better they can concentrate on education and see it as something to aim for. We have a resettlement project, for example, in Portland Young Offender Institution called the 'On-side' project. It initially started for juveniles although Portland has now changed and takes young offenders aged 18 to 20 so the successor of the project works with the slightly older age group. That was designed specifically for the young people who were most vulnerable, in other words those with the highest combination of problems in their background which would make them vulnerable both as individuals but also to re-offending and committing further crimes. They provided more intensive support for them than would normally be provided. Over a three year period the research showed that it reduced the re-conviction rate compared with 84% of juveniles being re-convicted within two years in the general prison population to 58%. Because it was concentrating on the most vulnerable juveniles - those with the highest combinations of problems - the likely re-conviction rate of that group was higher than the average of 84%.

Q61  Mr Clappison: You were taking particularly difficult cases.

Mr Cavadino: Exactly. It would have been pretty well 100% likelihood of re-conviction so it effectively nearly halved the likelihood of re-conviction. It could have been much more effective if all the other things that are important to re-offending had been out there in the community to link with because there were problems often in getting young people into suitable accommodation. If that had been more readily available the re-conviction rate could have been reduced and so on, but the mere provision of intensive support and intensive case work on trying to sort out issues when people were released and follow-up work significantly reduced the likelihood of re-offending.

Q62  Mr Clappison: Do you think that could be more widely applied throughout the system?

Mr Cavadino: Yes. We have shared the lessons of that project with the Youth Justice Board and we know that the Youth Justice Board is interested in the lessons of that and has been looking at them with a view to forming its development of regimes elsewhere. The Board has been hampered by the sheer numbers issue; it has limited resources and if you have more young prisoners then those resources do not go round as well. There is no doubt that that kind of provision, if it were available everywhere, could make a big difference to the likelihood of re-offending.

Q63  Mr Clappison: Presumably a large number of the juveniles in the system have special educational needs. What specialist provision is there for them?

Ms Crook: None. If they are statemented their statement does not follow them into prison; the local authority does not have to provide the extra support that the law says that that child should have and the prison does not even know if they have a statement, there is no-one to say that they have to know about it. The local education authority does not have to provide information to the prison so most of the prisons do not know. Then there are children who have particular needs who do not have a statement - obviously local authorities do not like to give statements because they are expensive - and they do not get extra help either. The teachers in the juvenile prisons are adult education teachers, they are not qualified even to teach in schools. They do not have the qualifications. Very few prisons have SEN specialist providers. The quality of education these young people get in juvenile prisons - with the best will in the world and with some very expert and committed staff - is still very much based on chalk and talk and is replicating the very boring and mundane experience that they have in schools and I do not think that is always encouraging.

Ms Lyon: You have identified an area which needs a lot further research. Presumably a very large number have educational needs but where the research has been done by the Office for National Statistics on mental health in young offenders - so that we know that 90% have at least two forms of diagnosable mental disorder, 10% have functional psychosis - we do not have any idea about the level of learning disabilities within the prison population in terms of a carefully worked survey of that population and their needs.

Q64  Mr Clappison: One imagines it would be quite hard.

Ms Lyon: Absolutely, one does imagine that.

Q65  Chairman: Is it fair to say, from what you have said so far, that the prison system has largely washed its hands of rehabilitative work with short term prisoners, whether on remand or short sentences?

Mr Cavadino: Traditionally there has been very little rehabilitative work done with short term prisoners, both those under sentence and those on remand. There has been a tendency to say that they are only here for a short time and nothing effective can be done by way of a course or any kind of rehabilitation programme. There have been some exceptions to that. There have been examples of programmes in a tiny number of individual prisons which have been running for some time which have been doing effective work of the kind that I described as the ideal to assess short term prisoners' needs and to get something in place not only to tackle emergency needs but to plan for the future, but they have been very much the exception rather than the rule. There has been more interest in dealing with short term prisoners over the last three or four years as a result of, among other things, the Social Exclusion Unit's recent report on reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners and also successive Home Office ministers - including Miss Widdecombe, Jack Straw and the current ministers - have listened to organisations like ourselves and have been interested in improving the extent to which rehabilitation takes place in prisons. It is still the case that for short term prisoners often very little is done and although there is more interest in rehabilitation and resettlement in prisons than there was some years ago for short term prisoners, they are very much the poor relations and, of course, when they are released they are not a responsibility of the Probation Service so there is no statutory service out there for them and any help they get depends on voluntary sector organisations whose resourcing and whose availability in different areas is variable.

