Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 71)
TUESDAY 4 NOVEMBER 2003
MS FRANCES
CROOK, MR
PAUL CAVADINO,
MS JACKIE
WORRALL, MS
JULIET LYON
AND MR
ENVER SOLOMON
Q60 Mr Clappison: Moving on from
that, can I turn to juveniles—both boys and girls—and
ask Paul Cavadino what the current status of education and training
programmes for juveniles is across the prison estate?
Mr Cavadino: There are statutory
requirements for juveniles to have a certain number of minimum
hours education. The arrangements in practice are very variable.
There are some young offender institutions which have an extremely
good range of educational opportunities for young offenders and
others where the opportunities are, in practice, very much more
restricted. The Youth Justice Board, since it became responsible
for young offenders, has put more resources into custodial establishments
to enable some improvements in the regime, but the number of juveniles
in custody is considerably larger now than it was a few years
ago and obviously with a given number of resources and a much
larger number of young prisoners than we were talking about a
few years ago, those resources have improved the regimes but not
to the extent they potentially could if the numbers were smaller.
Where we have found a significant difference in relation to re-offending
is when young people are provided not only with educational opportunities
but with the kind of intensive support on all of the other problems
that they have which enables them to take advantage of those educational
opportunities and enables them to be motivated to take advantage
of them and because other areas of their lives are being coped
with better they can concentrate on education and see it as something
to aim for. We have a resettlement project, for example, in Portland
Young Offender Institution called the "On-side" project.
It initially started for juveniles although Portland has now changed
and takes young offenders aged 18 to 20 so the successor of the
project works with the slightly older age group. That was designed
specifically for the young people who were most vulnerable, in
other words those with the highest combination of problems in
their background which would make them vulnerable both as individuals
but also to re-offending and committing further crimes. They were
provided with more intensive support for them than would normally
be provided. Over a three year period the research showed that
it reduced the re-conviction rate compared with 84% of juveniles
being re-convicted within two years in the general prison population
to 58%. Because it was concentrating on the most vulnerable juveniles—those
with the highest combinations of problems—the likely re-conviction
rate of that group was higher than the average of 84%.
Q61 Mr Clappison: You were taking
particularly difficult cases.
Mr Cavadino: Exactly. It would
have been pretty well 100% likelihood of re-conviction so it effectively
nearly halved the likelihood of re-conviction. It could have been
much more effective if all the other things that are important
to re-offending had been out there in the community to link with
because there were problems often in getting young people into
suitable accommodation. If that had been more readily available
the re-conviction rate could have been reduced further, but the
mere provision of intensive support and intensive case work on
trying to sort out issues when people were released and follow-up
work significantly reduced the likelihood of re-offending.
Q62 Mr Clappison: Do you think that
could be more widely applied throughout the system?
Mr Cavadino: Yes. We have shared
the lessons of that project with the Youth Justice Board and we
know that the Youth Justice Board is interested in the lessons
of that and has been looking at them with a view to forming its
development of regimes elsewhere. The Board has been hampered
by the sheer numbers issue; it has limited resources and if you
have more young prisoners then those resources do not go round
as well. There is no doubt that that kind of provision, if it
were available everywhere, could make a big difference to the
likelihood of re-offending.
Q63 Mr Clappison: Presumably a large
number of the juveniles in the system have special educational
needs. What specialist provision is there for them?
Ms Crook: None. If they are statemented
their statement does not follow them into prison; the local authority
does not have to provide the extra support that the law says that
that child should have and the prison does not even know if they
have a statement, there is no-one to say that they have to know
about it. The local education authority does not have to provide
information to the prison so most of the prisons do not know.
Then there are children who have particular needs who do not have
a statement—obviously local authorities do not like to give
statements because they are expensive—and they do not get
extra help either. The teachers in the juvenile prisons are adult
education teachers, they are not qualified even to teach in schools.
They do not have the qualifications. Very few prisons have SEN
specialist providers. The quality of education these young people
get in juvenile prisons—with the best will in the world
and with some very expert and committed staff—is still very
much based on chalk and talk and is replicating the very boring
and mundane experience that they have in schools and I do not
think that is always encouraging.
Ms Lyon: You have identified an
area which needs a lot further research. Presumably a very large
number have educational needs but where the research has been
done by the Office for National Statistics on mental health in
young offenders—so that we know that 90% have at least two
forms of diagnosable mental disorder, 10% have functional psychosis—we
do not have any idea about the level of learning disabilities
within the prison population in terms of a carefully worked survey
of that population and their needs.
Q64 Mr Clappison: One imagines it
would be quite hard.
Ms Lyon: Absolutely, one does
imagine that.
