Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
15 SEPTEMBER 2004
MS FRANCES
CROOK AND
MR ROBERT
NEWMAN
Q180 Chairman: You would agree with that,
Robert?
Mr Newman: Yes.
Q181 Jonathan Shaw: Staying on that,
we have received that sort of criticism about the central contract
across the board in terms of our visits and people are very open
about their criticism of staff, which is a good thing but very
worrying. In discussions that you have with the Home Office, Frances,
is there any indication that there might be some new thinking,
given that there is such whole-scale criticism across the board,
to have more local contracting which may prove to be more flexible
and beneficial to the prisoners?
Ms Crook: My experience of discussing
things with the Home Office, particularly at the political level,
is that it is completely impervious to criticism, however well
founded.
Q182 Mr Pollard: Could you be more explicit?
Ms Crook: I think you have got
my meaning.
Valerie Davey: Very subtly said!
Q183 Jonathan Shaw: Perhaps you could
put a bit more flesh on the bones about your real work enterprise.
It is a printing firm and they are going to have the same conditions
as someone outside. They are going to have to support their families,
they are going to have to save, they are going to have to donate
to Victim Support if they wish, contribute to prison upkeep, and
they are going to pay tax and insurance, so they are going to
be earning above the minimum wage, aren't they? I do not know
what is going to be left after all that. Give us a bit more of
the detail. We have seen Transco in operation, spoken to youngsters,
spoken to Transco. Tell us a little more about your enterprise.
Ms Crook: The way the law is at
the moment it would be unlawful for a prisoner to contribute to
their bed and board whilst they are in prison, but we would like,
as a matter of principle, that they contribute something towards
enhancing the prison experience in some way, something extra.
It might be, for example, they would make a contribution to a
visitors' centre (which are often run by charities) so it helps
the families who visit the general prison. We may only be talking
about small sums of money but I think small sums of money can
sometimes be very symbolic, particularly as you talk about public
confidence in this sort of thing, to feel that a prisoner is making
amends for the wrong they have done, and contributing positively,
even if it is only a small amount of money, to Victim Support
or family involvement in the prison, is very important. I think
perhaps the most important element of it is that it is a real
work experience. They will have to apply for a job. They will
have to spend a full working day there. We will keep them over
lunchtime so they are not locked up for two hours at lunchtime.
They will have promotional and training opportunities. They will
be paid a real wage but it will obviously not go into cash in
hand, it will be managed in bank accounts for them. They will
get money at the end which they will have saved to help them on
release so that people after a few years of working in the prison
will have a sum of money and they will be given help and support
on how to invest that in business or tide them over to some extent.
At the moment the work that we have done to look at prison industries,
which we published a couple of years ago, was probably one of
the most depressing pieces of work the Howard League for Penal
Reform has ever done. Prison industries are chaotic, there are
very few of them, there are fewer than 10,000 people involved
in prison industries.
Q184 Mr Pollard: It is very low tech
as well.
Ms Crook: Very low tech. It is
menial work. Somebody has to do menial work. I do not mind that
there is menial work in it as long as it is properly paid. If
that work is not the most exciting then it should at least be
properly paid and properly respected, and you will get social
interaction and all the other benefits that we all get from work.
At the moment in prisons that is simply not the case. It is low
paid, low skilled, low respect and reinforces the view, as I say,
that crime is much more exciting and pays better.
Q185 Chairman: In terms of the way in
which prisons are organised what would you do? I felt you put
your finger on something. We understand that prison officers have
had a reduced amount of training, which has been cut back before
they become fully-fledged prison officers. Is that true?
Ms Crook: I think it is true and
I think it is very unfortunate. I think at the heart of it is
partly a confusion still about what prisons are for and when people
are employed in the Prison Service as prison officers, are they
there as warders, are they there as custodians, are they there
as social care officers or educationalists? They are expected
to do a lot of things now. Prison staff are expected to provide
all sorts of psychological support for people and even deliver
programmes and yet many of them have very little educational attainment
themselves. I think we ought to move towards a system where prison
officers are given much more support for time off for education,
so that training is given a priority, which at the moment it often
is not. Training programmes are put on and then they are cancelled
for security reasons or due to staff absences. The key to everything
in prisons is the staff. If they are committed to it and think
it is worthwhile and it enhances their working life, then it will
happen and they must be engaged in it constructively.
