Examination of Witnesses (Questions 136
- 139)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2003
MS ANNE
OWERS, MS
UNA PADEL
AND PROFESSOR
ANDREW COYLE
Q136 Chairman: Good morning. Thank
you very much indeed for coming before the Committee to give evidence.
I would like to thank all three of you for your written evidence,
which the Committee has found very helpful. Obviously with three
witnesses from different organisations we need to try to draw
your expertise and get through the session in a reasonable time,
so if I could ask for answers to be brief where possible that
would be very helpful. May I start by asking you, Anne Owers,
and the other witnesses from the academic organisations, about
the purpose of prison itself. I would like to start by trying
to tease out an issue that has already come up several times in
front of the Committee. In your evidence, Ms Owers, you have said
effectively that prison itself cannot deliver rehabilitation,
or words to that effect. I think we need to be clear in the Committee
whether we are being told that nothing you do in prison really
has an effect on the rehabilitation of prisoners, or whether the
issue is that what is done in prison can have an effect on the
rehabilitation of prisoners but that also depends on what happens
outside. Three sets of written evidence will give a slightly different
emphasis to this issue, as does the other evidence we have had
so far. Could I ask each of you to try to identify as precisely
as possible for the Committee to what extent the prison regime
can have a rehabilitative effect, and what the other factors are
that it may depend on?
Ms Owers: I would say that there
are three factors the Committee ought to look at. One is whether
there are interventions which are only or mostly available in
prison, but which could more usefully be available outside in
the community. There I am thinking about interventions in relation
to substance abuse, mental illness, or perhaps women with non-violent
offences and small children. There is considerable evidence that
some of those issues need not be addressed in prison and, indeed,
are less effective if they are addressed in prison, because they
do not address the real world in which people will have to live
after whatever intervention is made available. I think the Committee
could do well to look at that. Secondly, I have no doubt in relation
to our inspections that prison can be a place where good work
is done to provide skills and training to those who do not have
them, and to deal with drug abuse problems and various other kinds
of interventions that I have raised in my evidence. Crucially,
if that is to have any long-term effect on the protection of the
public and the prevention of re-offending, whatever has been done
in prison has to be continued and strengthened rather than undermined
when those prisoners return to society. If you have had drug treatment
in prison you must be able to get support for that once you go
back. If you have been given skills and education in prison you
must be assisted to get employment. We know that employment has
a 50% chance of reducing re-offending. Those are the two ways
I would look at prison in relation to rehabilitation. The third
factor of course, and I think it comes through in all of our evidence,
is the effect of overcrowding in prisons on their ability properly
to deliver rehabilitation. That may go to my first point, that
if you could provide some interventions outside prison and therefore
release the pressure on prisons themselves, my view is that they
would be able to do a much better job for those people for whom
they can do a job.
Q137 Chairman: So the issue is not
that prison is inevitably so bad that it does more harm than good
in relation to rehabilitation, but things can be done in prison
that have a positive effect if the conditions are right and if
the links with the outside world after prison are right?
Ms Owers: If all of those "ifs"
are in place, yes; but, inevitably, prison disrupts people's lives—it
must do. Therefore, if you are to do useful work in prison which
has a result outside then the consequences of that disruption
need to be addressed and minimised. I think we need to look at
the kinds of prisons we have; the work that was done earlier on
the kinds of prisons that might be appropriate for women who need
to be close to their families and who need to keep those family
ties going; the kind of institutions that are suitable for children
and young people. We may need to look at a different kind of custodial
environment, but there is no doubt, from what I have seen, that
custodial environments can make good some of the deficits we know
that those coming to prison have.
Q138 Chairman: Una Padel, would you
like to address the same issue? Please do not feel worried about
highlighting any differences of emphasis between the three witnesses.
Ms Padel: For me the primary purpose
of prison is containment. Obviously prison is used to mark society's
distaste for criminal activity, but I am not convinced that it
has to be the answer in that sense as often as it is used. In
terms of containment, there might be a short-term gain for the
majority of prisoners, but long-term major problems; because an
awful lot of rehabilitative work is actually geared towards reducing
harm caused by imprisonment, and that seems to me to be an incredible
waste of resources. I actually left the Probation Service 18 years
ago because I was specialising in working with prisoners from
a community base and one of the reasons I left to join the Prison
Reform Trust was because I felt so angry that I was spending all
my time running around trying to keep people's lives together
while (because the prisons were then overcrowded as well) what
was happening to the people was that their lives were disintegrating
as a result of the punishment of the court, and making them more
likely to be offenders in the future. I do not think an awful
lot has changed in that respect. There are some very good programmes
in prisons. Places like Grendon provide a resource which is not
available in the community, and the people in Grendon would not
otherwise be suitable for community penalties. There are also
good programmes in relation to drugs and other things going on
in prisons but, as Anne has said, why do people have to go to
prison to get those programmes? As I have said in my evidence,
there is a real danger that people are sometimes sent to prison
in order to benefit from programmes, which is one of the reasons
the prisons are clogged up with so many people. While there are
so many prisoners it makes it much less likely that an individual
prisoner will get access to the programmes they actually need.
Q139 Chairman: Could I press you
quickly on that last point because it has been suggested anecdotally.
What is the evidence that sentencers are sending people to prison
to gain access to programmes? It is widely said but is there evidence
from magistrates, judges or elsewhere that they are sentencing
for that purpose? It is widely repeated by those people who do
not like prisons but do we know that it is actually the case?
Ms Padel: I cannot call to mind
any research evidence on that.
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