Q65 Chairman: Is it fair to say,
from what you have said so far, that the prison system has largely
washed its hands of rehabilitative work with short term prisoners,
whether on remand or short sentences?
Mr Cavadino: Traditionally there
has been very little rehabilitative work done with short term
prisoners, both those under sentence and those on remand. There
has been a tendency to say that they are only here for a short
time and nothing effective can be done by way of a course or any
kind of rehabilitation programme. There have been some exceptions
to that. There have been examples of programmes in a tiny number
of individual prisons which have been running for some time which
have been doing effective work of the kind that I described as
the ideal to assess short term prisoners' needs and to get something
in place not only to tackle emergency needs but to plan for the
future, but they have been very much the exception rather than
the rule. There has been more interest in dealing with short term
prisoners over the last three or four years as a result of, among
other things, the Social Exclusion Unit's recent report on reducing
re-offending by ex-prisoners and also successive Home Office ministers—including
Miss Widdecombe, Jack Straw and the current ministers—have
listened to organisations like ourselves and have been interested
in improving the extent to which rehabilitation takes place in
prisons. It is still the case that for short term prisoners often
very little is done and although there is more interest in rehabilitation
and resettlement in prisons than there was some years ago for
short term prisoners, they are very much the poor relations and,
of course, when they are released they are not a responsibility
of the Probation Service so there is no statutory service out
there for them and any help they get depends on voluntary sector
organisations whose resourcing and whose availability in different
areas is variable.
Q66 Chairman: That is a fairly formidable
list of ministers who have taken an interest in this topic. Why
do you think that despite that they have not made more impact
in the system and if you were in a position to instruct the director
of the Prison Service in this area what are the two or three things
that you would point to that you really think would make a difference
to the impact on the short term prisoners, both the remand and
those on short term sentences?
Mr Cavadino: The biggest single
thing I think would be remedying the gap that was identified by
the Social Exclusion Unit in its report on reducing re-offending
by ex-prisoners and that is that it is nobody's job to ensure
the resettlement of ex-prisoners. People often fall between the
stools of different agencies who may or may not be involved in
working with them. To fill that gap I think we need something
in every prison and something in every area. The something that
we need in every prison is a team of people with the specific
job of ensuring that all prisoners have their practical resettlement
needs assessed immediately they come in, and plans are made to
meet them. That should cover their needs for accommodation, employment,
education, help with addictions, help with mental health issues
and the other related practical issues such as accessing benefits,
having identification that agencies recognise on the outside for
everything from claiming benefits to opening bank accounts. Having
a team with the specific responsibility of ensuring that happens,
carrying out some of it themselves, co-ordinating the work of
outside agencies that come into the prison and are involved in
it, making liaison with outside agencies which can make a very
big difference. If you have a series of housing providers—outside
in the catchment areas to which prisoners are returning, and a
service within the prison—which contacts all of them systematically
and asks them to nominate a prison liaison person, that can make
a massive difference to working effectively with that housing
provider and getting prisoners into accommodation on release.
The same is true of training agencies and other types of agency.
So, a team within the prison that have specific responsibility
for co-ordinating resettlement arrangements is crucial. A team
in each community area with responsibility for practical resettlement
would be crucial to ensuring that it carried on on release and
by that I mean a team of people who would be identifying housing,
employment and training opportunities in the community; arranging
support from mentors for offenders whether they be paid staff
or volunteers; liaising with housing providers, training providers
and employers who have agreed to take offenders but need continuing
support or somewhere to turn for advice (which can often make
a big difference to whether a housing provider, a training provider
or an employer will agree to take somebody on in the first place;
it can increase their readiness to do it); and making agreements
with local agencies such as housing providers for the accommodation
of ex-prisoners with the learning and skills councils and Jobcentre
Plus for the provision of training.
Q67 Chairman: The critical thing
is that somebody must be clearly responsible and accountable.
Mr Cavadino: There are two critical
things. One is that it must be somebody's job and the second is
that there must be a team of people both in each prison and in
each community with the job of doing it.
Ms Lyon: I agree entirely with
Paul Cavadino. This is an extremely good example of the fruitlessness
of imprisonment and the amount of harm it does in terms of the
level of dislocation. The best staff in the best prisons spend
their time, if they can, with the short term prisoners trying
to make up for the dislocation that has occurred as a result of
imprisonment. So they are trying to re-connect them with family,
re-connect them with employment, trying to find housing in the
few cases where that can be managed. Where you try to get somebody's
job like bail information, bail support in a prison, it is not
ring fenced and it unravels very fast due to the other pressures
on staff. We are currently reviewing remand provision for women,
looking at bail support schemes and bail information schemes.
