Examination of Witness (Questions 1030-1039)
8 FEBRUARY 2005
MR BRIAN
CATON
Q1030 Chairman: Brian, can I welcome
you to our deliberations. You will know that we have been inquiring
into prison education and skills for some weeks now. It has certainly
been an area we could only get involved in fairly recently because
before that it was a home affairs' bailiwick and now it is ours.
So as the Committee on Education and Skills we are very keen to
write a very good report and we could not do that without your
help and co-operation, so we are very delighted that you managed
to see us today. We have had one of your colleagues in front of
us, as you know. You and I go back quite some time. When I used
to be Roy Hattersley's deputy we used to meet regularly on prison
matters in obscure broadcasts on radio stations and so on, and
of course with your long association with Wakefield and Yorkshire
you will probably know some of the usual suspects around this
table, including Jeff Ennis who I do not know if you ever had
as an inmate?
Mr Caton: Probably should have,
Barry!
Jeff Ennis: I went to Hemsworth Grammar
of course in Wakefield.
Q1031 Chairman: Let's
get down to the business then. This is a serious inquiry and we
want to write a good report. We have visited three prisons on
the Isle of Wight, we have been to Reading, we have been to three
prisons in Vancouver, British Columbia, we have been to a prison
in Finland and a prison in Norway so we have not done bad for
a shortish inquiry. We are learning quite a bit. We have talked
to a lot of prison officers in our visits and made comparisons
with other areas. Prison education and skills: is it going the
right way? What do you think?
Mr Caton: I would like to think
that the way in which we are being steered currently is going
to be helpful in tackling the offending behaviour, particularly
of youngsters, through providing the three things that I, in my
experience, find that prisoners need on release. First of all,
they need somewhere to live; secondly, they need the skills for
life; and thirdly they need the skills and the opportunity to
get into employment as quickly as possible. Without those three
areas, in my opinion, it is highly unlikely when you look at where
the vast majority of prisoners come from that they will avoid
falling back into the same ways that got them there in the first
place. My view has always been that for those who spend so much
time with prisoners, with trainees, with young people in prison,
which prison officers do, to have a position where the prison
officers' life skills are not utilised to the full extent and
where prison officers are not actively involved in the various
aspects of education, including social education, I think we are
somewhat missing trick. I was very proud to join the Prison Service
a fairly long time ago in 1976. I joined at a long-term prison,
a dispersal prison in Wakefield but a prison that also had the
responsibility for people who were in the first part of a life
sentence and were serving very long terms. Equally, I think it
would be fair to say that we had a greater input at that time
on the issues of making sure that prisoners were able to hit those
three targets because we did a lot of re-settlement work at that
time. We did engage prison officers. Prison officers were used
quite a lot in giving those pieces of social education and we
were given the time to do it. I think they probably still would
be given the time to do it at a place like Wakefield. If you look
around Feltham and other places you will see that prison officers
are pretty thin on the ground, and are probably not the same kind
of prison officers that I joined with. I do not know if that is
a good thing or a bad thing. I swing around a bit like a pendulum
on that whether it is good or bad to have more academic people
as prison officers or to have more people who have their feet
firmly planted on the ground, who understand the places prisoners
come from because that is where they come from. I am always a
little bit worried that we tend at times in education and skills
to try to overreach the potential of prisoners. I think that what
prisoners need more than anything is social skills because that
is what they are lacking and getting them social skills and challenging
their offending behaviour should be integrated into their education
as well and the best people to do that are probably prison officers.
If there was enough of them, if there were more of them, if there
were less prisoners, if we had more community sentencing, all
the things that you will hear. Some people think they are rhetorical
particular from my organisation but they are not. We could do
more if the resources that we have got were better used or if
we had less people in prison.
Q1032 Chairman: Thank you for that, Brian.
What you did not mention was in a sense one thing that has been
cropping up regularly within our inquiry is if you compare prison
officers here with those in Nordic countries or in British Columbia
where we visited, we have a very short period of training for
our prison officers, and indeed witnesses have said it has been
reduced in recent years by one or two weeks down to something
like seven weeks for a prison officer, and someone just told us
today that 20% of that is restraint training. It just seems to
us that there is a potential for a longer period of training or
better training or up-skilling of prison officers that perhaps
you as the Prison Officers' Association should have been pushing
for.
