Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
20 OCTOBER 2004
MR CHRISTOPHER
MORGAN MBE, MR
BOB DUNCAN,
MS RUTH
WYNER AND
MR BOBBY
CUMMINES
Q240 Chairman: Do they see you as amateur
do-gooders?
Ms Wyner: Some of them do, yes.
Others are very respectful. I have had a senior officer say to
me, "It is very helpful. Even if the prisoners are just sounding
off about how difficult it is in prison, it helps us because there
are not so many difficulties on the wing." They are very
much in favour of helping the prisoners get different attitudes
and so on, but there is a bit of a split between the officers
themselves really.
Mr Duncan: The right culture is
very important. A motivated officer is more important than an
educated one in some senses. It is their enthusiasm that will
help a scheme like ours develop. I have to say that very often
we do not get much support from the management locally and we
have spoken to the Director General about this. He is personally
in support of the scheme. His argument is that governors have
too much pressure on them already, too many tasks to undertake,
and he does not want to add to that burden. I understand where
he is coming from but we would like a little more support through
the hierarchy in some of the things. Some officers are doing a
magnificent job because they are motivated and I know that in
some places—and I should explain that I am an ex-governor,
I am a retired governor—some staff themselves are dyslexic
and have welcomed a culture change in the approach to education
because they have been able to admit their own deficiencies and
take advantage of schemes that operate.
Q241 Chairman: If you wanted to really
radically change the culture of a prison and have an educational
culture, surely you would need a motivated management and staff
and that provides the environment in which prisoners would have
a totally different way of learning.
Mr Duncan: Governors do have a
lot on their plate and they have a formal education department.
Q242 Chairman: But they have reduced
the training of prison officers to six weeks, have they not? In
Scandinavia, it is a year's training.
Mr Duncan: It was nine weeks but
they had them on probation for a year. The training is changing
all the time.
Q243 Chairman: But it has been reduced
in time.
Mr Duncan: It has been reduced,
that is right.
Q244 Chairman: Do you think six weeks'
training to be a prison officer is sufficient?
Mr Duncan: I do not want to hang
on to this. It is not reduced to six weeks. They do less time
in the residential training centre but they get more support and
training at the local establishment.
Q245 Chairman: Her Majesty's Inspector
at the very conference at which I spoke on Monday said that it
has been reduced to six weeks and they get no further training
except training in restraint.
Ms Wyner: I was involved in weekend
training for some officers at Whitemoor. The officers did not
get paid for going to that training; they were told that they
had to go in their own spare time.
Q246 Chairman: I am trying to get it
out of you as to whether it is related. We are the Education and
Skills Select Committee. If we want an educational culture in
our prisons, what I am asking you is can you just pluck out one
part of prison education, literacy and so on, or do we have to
do a much more thorough—
Mr Cummines: I think you need
to go deeper than this. Some prison officers see education as
a threat because what it means is that there are more educated
prisoners who can write more complaints. That is how they see
it. There are some prison officers who see it as an asset because,
if you have an educated prisoner, they are more likely not to
be disruptive. You have this macho culture that was talked about,
them and us. What I have noticed in Maidstone Prison, for instance,
is that there was a strong move towards learning—let us
educate prisoners, let us build some dialogue, let us break down
the barriers of "them and us"—and it was the old
"bang them up and bash them up" brigade that were rebelling
against the education, but the new blood that is coming into the
prison are more for the education, and I think it was a very strong
point that you made, are the prison officers educated enough to
do that job? I have to do the other side of this now. I actually
have to defend prison officers because I did an investigation
for the Regimes Unit of the Home Officer at Elmley Prison and
there were prison officers going out in their own time to get
information about benefit systems, educational courses etcetera.
The education authorities could have sent that into the prison
but these people were doing it in their own time. There are very
committed staff there working in very few numbers who are working
in appalling conditions—and my members are living in that—and
that is why you have the "bang up 23 hours a day" thing.
If you have a man banged up in his cell, the prison officers and
the governor of that prison have to decide whether they want that
prison to be a university for rehabilitation or a university for
crime because, if they are not in education blocks, they are reading
books on crime or talking to their fellow inmates about crime.
Education is so important but it is feeding back to the staff
so that they do not feel resentment when somebody gets a degree
and they say, "Hold on a minute, I've got this job."
