Examination of Witnesses (Questions 155-159)
15 SEPTEMBER 2004
MS FRANCES
CROOK AND
MR ROBERT
NEWMAN
Q155 Chairman: Can I ask the Howard League
and Frances Crook to join us. Can I welcome you, Frances, to our
proceedings and thank you very much for sitting their patiently
waiting to be called.
Ms Crook: It was very interesting.
Chairman: You and I know have known each
other for a long time from when I was Shadow Home Affairs Minister—
Jonathan Shaw: You are saying this about
all of our witnesses, we are starting to get worried!
Chairman: I have known Frances since
I was Home Affairs Shadow Minister for about four years and we
got to know each other quite well and Rod Morgan as well. You
cannot help it, it is an incredibly inbred world, is it not?
Jonathan Shaw: Evidently!
Chairman: I am going to ask you to say
something to open up but I have got a member of the Committee
who has to go by 11.05 but who wants to ask a question, so could
I ask David to ask his question straight off and then we will
go back into normal service.
Q156 Mr Chaytor: During the Committee's
earlier visits to prisons one of the issues that came up repeatedly
was the problem of the difficulty of transferring prisoners' records
between prisons. I understand that there is a new information
system called Oasis and I would just like you to tell us a little
bit about that insofar as what information will it transfer and
what is the timescale for the implementation of Oasis across all
institutions?
Ms Crook: Oh dear! I think you
should ask the Prison Service. Detailed questions like that about
management of records I cannot give you a definitive answer to.
All I can tell you is that it is all pretty chaotic in my experience.
Q157 Mr Chaytor: We want to hear your
experience. Is it fair criticism that what exists now is completely
inadequate? Why has nobody got to grips with this over the last
few years because simply recording prisoners' employment records
and previous qualifications and educational activity would seem
to be a fairly simple process and I do not understand why it does
not work efficiently at the moment?
Ms Crook: I think the answer to
that, particularly for the adults, would be that the pressure
of numbers means that it is incredibly difficult for anybody to
manage anything efficiently. That is particularly true as well
for the huge numbers of adults, mostly adult men of course, who
are received into prison for short sentences and may serve a short
time in one prison and then be transferred for a short time to
another prison and then be released. If however you are sentenced
to a longer period in prison—four or five years—things
get a little bit more settled and your records are more likely
to catch up with you round the system. The answer to your question
is that it is an impossible task for any system to deal with the
huge pressure of numbers particularly with the enormous rise of
numbers of people going in for short sentences and their records
will simply never catch up with them. Goodness knows, their underwear
does not catch up with them, how can anything else!
Q158 Mr Chaytor: If we compare other
institutions, the National Health Service for example has millions
of transactions every day and yet the National Health Service
has a system of medical record-keeping which is not perfect and
falls down from time to time but everybody has a medical record
and everyone's transaction, even if it is a five-minute interview
with their GP, is recorded so why is the Prison Service so far
behind the National Health Service for example. It is not just
a question of numbers because there are far more numbers in the
NHS.
Ms Crook: I think perhaps another
emphasis is the emphasis on security because the money that has
gone into the Prison Service over the last five or six years has
tended to go towards building higher walls with barbed wire round
them not on the additional support networks for administration.
I think another issue would probably be, if you are looking at
education, the educational level given to staff, the educational
support and training for staff, which is well below what you would
get in the Health Service. The basic level of education for a
prison officer is lower than most people in the Health Service.
I think it is a serious issue that if we are looking at the education
of prisoners we also ought to look at education not just training
(they are different) for staff.
Q159 Mr Chaytor: Do you think that there
is a serious issue of professional development of prison staff
across the board at all levels?
Ms Crook: I think it is a very
serious issues, both from appointment, where many of the staff
have a low level of education, and through the level of education
that is given to them in professional development (and I think
there is a significant difference between training and education)
where support is not given to staff as it should be.
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