Mr Caton: I believe that the evidence
would support that we have. Certainly I would let the Committee
have a copy of our first submission to the first Pay Review Body
because it does go into quite a lot of our policies and what we
have fought for over very many years. I do not believe that seven
weeks is adequate for the training of a prison officer. I do not
believe that 12 or 16 is; I really do not. What I believe is there
are two aspects to a prison officer's job: what you are and what
you are taught. People often say that we needed to change the
culture away from those entering from the armed forces to one
where people entered from all kinds of skills and I would not
necessarily disagree with that. However, there was one thing that
we made sure of when I joined the Prison Service and that was
that we were able to have a disciplined and ordered way of life
because without that discipline and ordered way of life in prison
you will not get prisoners to respond to education and skills
training. The other thing is I certainly would like to see prison
officers allowed to expand their potential from day one. I would
like to see the training more challenging. I would like to see
the training longer. I would like to see five days of compulsory
training on mental health which is what the prison officer used
to get many years ago. I am a great advocate of tackling mental
health in prisons. I think I have been in the forefront of putting
my head down and running at the Prison Service on numerous occasions
about the huge increase we have experienced in the 1970s, again
in the 1980s, and since I have been General Secretary since 1999
pressing them again to make sure that our people, my Association
members, are able to deal with what confronts them. Currently
they are not. To try and get a young person to consider education
and skills, to rehabilitate themselves, and to tackle their offending
behaviour, I would suggest that you need to break down a number
of barriers. The biggest barrier that we have got currently, whether
it be alcohol or drug induced, is personality disorders and mental
health problems. We can only tackle those firstly by identifying
what we consider is wrong with the individual and then seeking
to put that right. Otherwise, we are never going to jump that
hurdle and get to their offending behaviour. Despite people saying
drugs and drink cause these people to commit offences, I do not
think we ever really find out with all individuals whether that
is the case.
Q1033 Chairman: You are the POA and I
know of your very powerful position in that organisation over
a number of years, yet here we have very short training and there
is something wrong, is there not, both in terms of what we are
doing if in recent years 60% of your recruits have left within
two years? There is something radically wrong. If you took any
other profession, government department, or anything, if you look
at the 60% of people leaving within two years, either the recruitment
was wrong or the training or induction. Something must be wrong.
Mr Caton: I think there are a
number of things wrong. I would say that to the Committee. Whether
people will accept this from me or not is a matter for the Committee.
We were a demonised trade union. We were a trade union that was
anecdotally believed to be permanently on industrial action. We
were seen as all powerful and dominating. We are seen as a barrier
to change. We were all these things that we have seen in the press.
"20 reasons why the POA should be attacked by Government."
In reality, the reason that we are seen as a strong and powerful
union—and I do not think we are powerful, I think we are
a fairly united trade union, we have our moments of course at
the top of it—the reason we are fairly united in that way
is that we do a job where we are very much dependent on each other
and we wear and uniform and that unites us. What always baffles
me really being ex-Forces and having worked in a colliery where
you depend on people (and I have only ever done those kinds of
jobs where I depend on my friends and my work colleagues) why
the Prison Service never grasps that and tries to unite us in
the way that many chief constables do in the police, where they
stick up for their staff and they become "their" staff.
They have never managed to quite capture that. We capture it and
I think the reasons why we have not been able to improve things
like our training is that mandatory training for prison officers
was totally axed by the Prison Service so there is no training
from the centre that prison officers must do year-on-year to make
sure that their skills are up to meeting the challenges against
them. There is none of that because the Prison Service decided
to scrap it. The reason they scrapped it is that we went to the
Prison Service and said you have got too much mandatory training.