Q186 Chairman: We saw one particular
prison on the Isle of Wight where there was a very interesting
printing operation where they were taking outside contracts. There
seemed to be a high level of motivation, high-quality training
and high-quality leadership, so within the prison system quite
a lot can be achieved with the right management and the right
leadership?
Ms Crook: Yes, in individual prisons
that is the case. The trouble is that I think sometimes centrally
that has not been the case and institutions will go up and down.
If you go back in four years' time to the prison you went to you
will see what it is like when that particular governor has moved
on somewhere else, because it is not just the churn of prisoners,
it is the churn of senior managers that is the problem, too.
Q187 Chairman: What are the steps to
achieving your vision, radically changing the culture and radically
changing the nature? What are the steps that you would take? Many
of us hoped when there was a new administration in 1997 that there
would be a totally different attitude to what prisons are and
how they are organised. There does not seem to have been a change
at all, does there?
Ms Crook: I think a change of
attitude has to come from the top and it has to be political leadership.
What I would like to see is political leadership saying people
who have done something wrong must make amends for the wrong they
have done and they should be helped to change their lives, and
the most effective way of doing that is to maintain them in their
communities as far as possible. If somebody has committed a serious
and violent offence and has to go into custody for public safety
then they should be doing something useful in that environment
which, again, allows them to make amends for the wrong they have
done. They should lead a busy, useful and constructive life in
custody. That is the balance which I think the public would engage
with. They do not want to see people getting what they think as
benefits from having committed a crime. On the other hand, all
of us would agree we want to see a safer society where there are
fewer victims of crime, and the best way to achieve that is to
have a new system of criminal justice which is based on restoring
the damage which has been done by crime and changing people's
lives by getting them to make amends for the wrong they have done,
and that can be done through education, through training and through
work.
Q188 Chairman: Why do you think there
is such a lack of political leadership and even in terms of the
press, usually this Committee, when we look at early years or
universities or almost everything else, has radio, television
and the press here. Since we started prison education there has
been no radio, no television, I do not think there is one member
of the press here. If there is, indicate please. No. I have never
known that. It is astonishing, is it not, not the tabloids, not
the heavyweight press, no-one. It seems as though we are in some
sort of ghetto that no-one is interested in. Why do you think
that is?
Ms Crook: People are interested
when something goes seriously wrong, when there is a death or
a riot, but you do not hear ministers talking about the sort of
thing you are talking about. It is not a high political priority.
We do not hear ministers giving strong leadership or the Home
Secretary giving strong leadership talking about the place of
prison in society and the place of community based penalties which
can allow people to make amends for the wrong they have done in
a constructive way. It is never talked about and unless you have
strong political and moral leadership given on these issues no-one
else will follow.
Chairman: The Secretary of State for
Education and Skills has said that he is very interested in prison
education and very interested in the inquiry that we have mounted
and is watching with great interest. I suppose we have to be relatively
fair because he has actually said that in the House on a number
of occasions so perhaps we can hope for some change there. I would
like to move on now. Other members of the Committee, any more
questions? Paul?
Q189 Paul Holmes: Picking up the one
that you mentioned earlier, the Isle of Wight example of the print
works compared with the more realistic working and paying tax
example that you are experimenting with. One of the things that
the prison officers we talked to in various prisons commented
on most often was the problem with any education or training course
that they did run was having enough prison officers to make sure
that the prisoners got there on time for classes or at all because
quite often a shortage of prison staff or other priorities within
the Prison Service meant from day-to-day you never knew whether
the people you were teaching or training were going to turn up
and that interfered enormously with any attempts at education
and training. How far would that sort of thing impinge? If you
are trying to get prisoners doing a proper job while they are
in prison, how far is that going to be practical within a prison
situation?
Ms Crook: Some training prisons
have something called "free flow" which is what the
Mount has so that people are unlocked and it is up to them to
get to where they are meant to go and everybody goes across the
prison to where they are meant to be. The prisoners themselves
are responsible for getting themselves after breakfast to their
workplace. We are hoping that that will allow us to get the right
people to the right time at the right place.
Q190 Paul Holmes: It seemed sometimes
talking to the prisoners and to the tutors from colleges or the
prison officers who were doing the training, that access to education,
certainly to the better schemes, was a privilege and quite a number
of prisoners did not get access partly because of their behaviour
in the institution. Also a lot of people did not want to take
part so it bypassed them. How far would the sort of training scheme
you are talking about be the tip of the iceberg? It would be a
wonderful example but would it really touch the bulk of the prison
population?