A prison officer in my presence said to an inmate, "I'm going
home tonight and you're here" and he was ribbing him a little
but the inmate said, "I'm here at the lowest point in my
career, you are here at the highest point. It doesn't say a lot
for you, does it?" The prison officer was stumped! What I
am saying is that there has to be equal learning. Also, when I
was doing a course at Kent University with the prison officers
about addictive criminal behaviour and we were talking about why
people re-offend, the officers on that course were given no increment
for going on that course and the skills that they achieved on
that course were not accredited so they could take them outside,
they were not transferable skills, and I think that prison officers
who are willing to go for further training should either get some
form of recognition through payment or at least be given certificates
of achievement. I think they are demoralised a lot. Colin Moses
would be very pleased to hear me say that because I was talking
to the POA and saying that you have to give prison officers an
incentive to do this. Also, the lack of prison officers means
that, if they are running a course, they can be called off for
movement which disrupts the whole of that course and the prison
is banged up again.
Chairman: Thank you for that very balanced
evidence. I will be accused by the Committee of a lot of mission
creep here, so I am going to go back to support for prisoners
on release and Helen is going to lead us on that.
Q247 Helen Jones: What we are concerned
with as a Committee is that any recommendations that we make for
education in prison can be followed through when the prisoner
leaves. I wondered if you had any thoughts that you could give
us on how the work that some of your groups is doing could be
followed through after release and also how we can maintain what
we start in prison, so that if prisoners need both support to
build self-esteem, if they need basic skills or if they want to
go on to do more training afterwards, we can build that into the
system. What are the obstacles for doing that and what would you
recommend? I know it is a very wide question but we would like
to hear your thoughts because we see no point in setting up a
prison education system when it falls down when the prisoner leaves.
Mr Cummines: We are doing something
now with Goldsmiths Colleges and Goldsmiths College is probably
one of the most advanced colleges for this: they have actually
given rooms now for ex-offenders in order that they can integrate
with normal students. There is also a group called Open Book
and it might be interesting to the Committee to have a look at
Open Book. It actually takes people, not just ex-offenders,
from disadvantaged backgrounds and brings them into education
and follows it through. The thing we found with most of the people
who have undertaken education in prison—and I, as a national
charity, am very much offended by this—is that there are
charities taking huge amounts of money from the Government and
not coming up with the goods. They are turning out the glossy
literature but they are not coming up with the goods and the support
systems outside fail miserably. Education does 100% work in jail
but there are not the support systems outside. It is not just
around education, it is also about housing that can disrupt education
and it is about training for employment and it is about the benefit
system which is the most notorious out of the lot because, if
they cannot get their benefits, they cannot get to college. They
are the practical problems we are facing and that it is why it
was imperative that UNLOCK negotiated with the Bank of Scotland
that ex-offenders coming out now have bank accounts in line with
Government policy and we did that because then they could get
their fees paid into their bank accounts and manage their finances.
Once their finances and their housing was organised, then they
could concentrate. In prison, you are living in a false society
where everything is done for you and then we throw them out of
the door. We do not let them make decisions in prison and then
we throw them out of the door and they have to make all these
decisions that they are not capable of making and handling.
Ms Wyner: One thing that we are
wanting to set up are dialogue groups outside in order that the
community can then receive people when they come out of prison
and provide continuing support that involves volunteers from the
community. One thing certainly when I was in prison that I was
aware of is that there was a system of personal officers set up.
I think that most prisoners do not know who their personal officer
is and have very little contact with a personal officer. I thought
it was a very good idea to have a personal officer because one
of the problems that many prisoners have is that they have not
had any supportive relationships or very few supporting relationships.
If this system of personal officer was set up properly, that person
could be focused on the needs of the offender in a wider sense
in terms of all sorts of issues while they are in prison but also
in terms of what happens when they go out and, if there is one
person with whom they can make contact and deal, I think that
is very, very helpful. Similarly, once someone is out of prison,
the Probation Service, just as the Prison Service, is very overwhelmed
but, if the probation officer can actually have the time to work
on these individuals that Bobby has mentioned, then there will
a lot of reward coming back. I think that the one-to-one relationship
is actually very important, having one person you can trust and
who you know is there for you.
Mr Cummines: I think also if we
could be, if you like, a little revolutionary and these things
were put in place before the prisoner went out, such as the housing
etcetera, because I believe that you would find a better integration.