Q66  Chairman: That is a fairly formidable list of ministers who have taken an interest in this topic. Why do you think that despite that they have not made more impact in the system and if you were in a position to instruct the director of the Prison Service in this area what are the two or three things that you would point to that you really think would make a difference to the impact on the short term prisoners, both the remand and those on short term sentences?

Mr Cavadino: The biggest single thing I think would be remedying the gap that was identified by the Social Exclusion Unit in its report on reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners and that is that it is nobody's job to ensure the resettlement of ex-prisoners. People often fall between the stools of different agencies who may or may not be involved in working with them. To fill that gap I think we need something in every prison and something in every area. The something that we need in every prison is a team of people with the specific job of ensuring that all prisoners have their practical resettlement needs assessed immediately they come in and plans made to meet them. That should cover their needs for accommodation, employment, education, help with addictions, help with mental health issues and the other related practical issues such as accessing benefits, having identification that agencies recognise on the outside for everything from claiming benefits to opening bank accounts. Having a team with the specific responsibility of ensuring that happens, carrying out some it themselves, co-ordinating the work of outside agencies that come into the prison and are involved in it, making liaison with outside agencies which can make a very big difference. If you have a series of housing providers - outside in the catchment areas to which prisoners are returning, and a service within the prison - which contacts all of them systematically and asks them to nominate a prison liaison person, that can make a massive difference to working effectively with that housing provider and getting prisoners into accommodation on release. The same is true of training agencies and other types of agency. So, a team within the prison that have specific responsibility for co-ordinating resettlement arrangements is crucial. A team in each community area with responsibility for practical resettlement would be crucial to ensuring that it carried on on release and by that I mean a team of people who would be identifying housing, employment and training opportunities in the community; arranging support from mentors for offenders whether they be paid staff or volunteers; liaising with housing providers, training providers and employers who have agreed to take offenders but need continuing support or somewhere to turn for advice (which can often make a big difference to whether a housing provider, a training provider or an employer will agree to take somebody on in the first place; it can increase their readiness to do it); and making agreement with local agencies such as housing providers for the accommodation of ex-prisoners with the learning and skills councils and Jobcentre Plus for the provision of training.

Q67  Chairman: The critical thing is that somebody must be clearly responsible and accountable.

Mr Cavadino: There are two critical things. One is that it must be somebody's job and the second is that there must be a team of people both in each prison and in each community with the job of doing it.

Ms Lyon: I agree entirely with Paul Cavadino. This is an extremely good example of the fruitlessness of imprisonment and the amount of harm it does in terms of the level of dislocation. The best staff in the best prisons spend their time, if they can, with the short term prisoners trying to make up for the dislocation that has occurred as a result of imprisonment so they are trying to re-connect them with family, re-connect them with employment, trying to find housing in the few cases where that can be managed. Where you try to get somebody's job like bail information, bail support in a prison it is not ring fenced and it unravels very fast due to the other pressures on staff. We are currently reviewing remand provision for women, looking at bail support schemes and bail information schemes. They are incredibly disparate and failing in many, many cases. What we have is a system where we have 40,615 prisoners serving six months or less last year; we have, as I said, 53,000 waiting trial and of those there are some, presumably, who absolutely should be there because they represent a risk to the public and we are not saying that those people should not be in prison. It would be fair to say that a very high proportion of those numbers, bearing in mind that a quarter - or almost - are on remand in the women's prison population, we have got it wrong in a spectacular way. All the things that Paul Cavadino has talked about in relation to the team that is needed afterwards is needed very much for those seriously violent offenders who need very careful re-integration back into the community. However, for those serving short sentences or those held on remand a review of that to see where community provision could be introduced, where the intermediate estate - which was a recommendation in the Halliday review but which became rather lost in the Criminal Justice Bill - could be resurrected and would make the world of difference and we would not be asking something that is beyond the capacity of prison staff as things stand at the moment.

