Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 135)
TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2003
MR BRYAN
BAKER, MS
JILL BERLIAND
AND MR
NEIL ORR
Q120 Janet Anderson: It would be
better to have hostel-type accommodation and mother and baby units?
Mr Baker: Yes, I think it would
be.
Ms Berliand: When we are talking
about hostels it is much harder for a women to get a hostel place.
Therefore, when she is coming up to the possibility of being sentenced
to custody or not the alternatives are not as open as they are
for a man. Frequently a woman will go into custody because there
is no alternative address for her. I think that makes a big difference.
We did a survey not very long ago of bail officers for women in
women's estate prisons, and the facilities for bail officers were
deplorable. In my local prison if a man wants to apply for bail
he has only got to ask to see the bail officer who will come up
and see him, tell him what to do and how to apply for bail, done
and dusted. Many women's prisons have a bail officer maybe for
one afternoon a week. Women need to apply for bail and they need
help. Bryan pictured it so well—it is difficult for a woman
to think past that block of "I've got to get out and sort
out my family". They cannot think past their behaviour or
anything. They cannot move forward until that is sorted. We need
bail hostels and we need bail officers in jails, we really do.
Q121 Chairman: Can I ask you about
juvenile offenders. There is one group of prisoners in the prison
population where we produce particularly bad results in terms
of re-offending, the 18-21 year-old males. What is your assessment
of the current state of the rehabilitation and education services
for them; whether they should be improved; and why is it going
so badly wrong for that group?
Mr Orr: I would entirely agree
that it is very, very poor for the young. Young remand prisoners
do not have to do anything. Remand prisoners do not have to go
to work or do education, and they are perfectly happy to sit in
their cells with their television. Once they are convicted then
they should be encouraged, but it is difficult to encourage them
when there are not many things for them, except for these primary
skill courses with computers. The ones that really work are when
you can put a young man in front of a computer and teach him how
to read and write; teach him how to write his CV; teach him how
to write a letter of application for a job and eventually build
up a portfolio. That is where they really shine and come into
their own. One or two I have seen have gone out and one into full-time
education in the university, having come in illiterate. It can
be done but it is very limited and needs more funds.
Mr Baker: From my experience of
seeing Young Offenders' Institutes lately, and Jill is probably
the best one to speak about Young Offenders' Institutes partly
because her daughter was on the board of one of them, a great
deal of work is done by officers now and a lot of progress is
being made, and education is good, but you still face the problem
of peer pressure. You cannot actually be seen to be doing it because
that is not quite the macho image.
Q122 Chairman: Listening to Ann Widdecombe's
questions earlier about real work in prisons would you regard
this as having any particular significance for this group of young
people whom, I guess, will have the highest proportion of people
who have never been in work in their lives?
Mr Baker: I would surmise, and
it would only be my view, that when you get them at the next stage,
21 onwards, and they come into the male prison that is the time
when you will start to have a greater effect on them then you
will at 18 where they are still very conscious of what the boy
in the next cell thinks, and what the gang thinks. "You're
actually working; you're actually going to education. You've got
to be mad".
Mr Orr: I do not entirely agree
with my colleague on that one. I went round the MCTC in Colchester
yesterday, the Military Corrective Training Centre, and there
are these young men, 18 and 19, doing just the sort of things
that Ann Widdecombe was talking about—fitting exhausts into
cars, fitting windscreens into cars and learning how to build
walls, sign writing and decorating, things they can go out and
do at once and they see their peers doing it too and it works
very well. You cannot do a lot of these things unless you can
write and apply for a job or read a notice. They can work the
two in together, but they are actually doing something and that
is what they really like.
Ms Berliand: There is a dichotomy
between Young Offender Institutes—which I think are doing
for the most part some very good work indeed, driven by good officers
and good governors—and the male local which is holding 18-21
year olds. There is this dichotomy that while you are on remand
you are a young adult and, indeed, you go to the adult court.
The day you are convicted you come back to that same jail, to
that same cell but you are a young offender. That makes it enormously
difficult for governors to manage. When you are a young offender
you have to be educated separately and live separately.