You cannot have this amount of mandatory training otherwise we
are never going to see a prisoner, we are going to be training
all the time. Will you please compact it into what we really need
to tackle what we have against us in reaching the potential and
getting people trained et cetera and tackling the various aspects
of the prisoner population from time to time. Will you please
look at what we really need to be trained on year-on-year and
we did say to them—it is right Barry—that we want
to look at the basic training for a prison officer because that
needs to be somewhat different than it has been in the past. Their
answer to that was to remove all mandatory training from prison
officers. We have no mandatory training now whatsoever. It is
left now to governors to decide at their establishment what is
the priority. If somebody stands up and makes an excellent speech
in the House of Commons and it becomes big headlines, then a governor
will look at it and decide I will do something about that in advance
because it will help my career because this is the popular and
fashionable thing to start putting in, and he will train his staff
in that, I would say at the expense of things we really ought
to know about. So I think that the training and skills that we
are able to pass down to prisoners is very much dependent on what
we are taught ourselves and I do not think in my time in the Prison
Service or representing prison officers, indeed people in high
security psychiatric units, that we in any of those areas are
actually getting the skills right. We do not seem to review the
initial training and the on-going training, the in-service training
as we used to call it, often enough and if we did I think that
prison officers, provided there are enough of them and provided
we had less prisoners, would be able to mirror those issues that
you found in Norway and Scandinavia. We have great links with
Scandinavian prisons. We understand what prison officers are doing
there and in Canada and elsewhere. To be honest, I think it would
be a more exciting and a better and probably a more rewarding
job as a prison officer if we were able to capture those kinds
of issues.
Chairman: Brian, we are going to move
into quick fire questions right round the Committee if you do
not mind that format. I am going to start with Paul because he
waited a long time in the last session.
Q1034 Paul Holmes: At the start the Chairman
said Norway which we visited had one year's training for prison
officers, there is only seven weeks here, and you seem to have
agreed that is not enough for the initial training. Then you have
talked about the failings of on-going training. What would you
put into those initial and on-going training programmes that is
not there? You have mentioned mental health; what else?
Mr Caton: The reason I say mental
health so strongly is that the Prison Service tells us that 90%
of our prisoner population are suffering from some kind of mental
health problem, whether it be drug induced or alcohol induced.
That would have to go to the top of my agenda. I am not saying
that we should be training them as registered mental nurses because
I think that would be a little bit rich, but what I do think is
that is high up. I also think that we have got to be able to ensure
constantly that where we are using force we also are able to back
that up with interpersonal skills with prisoners, being able to
de-escalate things. I do not think there is enough of that in
the Prison Service hence we get accused all the time of over-use
of force. I think the other thing that needs to be recognised
is that we are capable of affecting the lives of those who are
put in our care. Simple things. I do not think prison officers
are great at writing reports any more. In fact, I think they are
rubbish at writing reports. I had to write reports for a living
when I was in the Army. I had to write reports when I came in
the Prison Service. I thought I was pretty good and I was not
because we had people who demanded that you were able to express
your views about an individual in writing. I do not think they
are very good at that at all. I also do not believe that the core
essential things like how you treat prisoners, how you talk to
prisoners, how you engage in conversation with prisoners, how
you keep that distance are covered. I was told when I joined the
Prison Service, "you have got to firm, you have got to be
fair, and you have got to be friendly." You are never going
to find anything out from them—and you need that as well
for security reasons—unless you can use those skills. I
think those skills, with the greatest respect to those who have
spent years in our universities and colleges—are not learned
there. They are people skills and you learn them in the "university
of hard knocks". The vast majority of people that we have
in prison are not the kind of people who you would sit around
years ago listening to Deep Purple with on the floor of a campus
in a university. They are not those kind of people; they are "hard
knock" people.
Q1035 Paul Holmes: So mental health,
inter-personal skills, and report writing?
Mr Caton: Yes.
Q1036 Jeff Ennis: On The NOMS situation,
your trade union proposed a resolution at the TUC conference last
year to oppose the setting up of NOMS which is to provide an extra
element of after care for the prisoner. That is what the whole
ethos of that is anyway. I am just wondering what the current
situation is and why the Prison Officers' Association is so opposed
to NOMS. I suppose it is a privatisation issue to some extent?
Mr Caton: It is a layer of bureacracy
too far. We have always said that we wanted to work closer with
our colleagues in the Probation Service and in the Health Service
and in social services to make sure that we joined up the system.