They are incredibly disparate and failing in many, many cases.
What we have is a system where we have 40,615 prisoners serving
six months or less in 2001; we have, as I said, 53,467 waiting
trial and of those there are some, presumably, who absolutely
should be there because they represent a risk to the public, and
we are not saying that those people should not be in prison. It
would be fair to say that a very high proportion of those numbers,
bearing in mind that a quarter—or almost—are on remand
in the women's prison population, we have got it wrong in a spectacular
way. All the things that Paul Cavadino has talked about in relation
to the team that is needed afterwards is needed very much for
those seriously violent offenders who need very careful re-integration
back into the community. However, for those serving short sentences,
or those held on remand, a review of that to see where community
provision could be introduced, where the intermediate estate—which
was a recommendation in the Halliday review but which became rather
lost in the Criminal Justice Bill—could be resurrected and
would make the world of difference and we would not be asking
something that is beyond the capacity of prison staff as things
stand at the moment.
Q68 Mr Prosser: A number of you have
made reference to the involvement of the voluntary sector in helping
with rehabilitation and the Halliday report said that the voluntary
sector could play an essential role in rehabilitation in terms
of housing, after-care and support. Then just last year the Social
Exclusion Unit said there was a lack of co-ordination between
the voluntary sector, the Prison Service and the Probation Service
and perhaps a lack of joined-up thinking. What are your views
on that? Is there a lack of partnership? Is there a lack of resource?
What needs to be done to bring them together?
Mr Cavadino: There are some very
good examples of partnerships in individual prisons or individual
areas, but what the Social Exclusion Unit said is broadly true.
We have a situation in which arrangements are very fragmented
and very ad hoc and even though there is a lot of good
work going on by individual voluntary organisations there is not
any systematic approach to partnership. There have been steps
taken by both the Prison Service and the National Probation Service
to address that. The Prison Service has set up a voluntary and
community sector strategy group—of which my colleague Jackie
Worrall is a member—to try to improve arrangements. The
Probation Service has set up what it calls a centrally led action
network on partnership which is working to produce a strategy
for partnership between the Probation Service and the voluntary
sector. Currently the situation is extremely variable and it is
essentially up to each individual prison governor and each individual
area probation service to decide how far and in what ways it wishes
to engage with the voluntary sector. That is very different from
there being an effective strategy for partnership. As you said,
the Halliday report identifies the need to engage the voluntary
sector in relation to areas such as accommodation and employment
and mentoring if supervision on release or under community sentences
was going to be effective and that remains a need. It is significant
that in order to try to get more joined up approaches across the
Prison and Probation Services and the Youth Justice Services,
the Government has set up a Correctional Service Board which includes
representatives of the Prison Service, the National Probation
Service, the Youth Justice Board and it also has four non-executive
directors. As it happens, one of those four has considerable experience
of the voluntary sector but not specifically in the field of resettlement
of offenders or criminal justice and it is significant that there
is no representative of the voluntary sector in this field on
the Correctional Services Board. Partnership must mean involvement
in planning. It cannot just mean that the statutory services decide
what they want to do and then tell the voluntary sector what they
have decided and then ask for their help. Partnership must mean
engaging the voluntary sector—which has enormous experience
in this area of rehabilitation of offenders—in the planning
and the thinking about what needs to happen, not just approaching
them on an ad hoc basis depending on what each individual
prison governor or each area probation service decides it would
like the voluntary sector to do.
Ms Crook: It does not just mean
using the voluntary sector to provide a service which is cheaper.
I think quite often that is in the thinking from the Prison Service
and they do not like criticism either. Part of the relationship
with the voluntary sector has always been based on the assumption—as
Paul Cavadino has said—that they would provide a service
and the Prison Service would tell them what to do. When that relationship
is more challenging the Prison Service responds very negatively
so that, for example, while we are trying to force the Prison
Service to act lawfully in its care for girls I am not being allowed
into prisons which hold young women and it is simply a vindictive
act by the Prison Service and the managers of the female estate
because they do not like what we are doing because we are trying
to make them act within the law. Once the voluntary sector starts
to be more challenging towards the Prison Service and tells them
that they have to act within the law they then react very negatively.
For example, there is no public interest immunity policy in the
Prison Service and there ought to be for its own staff and for
anyone working within the prison walls, whether they are volunteers
or voluntary sector. There ought to be a whistleblowers charter.
These are closed institutions where there ought to be a public
interest immunity. People should be treated properly whether they
are visitors, family, staff, prisoners or voluntary sector workers;
they should all be treated properly and people should be encouraged
to say if they are not treated properly. That is a very difficult
and challenging relationship that has to be taken on board by
the Prison Service.
