Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2003
MR BRYAN
BAKER, MS
JILL BERLIAND
AND MR
NEIL ORR
Q100 Mr Singh: Is it not unrealistic
to expect arts and crafts alike not to be sacrificed when budgets
come under pressure? Are they not a luxury?
Mr Baker: I think it has often
been said that that type of thing is a luxury. If you are a prisoner
who has been sent to prison for three or four years and you want
to try and improve yourself and improve what you can do when you
come out, I do not think you would regard them as a luxury. I
cannot paint and I cannot model so I would probably regard them
as a luxury, but I think someone who can paint and someone who
can model would not regard them as a luxury. I think we should
be trying to cater within prisons for all the elements of a prisoner—anything
that will help him to restore himself into society, and that might
be art and modelling.
Q101 Mr Singh: Notwithstanding that
some of these areas can be cut, the Prison Services claims to
have made considerable progress in terms of education and learning.
Is there any evidence of that at all? What is your opinion of
that claim?
Mr Baker: I think you can see
that in the work of prisoners, and you can see that in the attainment
levels of prisoners. My colleagues may have different views from
their own prisons, but there are two areas where clearly there
is a lot of progress which you can see which is in basic learning,
the actual reading and writing. We should be able to use the time
that anybody is sent into prison to ensure that they can read
and write by the time they come out. They go to great lengths
to hide the fact that they cannot read or write and the Prison
Service has now developed some wonderful methods of ascertaining
whether they can or not. The systems they use to do that now—not
only through education but through other prisoners and through
bringing voluntary organisations in to help—I think have
a major effect. The achievements in the Prison Service in that
area are well worthy of recognition. In terms also of computer
work and fitting people to be able to manage themselves and be
able to manage businesses when they come out is good.
Q102 Mr Singh: I take it that, despite
overcrowding and the transfers, good work is being done?
Mr Baker: Yes, it is.
Q103 Mr Singh: Is the reason for
that, that the money for education skills has been transferred
from the Home Office and that it has been ring-fenced; or is the
reason that the prison governors have made education skills a
higher priority themselves?
Mr Baker: I would like to think
it is both of those reasons. Certainly ring-fencing has protected
it. You asked whether arts and crafts are a luxury, if you are
sitting facing a reduction in your budget, if you are not inclined
to the arts you would think "That's one of the first areas
we can get rid of". Ring-fencing has protected, and I think
it is advantageous that it is ring-fenced and the more areas that
are ring-fenced the better.
Q104 Mr Singh: You say there is an
economic disincentive to attend educational skills training. Why
is that, and what can be done to address the problem?
Mr Baker: I think two things can
be done to address that problem. If I were speaking on behalf
of prisoners, the first thing a prisoner would say would be to
increase prisoners' wages because they have not been increased
for a great many years. The second element of this is that the
work within a prison is categorised by the prison itself into
how much you are paid. If you take the prison I associated with
the last time, and I have not looked at for some time, you got
£7 a week if you were on education and £12 a week if
you were in the machine shop. Prisoners are anxious to earn as
much as they possibly can. Their earnings are what they can spend
in the canteen, on phone cards, tobacco and on what they regard
as the luxuries and essentials of life, therefore, they want to
go for those areas of work which pay the most money. Education
has suffered over the years because it has been at the lower paid
end.
Q105 Mr Singh: So we need to increase
what we pay for that?
Mr Baker: Yes.
Mr Orr: This is individual for
prisons. We as a board raised this with our governors—and
we have had three governors and three deputy governors in the
last four years—and we negotiated that education had very
much the same pay as work, so there is not this incentive to go
and do other things.
Q106 Mr Singh: That is happening
and is possible?
Mr Orr: It is perfectly possible.
Ms Berliand: Each prison can manage
its own pay scale.
Q107 Mr Singh: I understand that
there is a wide disparity in terms of funding and curriculum between
prisons. Why is that, and what can be done to address that? Some
prisons spend more money and have a better curriculum than others
and the disparities are very wide.
Ms Berliand: I think it is largely
to do with the categorisation of your prison. I am sorry to reiterate
what I was saying earlier, but it is less likely that a core local
will spend as much on education perhaps as a Category C trainer.
That is at its simplest. It may also be that some educational
authorities just charge more to provide the same services, but
we would not necessarily know that. We are monitoring what is
in the prison rather than driving what we think think, as a board,
ought be in a prison, that is not our role at all. We are just
there to monitor what is in a prison.
Q108 Mr Singh: Is there any cause
to look at options such as the national curriculum for prisons?
Mr Baker: When you speak to the
Prison Service you will probably find they do in fact have very
strict guidelines that they operate for the prisons. Prisons seek
tenders from colleges, and there are differences from college
to college by terms of cost and achievement and what they are
able to offer. I suspect that the levels will vary greatly from
one part of the country to the other, dependent upon what you
can get out of your particular college. I would not want to go
further than saying, I know it is an area that area managers and
governors look at very closely, and governors are monitored very
closely.