If you go back two and three TUCs you will see that both ourselves
and NAPO, the representative body for probation officers, called
upon having a justice ministry. We called upon there being attendance
centres, not the old attendance centres where you went on a Saturday
afternoon and scrubbed floors but where we could go, reach out
and prevent people having to be held in prison to teach them and
to put forward the challenging offending behaviour programmes
that when we can do them we do in prison so that we use the complete
skills. So I think there is a misguided view, probably because
the press seem to pick up on some of the things we say and not
others. The output that is being sought by Government through
NOMS we are 110% behind. The bureaucracy and the way in which
it is being dealt with through NOMS we are absolutely opposed
to because we do not think we will ever get there. I know a previous
Home Secretary said to me he did not know why the POA were putting
forward we should have a justice system because the only organisations
that were saying that were Liberty and JUSTICE and he was sure
we did not want the POA linked with those organisations. We do
and we get on very well. This is another myth that we do not get
on well with voluntary agencies; we do and we continue to work
very carefully with them. We believe it is a layer of bureaucracy
too far and we believe there are better ways of doing it than
building an empire in order to deliver something that could be
quite easily done with little cost and by people being trusted
to go on and do those kinds of things.
Q1037 Jeff Ennis: So your alternative
model then is to use the existing structure with some fine-tuning,
shall we say?
Mr Caton: Again I reach back into
history. We used to have a considerable amount of prison officers
working alongside probation officers inside prison. We used to
have detachments from the prison to the probation service where
we worked sometimes for four to six weeks seeing what probation
officers did and they did the same. We do not think that there
is a huge gap between what we want to do together with NAPO and
its membership to that that is being proposed by NOMS. I have
to say that NOMS in the eyes of my membership is purely about
two things: Market testing and privatisation, full stop. It is
not about anything else. It is about privatising even more and
we resist and will continue to resist, at times very rigorously
indeed, the privatisation of the justice system. We think it is
wrong. We think it is morally repugnant, to use Jack Straw's expression.
Chairman: I do not want to get too far
down that track but thank you very much for that. John?
Q1038 Mr Greenway: A couple of things.
Can we deliver education and the life skills for work with short-term
prisoners or prisoners being moved all over the estate all of
the time? Do you have a view on the effectiveness of detention
and training orders and what happens to those prisoners who have
had them post release?
Mr Caton: If I can deal with the
issue of prisoners. We used to transfer prisoners to give them
skills. We now transfer them so that denies them skills and learning.
That is not the fault of the Prison Service. I am sure that Phil
Wheatley, whom we get on very well with, and Martin Narey and
all the people who are helping to run the Prison Service do not
want to shift people up and down the country. We shift them up
and down the country for no good reason really, apart from we
have no spaces, yet by the same token we are actually mothballing
some places in the Prison Service. I find that very strange indeed.
Perhaps somebody would explain it to prison officers eventually.
In that first instance I do not think that we can deliver the
continuity that is necessary for people to learn, bearing in mind
our clientele. One thing we need is continuity with them. In regard
to short-term prisoners it is a waste of time. I cannot understand
why we bring them into prison, only to tap them on the head, put
them in a cell, make sure they get bathed and shaved, which is
a fairly good thing, make sure they clean their cells, and then
send them back onto the streets. It seems to me a total waste
of taxpayers' money and it is a waste of our members' time. We
cannot get our teeth into the issues of their offending behaviour
if they are only there for a short period of time. I think I would
beef up the detention and training orders.
Q1039 Mr Greenway: You think they are
too soft?
Mr Caton: I think they are too
soft, yes. I think actually—it is a big debate and I do
not know whether I want to enter into it—the act of imprisonment
is about causing people to change. I do not think that there has
been a sufficient debate on whether prison is actually punishing
at all when people who come into prison, when you look at their
outside life, better off through that act of imprisonment than
they would be outside. Some of them are given (in part) more freedom
inside than they would on the outside because of their dependence
on drugs, alcohol, the fact they are under threat, the fact they
are severe debt most of the time. They come into prison and it
is—
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