Also, there is a great mistrust from my members towards anyone
who is not from their community and I think that it helps a great
deal—when UNLOCK gets involved and we have worked alongside
most educationalists and most prison officers and the police etcetera—is
when they have a member of their own peer group who has been there,
done it and has come out the other side, it gives them the faith.
They can talk to us. We have things from kids that they would
tell us because of our background that they would never tell a
teacher. It is because we are non-judgmental and they know that
we are no better than them, if you like. So, it is having someone
there to shadow you and that is why we encourage ex-offenders
who have achieved to come back as mentors and train mentors in
that culture. It is so important that their own peer group take
ownership. My members tell me, "We don't want people doing
it for us, we just want the foundations to do it for ourselves"
and education gives them the foundations, but it comes from a
very middle-class background and a number of people do not understand
where our people come from and their very chaotic lifestyles.
So, I think that the educators need to be educated in that.
Mr Duncan: Kent is very exceptional
in that it has a mentoring scheme/support scheme for discharged
prisoners which is unique and very pro-active. The rest of the
country does not have that as yet and you have to remember that
40% at least of all prisoners discharged have no supervision whatsoever.
Mr Cummines: That is right.
Mr Duncan: So, to try and even
talk about support in terms of other problems of housing and finance
just does not exist. NOMS may change that but NOMS is some way
ahead. I know that Christopher anguishes over whether we ought
to extend to post-release but we cannot run before we can walk.
We are not struggling but we stretch our resources to meet the
needs that we see in prison. We would love for it to continue
afterwards but I think there has to be something like the Probation
Service recognising that there is a need for this to continue
and maybe that can be built into the NOMS concept but, at the
moment, aftercare is very patchy.
Q248 Helen Jones: I think we would all
agree with you that what is important is the whole package when
a prisoner leaves prison, but I want to ask specifically about
education. In your view, are the courses that are generally being
offered in prison of the right calibre and transferable for prisoners
to then carry on in whatever outside, whether it is education
or training, because, to do that, they have to get to some recognised,
whether it is basic skills, whether it is further education or
whatever? Is the problem that we are running a lot of ad hoc courses
that are simply then not properly certificated and not transferable
to outside?
Mr Cummines: You are 100% right.
The biggest employer of ex-offenders is the construction industry:
there are 400,000 jobs available out there. We used to have in
prison the old VCT training courses where they learned bricklaying
and plumbing. In the whole of Wales—and I have actually
done a survey on this—there are six Corgi registered heating
and ventilating people earning £750 a day. In fact, I was
thinking of resigning my job and going off to do a course in it!
It is very pro-active. We are looking at an industry that could
train our people. Some of the training in prison is not appropriate
for employment. Bob and I were on the Select Committee for Rehabilitation
and we went to various prisons to look at it and I went to Aylesbury
Prison where they are doing a course in car mechanics. These are
jobs that our people can get because then they are not working
with vulnerable people within the community, so they are not barred
from these jobs. I think that education in prisons has to be geared
more for the workforce outside than for academia. I think we have
run away a little with academia and we have to look really at
what works and what works is getting people into employment. We
went to Grendon and they did courses on enhanced thinking skills
and psychoanalysing people. Warehouse foremen do not want you
going in and psychoanalysing staff! What you need to do is be
able to operate a forklift truck. We have to get down to practical
basics and that is what UNLOCK does. We deal with the basic practical
stuff that excludes our people from employment.
Mr Morgan: We take it as a self-evident
truth that life is more possible if you can read, but we are also
coming up against the problem of following on after a prisoner
leaves prison because most sentences are less than six months'
duration and, of the 75,000 prisoners in our prisons, 90,000 (sic)
are released every year, which shows that they are not there for
long. We are operating already with a number of post-custodial
hostels and one or two of these YOIs which are scattered around
the country, but I have to say that I find it very difficult.
I have asked for meetings with the Probation Service and with
Harry Fletcher because we find we get on better with the unions
than we do with the authorities really. I have a number of hopes
that we will be able to do it but I can see it as a very difficult
thing. When a person is in prison, you have a wonderful opportunity
to teach him to read and cure this problem that he has. Once they
leave, whatever their good protestations of wanting to carry on,
other things get in the way and so on. For those 40% of prisoners
that do have some supervisory element after they leave prison,
we very much want to enable them to carry on and we are trying
to find ways of doing it.