Q68  Mr Prosser: A number of you have made reference to the involvement of the voluntary sector in helping with rehabilitation and the Halliday report said that the voluntary sector could play an essential role in rehabilitation in terms of housing, after-care and support. Then just last year the Social Exclusion Unit said there was a lack of co-ordination between the voluntary sector, the Prison Service and the Probation Service and perhaps a lack of joined-up thinking. What are your views on that? Is there a lack of partnership? Is there a lack of resource? What needs to be done to bring them together?

Mr Cavadino: There are some very good examples of partnerships in individual prisons or individual areas, but what the Social Exclusion Unit said is broadly true. We have a situation in which arrangements are very fragmented and very ad hoc and even though there is a lot of good work going on by individual voluntary organisations there is not any systematic approach to partnership. There have been steps taken by both the Prison Service and the National Probation Service to address that. The Prison Service has set up a voluntary and community sector strategy group - of which my colleague Jackie Worrall is a member - to try to improve arrangements. The Probation Service has set up what it calls a centrally led action network on partnership which is working to produce a strategy for partnership between the Probation Service and the voluntary sector. Currently the situation is extremely variable and it is essentially up to each individual prison governor and each individual area probation service to decide how far and in what ways it wishes to engage with the voluntary sector. That is very different from there being an effective strategy for partnership. As you said, the Halliday report identifies the need to engage the voluntary sector in relation to areas such as accommodation and, employment and mentoring if supervision on release or under community sentences was going to be effective and that remains a need. It is significant that in order to try to get more joined up approaches across the Prison and Probation Services and the Youth Justice Services, the Government has set up a Correctional Service Board which includes representatives of the Prison Service, the National Probation Service, the Youth Justice Board and it also has four non-executive directors. As it happens, one of those four has considerable experience of the voluntary sector but not in the field of resettlement of offenders or criminal justice and it is significant that there is no representative of the voluntary sector on the Correctional Services Board. Partnership must mean involvement in planning. It cannot just mean that the statutory services decide what they want to do and then tell the voluntary sector what they have decided and then ask for their help. Partnership must mean engaging the voluntary sector - which has enormous experience in this area of rehabilitation of offenders - in the planning and the thinking about what needs to happen, not just be approached on an ad hoc basis depending on what each individual prison governor or each area probation service decides it would like the voluntary sector to do.

Ms Crook: It does not just mean using the voluntary sector to provide a service which is cheaper. I think quite often that is in the thinking from the Prison Service and they do not like criticism either. Part of the relationship with the voluntary sector has always been based on the assumption - as Paul Cavadino has said - that they would provide a service and the Prison Service would tell them what to do. When that relationship is more challenging the Prison Service responds very negatively so that, for example, while we are trying to force the Prison Service to act lawfully in its care for girls I am not being allowed into prisons which hold young women and it is simply a vindictive act by the Prison Service and the managers of the female estate because they do not like what we are doing because we are trying to make them act within the law. Once the voluntary sector starts to be more challenging towards the Prison Service and tells them that they have to act within the law they then react very negatively. For example, there is no public interest immunity policy in the Prison Service and there ought to be for its own staff and for anyone working within the prison walls, whether they are volunteers or voluntary sector. There ought to be a whistleblowers charter. These are closed institutions where there ought to be a public interest immunity. People should be treated properly whether they are visitors, family, staff, prisoners or voluntary sector workers; they should all be treated properly and people should be encouraged to say if they are not treated properly. That is a very difficult and challenging relationship that has to be taken on board by the Prison Service.

Q69  Mr Prosser: Ms Worrall, from your position sitting on the public sector group, do you have the same feeling that there is no national strategy, nothing driving it forward and no means of bringing them all together into a co-ordinated effort?