Ms Crook: I do not think education
should ever be seen as a privilege; education is always a right
and should be encouraged. One of the reasons why sometimes people
do not want to go to education is in the adult system it can be
very dull, it can be very chalk and talk and classroom based.
I know that when I was teaching challenging children, I took them
out all the time. I took a whole group of children to the museum
in Liverpool none of whom had ever been to a museum. They were
terribly excited about going there because they thought it had
a café because they knew about cafe«s, cafe«s
were treats, but they did not know what a museum was. Unfortunately,
education in a custodial setting is almost invariably sitting
down and talking with very poor resources a lot of the time, particularly
in the adult system. As far as the employment scheme goes, I think
it is possible that it will be part of an incentive, although
anyone in the prison as far as we are concerned will be able to
apply as we will be selecting the best candidates, exactly as
you would as an employer outside. We will be looking for good
candidates to do this work and we will be selecting them, not
the prison.
Q191 Jonathan Shaw: Just a bit about
employers. You said that you would like to see more identification
of areas of skills shortage within local areas to prisons and
partnerships developed. That is what my brief says. You are looking
a bit puzzled.
Ms Crook: I probably said that.
I wish I had!
Q192 Jonathan Shaw: I am sure you did.
What opportunities are there for prisons to engage with local
employers to identify local skills shortages? We know about Transco.
It is almost like do not mention Transco because there has got
to be something else.
Ms Crook: Not necessarily.
Q193 Jonathan Shaw: Is that why we always
mention it?
Ms Crook: Yes, quite simply. There
are a few training prisons. Those are prisons that hold the longer
term prisoners, and which have developed good relationships with
employers, places like Swayleside for example in Kent. There are
of course the open prisons like Blantyre House or Leyhill which
have a large number of prisoners who go out to work in the local
community but to have a local prison engaging with a local community
in that way is very rare.
Q194 Chairman: Did the Victorians not
have more of an attitude towards work? If I remember rightly there
was a whole network of prison farms on which people worked. Do
they still exist? They certainly existed until fairly recently
because I helped in a campaign to save a rare breed of horse,
the Suffolk Punch, and the only place the Suffolk Punch still
existed in this country was in a prison in Suffolk and it was
the prison farm wanting to be sold off that led to a crisis. Prison
farms have all now gone, have they?
Ms Crook: There are very few.
Again I think that is unfortunate because working with the land
and animals can be a transforming experience and it is a useful
thing; we need food, we need animals, it is generally a good thing
to do but they are being closed down and sold off.
Q195 Chairman: Why?
Ms Crook: Because they have been
so badly managed.
Q196 Chairman: That does not auger well
for the Prison Service getting more involved in ventures, does
it?
Ms Crook: That is why the voluntary
sector is going to show them how to do it!
Q197 Chairman: I can see the voluntary
sector playing a very important role here but is there not an
institutional aspect? You say you want a new direction of leadership
from the very top and that the Prime Ministers should get interested
in prisons and Home Secretaries should take a different view,
we can see that, but in terms of the management structure, is
there a quality of management that we need to recruit into the
Prison Service to raise that aspiration and give it the expertise?
I mentioned entrepreneurs; is there an enterprise manager that
is lacking in the prison establishment? It is interesting, when
we looked at the number of prisons it is round about the same
number as the number of universities. I sometimes think that we
need an entrepreneur on every university campus. Perhaps we also
need an entrepreneur on every prison campus, if you can call a
prison a campus.
Ms Crook: Coming back to the conversation
you had earlier, what we need is to give a higher priority to
entrepreneurialism as well as education that is within a custodial
setting. I would say that there are some extremely good and entrepreneurial
governors around at the moment. I think that the dead hand of
some of—I will be very careful here—the industrial
guidance is perhaps not as exciting as it could be that is coming
from the centre.
Q198 Chairman: That comes from the Home
Office.
Ms Crook: Home Office and Prison
Service, yes.
Q199 Chairman: You looked very nervous
when you said "dead hand". Why were you nervous?
Ms Crook: I am not sure I want
to point the finger too closely at certain individuals or people.
I think it is an historical problem. Prison industries have always
been relegated to a minor role within the prisons.
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