Q69 Mr Prosser: Ms Worrall, from
your position sitting on the public sector group, do you have
the same feeling that there is no national strategy, nothing driving
it forward and no means of bringing them all together into a co-ordinated
effort?
Ms Worrall: I think in principal
there is a notion of strategy. The intention of the voluntary
sector advisory group is to develop strategy and the Prison Service
has appointed a voluntary sector co-ordinator to ensure that that
happens. A great deal of work has been done. I think the difficulty
comes in practice much more when individual governors or individual
areas are negotiating pieces of work with the voluntary sector.
I think, as has already been suggested, there is sometimes a confusion
about whether voluntary sector actually means volunteers and therefore
it is a cheap—or indeed free—service. I think that
has an influence on the notion of partnership, that it is quite
clearly not an equal partnership if that is the perception underpinning
any kind of discussions. I think there are improvements. There
is a definite willingness to work with the voluntary sector and
a recognition that the voluntary sector can offer something that
the Prison Service or Probation Service themselves cannot offer
in terms of less formal relationships with prisoners. We are still
a long way from being involved in the planning stage and contributing
fully to the development of strategy.
Ms Lyon: I am a member of the
same group as Jackie Worrall and I can tell you that the Service
has moved in about 18 months or two years to a situation where
at least they have a voluntary sector co-ordinator nominated in
each prison. That is quite an achievement in itself. In some cases
there is good practice where voluntary sector and staff are training
together. There has been some reluctance from staff in fear that
some of the more interesting elements of their work might be taken
away by the voluntary sector and they will be left locking and
unlocking doors. That has been proved not to be the case where
the governor has worked to integrate it. There are problems. One
of the problems I alluded to earlier—like the ever-changing
governor—will mean that, as all partnerships are negotiated
through the governor, if that governor moves on things can disintegrate
fairly quickly. It is significant that the voluntary sector co-ordinator
in the Prison Service is working with almost no budget and when
she was appointed there was absolutely no budget. It has a huge
long way to go from the principle which is now in place and is
a very good one and will make a big difference to the inward looking
nature of prisons. It is actually achieving something on the ground.
Q70 Mr Prosser: If you were to give
the Committee one recommendation to improve that, what would it
be?
Ms Lyon: That the voluntary sector
is seen as a fundamental part of the resettlement of prisoners
rather than a bolt-on.
Q71 Bob Russell: We have covered
most of the resettlement so I will conclude with one brief question
to each of you. If each of you could be the Home Secretary for
a few moments and each of you just give one answer, what more
needs to be done to support prisoners post-release in order to
help them move away from the revolving door cycle of re-offending,
re-conviction and re-imprisonment?
Ms Crook: My one answer is that
I do not think that anything more constructive is possible whilst
we still have so many people going through the system.
Ms Worrall: I think you have to
recognise that particularly the most vulnerable prisoners will
not cope on their own without some fairly high level of support
and that is about getting them into housing and giving them access
to any services that they require.
Mr Cavadino: In the community
post-release the single most important thing is for every area
to have a resettlement team identifying job training and accommodation
opportunities for prisoners, providing support for prisoners who
are in jobs, training and accommodation, providing support for
employers, training providers and housing providers who have taken
ex-prisoners into their programmes or their accommodation, and
negotiating effective compacts with agencies in the areas of housing,
training and addictions and mental health needs to ensure that
ex-prisoners who need those services can access them.
Ms Lyon: I would push on the current
policy—which I think is a cross-party agreement—on
citizenship. I would concentrate on maintaining and shoring up
people's sense of personal responsibility. That would cover avoiding
the revolving door for many and making sure they took responsibility
for their crime in the community and paid back and be called to
account in the community. It would mean that while they were in
prison, every effort would be made to avoid institutionalisation
whether it was participation as an active participant in a programme—peer
support and so forth—as a voter (as opposed to a non-voter);
and outside in the community, that they were actually given responsibilities
and the opportunity to take up work, to take up housing and to
maintain responsibility for their family. I think the way in which
we strip people of their citizenship and enable them to become,
if anything, less responsible as citizens, is a tragedy.
Mr Solomon: I think the broader
vision needs to change. I think the Home Secretary needs to go
back to Lord Woolf's report post-Strangeways and resurrect the
notion of the community prison. The Home Office plans to build
two 1500-bed prisons outside towns and in the middle of nowhere,
the vision needs to change and we need to return to the idea of
the community prison.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
That was a very good way of summing up the session. I think you
have set a very good basis for the rest of our hearing.
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