Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-503)
10 NOVEMBER 2004
MS ANNE
OWERS, MR
DAVID SINGLETON,
MR BILL
MASSAM, MR
DAVID SHERLOCK
AND MS
JEN WALTERS
Q500 Valerie Davey: In Bristol last week
Lord Chief Justice Woolf came to congratulate those who were involved
in a scheme looking at prolific offenders, and this is essentially
looking one-to-one. It seems to me that there are lessons to be
learned here, that it is this lack of individual assessment, this
lack of individually taking matters forward which leads to the
lack of prevention of re-offending. I think the initial benefits
of this have repercussions for our education style and perhaps
it is that we are looking forward. Is it true, do you think, that
we are looking too much at creating an ideal institution which
would not benefit the individual unless we know what the needs
of the individual coming through the door are?
Ms Owers: I would agree with that
and, as all of us have said, that actually relates to what is
going to happen next. We are rightly critical of our prisons.
My job is to hold prisons up to the standards that we require
of them and on some occasions find that those are not met. What
we have to recognise, however, is that prisons are dealing with
people who have come to prison with a history of disasters, chaos
and dysfunction in their lives, people that the rest of society
has often given up on. We are somehow expecting a short period
in prison, a matter of weeks or months, to be a magic fix that
will suddenly turn them into well-educated and fully functioning
citizens when they go out. It is not realistic. We talk about
a holistic approach within prisons but what we need to have is
a holistic approach to what is happening to people as a whole—they
are people as well as offenders.
Q501 Mr Pollard: Stop them getting there
in the first place.
Ms Owers: Exactly. There is upstream
work that needs to be done which, to be fair, in terms of young
people, the Youth Justice Board is doing, but there is also downstream
work that needs to be done. We are talking about people who have
been failed many times in their lives and in some cases the worst
thing you can do is to make assessments that you cannot carry
through in prison or to offer promises about what is not going
to happen later. That is almost worse than not doing anything.
Q502 Jonathan Shaw: Twenty three per
cent of males and 11% of females sentenced to prison attended
a special educational needs school compared to 1% of the population.
We have heard that there are SENCOs at young offender institutions.
It is not the case, we understand, in adult prisons. Is that something
that you are recommending? If people have all these high levels
of disability, it is vital that people have the skills to assess
them.
Ms Owers: Yes, I would welcome
advice from the ALI on that.
Ms Walters: There is a need and
an opportunity now to provide a structure whereby there are specific
pockets of help within the adult prisons for both males and females.
One of the things that we have identified is that in some prisons,
where the majority of those prisons are short term serving prisoners,
there is an opportunity for a strategy to be put in place which
becomes an elongated initial assessment and diagnostic assessment
centre where you can put this SENCO arrangement into place so
that you are preparing the whole person rather than just dealing
with the key performance targets.
Q503 Chairman: We must, to do justice
to the Prison Governors' Association, move on. There is just one
thing before we finish this session, which has been an excellent
session. I hope all of you will maintain a relationship with the
committee because we want to make this an extraordinarily good
report. It is a very important report to us. If you think of things
that we should have asked you or things you should have said,
do communicate with the committee. When we were in Oslo and Helsinki
something that went right through the discussions we had with
people about prison education was drugs, and none of you has mentioned
drugs, that 60 or 70% of people in our prison establishments are
abusing alcohol or other substances. We saw a wonderful aftercare
service in Oslo that seriously tried to address the drug-taking
problem. Is that not a problem that runs right through our ability
to educate and train people?
Ms Owers: It absolutely does.
Both Jen and Bill made the point about initial assessments. One
of the things that happens is that you are assessing people who
are still coming off drugs in most cases, but it also goes to
the point that all of us have made, that you cannot just treat
education as if it was a separate thing to the life and needs
of the person as a whole. Those will include the need for help
and support with substance abuse and other kinds of abuse, and
family links, all of those things that need to go together. Education
on its own is not going to change people round.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your
evidence.
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