Ms Worrall: I think in principal there is a notion of strategy. The intention of the voluntary sector advisory group is to develop strategy and the Prison Service has appointed a voluntary sector co-ordinator to ensure that that happens. A great deal of work has been done. I think the difficulty comes in practice much more when individual governors or individual areas are negotiating pieces of work with the voluntary sector. I think, as has already been suggested, there is sometimes a confusion about whether voluntary sector actually means volunteers and therefore it is a cheap - or indeed free - service. I think that has an influence on the notion of partnership, that it is quite clearly not an equal partnership if that is the perception underpinning any kind of discussions. I think there are improvements. There is a definite willingness to work with the voluntary sector and a recognition that the voluntary sector can offer something that the Prison Service or Probation Service themselves cannot offer in terms of less formal relationships with prisoners. We are still a long way from being involved in the planning stage and contributing fully to the development of strategy.

Ms Lyon: I am a member of the same group as Jackie Worrall and I can tell you that the Service has moved in about 18 months or two years to a situation where at least they have a voluntary sector co-ordinator nominated in each prison. That is quite an achievement in itself. In some cases there is good practice where voluntary sector and staff are training together. There has been some reluctance from staff in fear that some of the more interesting elements of their work might be taken away by the voluntary sector and they will be left locking and unlocking doors. That has been proved not to be the case where the governor has worked to integrate it. There are problems. One of the problems I alluded to earlier - like the every changing governor - will mean that as all partnerships are negotiated through the governor; if that governor moves on things can disintegrate fairly quickly. It is significant that the voluntary sector co-ordinator in the Prison Service is working with almost no budget and when she was appointed there was absolutely no budget. It has a huge long way to go from the principal which is now in place and is a very good one and will make a big difference to the inward looking nature of prisons. It is actually achieving something on the ground.

Q70  Mr Prosser: If you were to give the Committee one recommendation to improve that, what would it be?

Ms Lyon: That the voluntary sector is seen as a fundamental part of the resettlement of prisoners rather than a bolt-on.

Q71  Bob Russell: We have covered most of the resettlement so I will conclude with one brief question to each of you. If each of you could be the Home Secretary for a few moments and each of you just give one answer, what more needs to be done to support prisoners post-release in order to help them move away from the revolving door cycle of re-offending, re-conviction and re-imprisonment?

Ms Crook: My one answer is that I do not think that anything more constructive is possible whilst we still have so many people going through the system.

Ms Worrall: I think you have to recognise that particularly the most vulnerable prisoners will not cope on their own without some fairly high level of support and that is about getting them into housing and giving them access to any services that they require.

Mr Cavadino: In the community post-release the single most important thing is for every area to have a resettlement team identifying job training and accommodation opportunities for prisoners, providing support for prisoners who are in jobs, training and accommodation, providing support for employers, training providers and housing providers who have taken ex-prisoners into their programmes or their accommodation, and negotiating effective compact with agencies in the areas of housing, training and addictions and mental health needs to ensure that ex-prisoners who need those services can access them.

Ms Lyon: I would push on the current policy - which I think is a cross-party agreement - on citizenship. I would concentrate on maintaining and shoring up people's sense of personal responsibility. That would cover avoiding the revolving door for many and making sure they took responsibility for their crime in the community and paid back and be called to account in the community. It would mean that while they were in prison every effort would be made to avoid institutionalisation whether it was participation as an active participant in a programme - peer support and so forth - as a voter (as opposed to a non-voter), and outside in the community that they were actually given responsibilities and the opportunity to take up work, to take up housing and to maintain responsibility for their family. I think the way in which we strip people of their citizenship and enable them to become, if anything, less responsible as citizens, is a tragedy.

Mr Solomon: I think the broader vision needs to change. I think the Home Secretary needs to go back to Lord Wolfe's report post-Strangeways and resurrect the notion of the community prison. The plans that they have to build two 1500-bed prisons outside towns and in the middle of nowhere, the vision needs to change and we need to return to the idea of the community prison.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. That was a very good way of summing up the session. I think you have set a very good basis for the rest of our hearing.