Ms Wyner: I would like to make
a couple of points. I endorse what Bobby said. Before coming here,
I asked the dialogue group members for Norwich what they would
like me to say to the Committee and they said, "What we would
like are courses that actually enable us to get employment. Train
us to be bricklayers, train us to be plumbers, that sort of thing."
Also, I do not think that we should knock Grendon because what
we are involved with in the dialogue group is actually getting
people in a state of mind where they can learn and sit for more
than two minutes and concentrate and so on and I think that Grendon
is working with prisoners in such a way as enables their personalities
to grow so that they are able then to take their lives forward.
There is just one more point that I would really like to make
and it may be that this will feel a little like a red herring
but I think it is very pertinent. Nobody has mentioned the problems
of addiction.
Q249 Chairman: We were just going to
come on to that.
Ms Wyner: Then I will leave you
to get there.
Chairman: It is a very good point.
Q250 Helen Jones: Carry on, please.
Ms Wyner: If I can carry on, I
think all this goes completely out of the window if we do not
deal with people's addiction problems. The kind of courses that
people have in prison are just not enough for the majority of
addicts. Six weeks or three months is not enough. Research shows
that you need nine months to a year minimum, preferably 18 months,
to really help someone overcome their addiction. So, for people
on short sentences, there are some projects in America whereby
people are taken into drug rehab while they are in prison and,
when they go out, their rehab continues and focuses on the drug
problem and they go into a therapeutic community or something
which seems to be the treatment for drug addiction but it is not
a short-term fix. Unless people's addictions are dealt with, this
is just a total waste of money as far as I can see. There are
people in the dialogue groups who cannot get drugs out of their
minds. They may have been on an ETS (Enhanced Thinking Skills)
course or whatever but they are still right in there and they
know that they are going back to communities they were in where
drugs are available and the first thing they will want is to have
a hit.
Mr Cummines: That is 100% right.
If I can just clear up the point on Grendon, I was not knocking
Grendon, what I was saying is that there needs to be a balance
between therapeutic and practical. You are very right but what
I found in prison with the drug problem is that they tend to concentrate
mostly on heroin and crack cocaine. The biggest problem we are
having, especially with the younger prisoners, is alcohol abuse
mixed with drugs, cocktailing. Alcohol is not seen as a threat
and yet the biggest sector of crimes committed are alcohol related.
So, we need to educate, if you like, the addiction services not
just to concentrate on the hard drugs as alcohol is a serious,
serious problem.
Q251 Helen Jones: I think anyone in the
centre of my constituency would agree with you. When we are planning
for discharge, what is your view about what educational planning
should be undertaken? Should that not be part of a proper plan
for discharge with the support built in? How good is it?
Mr Cummines: Educational training
is probably the most important thing you have in prisons today.
It is one of the things that will stop people re-offending. It
is all right, as I said, doing the courses, even the plumbing
courses, but we also have to teach people practical skills like
money management. We have them coming out of prison with their
£54 and they go straight to a Kentucky Fried Chicken place
and buy a big bucket, do the rest on booze and the next day they
are skint and they are shoplifting. I worked in hostel environments
with ex-offenders coming out and the big problem we were having
is that they blow their money because they do not use money in
prison so they are not used to budgeting and they are not used
to shopping. I think that we have to teach people basic skills
of life, life skills if you like, and they have to be part of
a package that is followed through outside.
Q252 Helen Jones: Part of the whole course.
Mr Cummines: Yes.
Chairman: I am very pleased about what
you said regarding drug addiction. We picked that up very strongly
on our trip last week to the Nordic countries where they said
that 60%, perhaps 80%, of their inmates were on drugs and would
go out on drugs and we saw a very interesting Finnish pilot called
Pathfinder.
Q253 Jonathan Shaw: Can I just tag a
question on to this question of release. Pre-release courses:
in our papers, we are advised that Lord Justice Woolfe said that
he would welcome plans for the Prison Service to introduce pre-release
courses and they were first established at the end of 1992/beginning
of 1993 but, more than a decade later, these courses are still
to materialise.
Mr Cummines: In a number of the
cases, it was down to the Governor of the prison. If the Governor
were pro-active, pre-release courses were done but they were done
in a patchwork quilt way. They would look at, say, Dialogue and
then they would look at the Shannon Trust. What they were trying
to do was do it on the cheap. Instead of getting the people in
who were professionals in that skill, they were trying to mix
it up in prison. When you have a prison officer who is on landing
duty and doing all the rest of the things and you are understaffed,
it cannot work. Pre-release courses were seen as not that important.