Chairman: We can ask for a detailed memorandum
on this issue, about costs, investment and so on, from the Prison
Service before they give evidence.
Q109 Miss Widdecombe: Can we turn
to the issue of work in prisons. You mentioned earlier on that
wages had not much gone up in several years, and the answer is
that they are not wages at all but pocket money. Can I put to
you my view of what I think should happen which is that you work
towards a situation—and I am not suggesting it can be done
by the middle of next week—in which all prisons have self-financing
prison workshops, that real contractors bring in real work for
delivery to real customers, which means you can then pay some
real wages from which you can make some real deductions for victim
reparation, savings, upkeep of families etc. You cannot do that
if you are simply making socks for the prison population, it is
impossible. If you did that, first of all, you would have the
benefit that you would get a lot of people from unstructured fairly
purposeless lifestyles into the habit of a demanding working day;
and, secondly, you would get them into the habit of an orderly
disposition of earnings, which is foreign to most of them; that
you could get them accustomed to doing work which is actually
wanted in the outside world, and therefore there would be some
possibility of translating that into the outside world; that when
the prison workshop started to become a going concern you then
do not hand the money back to the Exchequer but you plough it
into expanding the prison workshop and possibly also expanding
education, because you look at the two things as being rehabilitative,
rather than running the prison. What is your view of that?
Mr Baker: We would sign to that
immediately.
Mr Orr: We do it too in a way.
How the money is apportioned when it comes into the prison is
not our affair, that is something we cannot plug. As a board we
plug that and at Chelmsford we have an extraordinarily good workshop
that re-makes old bicycles and wheelchairs, and the chaps really
love it and they get wonderful letters from all over the place.
Q110 Miss Widdecombe: How many prisoners
does it employ?
Mr Orr: It should employ 40 if
we have enough chaps to run the thing. We have just started a
thing where they are rebuilding and making computers, and they
will be able to go and repair computers. Our current governor—and
this is a governor-orientated thing—is pushing for things
that will be useful and bring money. Of course, doing charity
work, like repairing wheelchairs and bicycles is all done with
the Inside Out Trust as a charity. It is a question of whether
he is going to do these things to bring money into his prison,
or give the prisoners satisfaction.
Ms Berliand: I think we would
all sign up to it, but realistically in the great outside world
it is not a prison officer's role to go round local shops or companies
and say, "How about if we do some of this work?" It
is moving into a professionalism where the Prison Service would
need some professional help. To expect a member of staff to go
out and tout for business, which indeed they do in some of the
good prisons, a) means you have already depleted your workforce,
which probably means somebody is behind the door that day, because
we are so tightly staffed now that if there are not four or five
you will not be unlocked if one person is spending that day looking
for business, there is that element of taking that bum off that
seat; and b) the Prison Service needs to be more professional
to look at better contracts and contracts that are properly monitored.
Q111 Miss Widdecombe: You have quoted
a very good example in Chelmsford. There is also Coldingley, and
there is Blakenhurst, a private prison, which used to have a glass
engravers workshop. What kind of prison work in the generality
makes the greatest impact on rehabilitation?
Mr Baker: There are a number of
prisons which are making double glazing units. There are a number
of prisons doing sheet-metal work. I must be very careful (because
Jill tells me I express these things very badly) not to get myself
into all sorts of problems. It is the sort of work which offers
an opportunity. It is the sort of work a prisoner would want to
go into when he comes out of prison, which is useful, does make
money, and does help with rehabilitation. I cannot, however long
I sit and think about it, consider that filling bags with pot
pourri is going to help a man to rehabilitate and get a job when
he comes out of prison; nor sitting at a sewing machine in Stafford
Prison will help him when he comes out of prison. If he is making
double glazing units, if he is doing sheet metal working, if he
is doing building work in something that gives him an opportunity
to work towards that I think is very valuable. I am always impressed
(as I am sure you were when you were going round) when you go
to these prisons and see these workshops. Featherstone is one
where they do steel work. You see what they can do and what effect
that has on a prisoner and that is what we should be aiming at.
Filling bags with pot pourri is something we should be getting
rid of as quickly as we possibly can.
Q112 Miss Widdecombe: Would you like
to comment on the Custody to Work Scheme?
Mr Baker: I have no practical
experience of it.
Mr Orr: No, I do not.
Q113 Janet Anderson: I would like,
if I may, to turn to the issue of mental illness and rehabilitation.
We touched upon this last week. As we know, it has been estimated
that around 90% of prisoners can be diagnosed as suffering from
at least one of the five main categories of mental disorder. The
Independent Monitoring Boards state that "there is an air
of optimism within the prison service that the new involvement
of the NHS will improve the care given to prisoners". However,
in regard to mental health they argue the need to "find an
alternative to prison for those suffering from mental health problems;
the prison should not be a dumping ground [for these people]".
Is the Prison Service anywhere near to achieving the Department
of Health objective of providing comprehensive mental health services
to 5,000 prisoners at any one time by 2004? How big a difference
has the involvement of the NHS made?