Q123 Chairman: Let us move on. From
your evidence you clearly regard short-term prisoners in general
as a bit of a disaster for the Prison Service whether they are
on remand or short sentences. I do not want to distort what you
say but that is how I read your evidence! What should we be doing,
firstly, about remand prisoners that would be different? Presumably
there are reasons they are on remand rather than out on bail.
Secondly, what should we be doing about the short-term sentence
regime to make it better?
Ms Berliand: Can I answer about
the remand prisoner. It may be a need to look at whether it is
right ever to remand into custody a prisoner for an offence that
is very unlikely to receive a custodial sentence when he or she
is sentenced—if, for example, you have shoplifted £2.50
in Marks and Spencer that should ever carry a remand in custody;
because it is highly unlikely that the actual offence would carry
custody. If some looking at was done to that, that might help
remands. Long-term remand prisoners who change their briefs regularly
because they know that time spent on remand counts as double time
and are actually spinning time out.
Mr Baker: It comes back to what
we said at the beginning, we are there to monitor what happens
in prisons, in the same way as the Prison Service is there to
hold the prisoners of the courts sent to them. Short-term prisoners
are achieving nothing in prison but disrupting the service.
Q124 Chairman: They are achieving
nothing anyway. You have in said in some places the management
can do something quite useful. Are there any places that you hear
discussed at your annual conferences where people think they have
to choose an alternative regime for short-term prisoners?
Mr Baker: No, you are talking
largely about people doing three months, or six months, and there
is not sufficient time for the Prison Service to do anything with
them. One of the things that needs to be done (and this is a personal
opinion, and not the opinion of the organisation but it has been
widely discussed at our conferences) is to make community service
acceptable to the general public. I think one of its problems
at the moment is that the general public does not consider it
acceptable. If it can be given some credence then that would be
the way to move forward with short-term sentences.
Q125 Chairman: There was an idea
from the Public Accounts Committee last year that one thing we
might do, even somebody on a six-month sentence, is to start a
course that they could continue presumably at an FE college or
similar. Are you aware of any moves in that direction? Has anybody
explored that in practice?
Mr Baker: I have not heard anybody
say that.
Mr Orr: I can see some of these
young people on our careers workshop are going into full time
education afterwards. That, I reiterate, is ring fenced and the
chaps who are running it have outside contacts and are making
all the bridges there need to be. If I could do that for everybody,
it would be wonderful.
Ms Berliand: They are not being
moved because frequently people are being released in the north
of England perhaps when their homes are in Devon.
Q126 David Winnick: You said the
general perception is that community service is seen as a soft
option. Is that your view and that of your colleagues?
Mr Baker: That is the view of
my colleagues and it is my view as well. The people I talk to
and suggest to that these people should not go into prison but
they should do this, in the general conception of the public,
that is just a holiday.
Q127 David Winnick: That is your
view to some extent as well?
Mr Baker: When you see footballers
who are sentenced to giving 20 hours of teaching people to kick
a football and that has been their life and their love, I cannot
see personally that that is a penalty.
Chairman: James Beatty is continuing
to coach in Beavis Town Primary School months and months after
his community service finished, so possibly there are some examples
which give the lie to that.
Q128 Bob Russell: I would like to
put on record my appreciation of the whole voluntary concept and
so many volunteers in the whole prison set-up, both at prison
and post-prison, and in particular the visitors' centre at Chelmsford,
which I am hoping that the Committee may in due course visit to
see the excellent work that is being done there in appalling conditions.
The prison service has recently established a voluntary and community
sector strategy group. Have you seen evidence of an emerging partnership
between the prison service and the voluntary sector as regards
provision of educational and rehabilitative initiatives?
Mr Baker: Yes. This is in part
individual to the prisons and how far it has developed. There
are two areas of voluntary work which are making an outstanding
contribution to prison life. One is in the provision of people
to go in to help with the learning of reading and writing, which
is spreading very rapidly and having remarkably good effects.
The other two organisations which make an outstanding contribution
that we see day by day in the work that we do would be the Samaritans,
who perhaps make the greatest contribution in the way that they
train listeners and provide help for those who have the greatest
problems in prison. Their work is absolutely invaluable. Prison
visitors spend an enormous amount of time over a very long period
with people who have problems and no one else that they can turn
to. They also help and they are very important parts of the rehabilitation
process.