Q254 Jonathan Shaw: So, there is no blueprint
for a pre-release course?
Mr Cummines: No. There was one
we put up and UNLOCK is putting one together on money management
and all that. We are doing a DVD for pre-release courses to assist
prisoners to do a pre-release course—and the Home Office
are doing a pilot with us—which we will give them when they
go out. So that, if they move into Manchester, we will give them
all the support agencies in Manchester on a DVD that they can
plug in. It saves them carrying lots of paperwork because we found
that they would dump that. It will be in Urdu and also Braille
for people who are partially sighted because we are getting a
number of elderly prisoners now who are coming out of prison and
they have no home, they cannot access the benefit system properly
and they need support. If we had proper pre-release courses, the
prison population would drop dramatically because they would be
prepared for when they went out and we could hand over to the
Probation which is what NOMS is about or other agencies and they
would be able to filter in to that and they would drop dramatically
because they would have that support but, because we do not have
pre-release courses, it means they are not prepared for release
to deal with things like basic shopping skills etcetera.
Mr Duncan: There is another charity
called the Foundation of Training Organisations which does run
pre-release courses in a number of establishments. I can leave
their card if you are interested.
Q255 Chairman: Why has it all gone on
such a patchwork basis? That is what we want to know.
Ms Wyner: Prisons are totally
chaotic and it is all crisis work really and that is the problem.
Q256 Jonathan Shaw: I think this leads
on to the next point which is that the schemes you run are not
nationwide, are they?
Mr Cummines: Our one is.
Ms Wyner: We would like ours to
be.
Q257 Jonathan Shaw: We hear all too often,
not just in the Prison Service but right across the public service,
models of good practice, where it is working. We have heard from
the Shannon Trust that, where you have those enthusiastic people,
whether they are prisoners or prison warders, and I am sure it
is the same for you, Ruth, you need someone as that catalyst.
If the consequences of you good people not doing the things that
you do mean that we have that revolving door, surely that is not
good enough, is it? We should have the blueprints.
Mr Cummines: Charities could put
it together. We actually looked at pilot schemes. That is why
we did not take Home Office funding: because the pilot schemes
kamikaze. If you go up in the plane and it runs out of
petrol after 18 months—they have withdrawn funding—it
is sunk. A lot of people would not employ people to do projects,
because you would only have to sack them 18 months down the line.
So it was no incentive for charities. If you are going to have
something, you have to fund it for at least three years. Why?
When you are looking at the chaos that is prison, it is purely
a puncture outfit. What we need now are new tyres on the vehicle,
because puncture outfits do not work and it is going from one
thing to another. As you said, there is no blueprint to be able
to say to you, the Committee, "Here we go—this is how
you do it". Charities are also to blame, because we are so
busy trying to fight for the same funding that we are not effective
in what we do—because we are all chasing the same pot of
money—where, if the money was dispersed properly and there
was adequate funding—
Q258 Jonathan Shaw: A lot of us are new
to this area, but it strikes me that there is a myriad of different
charities involved in this education. I was recently trying to
think, with a colleague, of what one of them was called, and it
is Pythonesque.
Mr Cummines: But there are frontline
charities that are doing the work, and this is what you as politicians
must sort out. What you need is an inspectorate of aftercare.
You have got an inspectorate of probation, an inspectorate of
prisons, but you have no inspectorate of aftercare—someone
to look at whether you are getting value for money. The bottom
line is no, you are not. There are charities out there and all
they are doing is turning out glossy literature, making it seem
as if they should be in the publishing business and not the resettlement
business. I talk about what I know and I will tell it how it is.
I will tell you straight. What you need to say is "Prove
to us—
Q259 Chairman: One small rule, Bobby,
is to talk through the Chairman!
Mr Cummines: I am sorry. What
you need to say is, "Show us what you are doing". What
we need is evidence, and that is what it boils down to. Not nice,
glossy literature. "Show us the numbers where you are putting
these people out of prison and into employment, and you are getting
them back into a stable lifestyle." I will not name the charities,
but there are charities taking to the tune of £74 million,
and a lot of the work is glossy literature and research. We do
not need the research. We know the problems of crime and the causes
of crime. What we need now is action.
Ms Wyner: But I think that we
do need some research so that we can develop our practice as charities.
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