Mr Baker: The situation, as we
would understand at the moment, is that the various Trusts are
building up to doing this. We are being told nationally that they
will achieve a better standard of care. I think that is very likely
in terms of general health care within the Prison Service. I may
be cynical but if I am I think my cynicism is shared by a great
many of my colleagues, that we do not believe that the National
Health Service arrangement with prisons will cure the mental health
problems. It will not cure the mental health problems because
it may mean that in some prisons there will be more proficient
mental health nursing than there is at the present time; but it
will not cure the problem that there are a great many people in
prison who are there because they have mental health problems
and there is nowhere else to send them. That is not going to change.
A lot of those people, very sadly, from our experience are being
kept in segregation units because the staff cannot handle them
either. They are segregated for their own safety and for the safety
of the rest of the prison.
Q114 Janet Anderson: Do you think
they should not be in prison?
Mr Baker: They should not be in
prison.
Q115 Janet Anderson: Where would
you put them?
Mr Baker: That is the problem.
Society got rid of the system where you could have somewhere where
you could look after these people properly to a Care in the Community
system which manifestly fails, and it is not my position to comment,
nor particularly in this arena, and the prison system is seeing
the effects of that failure.
Ms Berliand: Can I add to what
Bryan has just said. There is a also a risk when the Prison Service
is running good in-patient health care services (which indeed
it is in the prison I come from at High Down) the courts are using
good prison medical service rather than dumping on the outside
social services and probation services. It is easier to get a
psychiatric report by sending on remand somebody to High Down
for 28 days for an offence that may not be punishable by imprisonment
anyway. One month spent in High Down is actually two months custody,
but they cannot get a report, or so social services or probation
say, on the out; so they put them into High Down and that way
they get a report.
Q116 Janet Anderson: What happens
when they leave prison in terms of rehabilitation? What attention
is paid to their mental health problems when they come out of
prison, is anything done?
Mr Orr: We are fairly advanced
in our liaison with the NHS in Chelmsford. The mental health units
outside and in the prison liaise very carefully, and also liaise
with people, with other NHS mental health units where the prisoners
are going when they go out. It often falls down, of course, but
there are very definite links between the two. One of the best
things we do in the prison which is quite a new initiative, which
is really a great success but again with ring-fenced money, is
in-patient in-reach, where prisoners are not bad but they cannot
cope; and they cannot cope on the normal wings because they get
bullied and bashed about and end up in the seg unit or end up
in health care. They are put in a day care unit where they can
get one-to-one confidence-building rapport with small numbers.
It has been a tremendous safety valve for people who just cannot
cope with prison life which is very tricky.
Q117 Janet Anderson: If I could just
turn to the issue of women prisoners. We know that women prisoners
commit fewer offences than men and generally have shorter and
less serious criminal careers. They are also less likely to be
re-convicted than men. Are these differences reflected in the
types of rehabilitative and educational programmes offered to
women? I think one of you said earlier where prisoners were in
prison for a shorter length of time it was more difficult to follow
a programme of education and rehabilitation. How much does this
apply to women?
Mr Baker: I think the problems
affecting women, our boards tell us, are greatly different from
those of men because of the concerns they have anyway. Boards
tell us that what they would like to see more is women's prisons
broken down into smaller units. As you say, a great many of offences
committed by women are not those where society would be terribly
concerned they were in danger. We would like to see hostels operated
where the children can stay with the mother most of the time,
which we think is a very important thing. I have never been on
a board in a women's prison but I have spent some considerable
time in a number of women's prisons, and there is nothing worse
than seeing a woman after a child has been taken away from her.
How that is meant to help her to progress is beyond me. If it
were possible I would want to see them operating in a hostel situation
and taught (as is often the case so I am told by people on boards
at women's prisons, but I do not have first-hand experience of
it) how to cope with life, how to manage a budget, how to shop,
how to cook and how to do the basic things which many of them
do not know.
Q118 Janet Anderson: Many of women
are presumably in there for the non-payment of fines?
Mr Baker: There are not all that
many in for the non-payment of fines.
Ms Berliand: Much fewer now.
Q119 Janet Anderson: Finally, you
say that concern for their families and their children actually
stops them addressing their offending behaviour, is that right?
Mr Baker: Yes, because they carry
these concerns with them. The professionals, the Prison Service,
will probably answer the question better for you than we can.
We are observers of prisoners and of prison life. Men's attitude
to family problems in our experience is different from that of
women. Men go into prison and they expect the women will maintain
the house and family and look after all the things while they
are in there. It is not true in every case, and it is easy to
make generalisations, but the great majority are more concerned
about themselves and what will happen to them when they come out
than what is happening out there. Women have an entirely different
mental approach to it when they go in. They are concerned will
the house still be there; what is happening to the children; can
they see the children? When you get examples, because of the staffing
problems we have been talking about, visits with children are
cancelled, that has a dramatic effect on a woman and you cannot
expect her to make progress under those circumstances.
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