Q129 Bob Russell: It is obviously
early days but do you see that the prison governors as a group
welcome the emergence of this new strategy or do they think it
is just a nuisance?
Mr Baker: My experience of prison
governors as a whole is that they welcome anybody who will help
the better running of the prison, to improve the life and prospects
of prisoners.
Mr Orr: As long as they do not
have to provide the funds. We had a very good YMCA presence in
prison for two years and it was withdrawn last year because the
prison provided £3,000 and the YMCA provided £3,000
and the fund has dried up. That excellent service has been taken
out.
Q130 Bob Russell: The prison funds
dried up or the YMCA's portion?
Mr Orr: It was probably: "You
do your bit and I will do mine." They decided that would
fold. The Samaritans are very effective with their listeners.
You probably do not know at the moment but at the visitors' centre
that you mentioned, the East Region Families Trust, which is a
charity, has come in with a very, very large donation of £45,000
a year for seven years, to support and increase the liaison between
families and prisoners. That is a very considerable step forward.
Q131 Bob Russell: That is charitable
funding?
Mr Orr: Yes.
Ms Berliand: It is also true that
where you have volunteers coming into the higher security prisons,
if there is nobody to escort them, they can spend long periods
of the day, which is inevitably quite a short day because of prisoners
being behind their doors through lunch and stuff, and if there
are no operational support grades to escort them, then they get
no further than the gate and that is another management problem.
Q132 Bob Russell: That is the voluntary
sector when the prisoners are in prison. Has the voluntary sector
a role to play in providing assistance and guidance to prisoners
post-release? If so, how do you see the voluntary sector getting
involved there?
Mr Baker: It is one of the things
that we would probably like to see made stronger than it is at
the moment. Any area that gives support to a prisoner when he
comes out of prison is valuable. That is when they are at their
most vulnerable. There are a lot of organisations that associate
themselves with prisons that could help—church groups are
a good example—just to contact somebody they can talk to,
somebody they can seek help and guidance from, somebody who will
just go and talk to them so that they have company. Sometimes
they are moved away from areas and all sorts of things when they
come out. There is a great deal that could be done in that respect
and again it should be part of a coordinated programme.
Q133 Bob Russell: We have been told
that more than 40% of prisoners lose contact with families and
friends in the course of a prison sentence. Can you tell us about
the structures or initiatives that are in place across the prison
system to assist prisoners pre-release with planning for resettlement
in terms of helping to find accommodation, employment, access
to education, rehabilitation programmes, so that the build up
to their release and their post-release is a continuation, and
the involvement, if any, of the voluntary sector in helping them?
Mr Baker: The largest area involved
with the release of the prisoner is the Probation Service which
is often under great pressure.
Q134 Bob Russell: That is part of
the system, is it not?
Mr Baker: Yes, but that has to
be the coordinating factor when you are looking at releasing a
prisoner, because they have to ascertain and satisfy the prison
service that there is a proper release plan, that he has somewhere
to live that is acceptable. It is at that stage that the group
that we were talking about earlier, a professional group, could
involve the voluntary sector to say, "This man is coming
out into your community. Can you help giving him contacts or a
job?"
Q135 Bob Russell: It strikes me that
the voluntary sector is more structured within the prisons when
the prisoners are there than it is when they come out. The prison
system seems to welcome the voluntary involvement, but does the
Probation Service also welcome the voluntary support that may
be available? Do they encourage it?
Ms Berliand: I think they work
well with housing associations and those sorts of challenges.
They are looking at any voluntary group in the community but it
is the Probation Service that brings together what is available
in the area of that prison. I am sorry to go on about it but so
many prisoners do not want to stay there because their homes are
somewhere else. That is a very real problem.
Mr Baker: The point you make is
a very strong point, that there is a very coordinated help system
within the prison. When you ask the question and make us stop
and address it, we think: hang on a minute. They are not there
when you release them from prison, so there may well be grounds
for building up a support group network that adopts a prisoner
when he comes out of prison, to help him through that first initial
period.
Chairman: A subject that we will pursue,
I am sure, with other witnesses and the voluntary sector and so
on in later hearings. Could I thank you very much? It has been
very useful.
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