Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 179)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2003
MS ANNE
OWERS, MS
UNA PADEL
AND PROFESSOR
ANDREW COYLE
Q160 Chairman: I would like to be
quite clear that we are using the same language. When you talk
about "protection of the public" we are all, I suspect,
agreed we are talking about murderers, rapists and so on. The
debate nearly a year ago was whether jailing a burglar was protecting
the public or not. When you talk about people from whom the public
need to be protected, do you include burglars or not? Are you
simply talking about a higher level of violent crime than that?
The debate can be quite confused unless we know exactly what we
are protecting the public from.
Professor Coyle: I would be very
reluctant to give hard and fast answers about specific groups
of people, because I think it does depend on the individual. You
have mentioned burglars, there is truth in saying that when
a burglar is in prison that burglar is not burgling your house.
What the public is really interested in is making sure that there
are less burglaries in future; that there are fewer victims; and
what you need to deal with is the issue about whether sending
individuals to prison for a set period of time is actually going
to reduce the likelihood of more burglaries being committed. It
is not a clear answer, but that is because I do not think there
is a clear answer. You have to follow that to its conclusion of
saying, "Are we going to lock up all potential burglars for
as long as it takes so that we have 300,000 people in prison in
this country, as they do in the United States?" That is an
option we can take, and the United States has chosen to take that
option. We should realise in taking that option that is exactly
what we are doing.
Chairman: I am not sure that one logic
follows from the other.
Q161 Mr Singh: Una Padel, in your
evidence you state that "there is no reason why rehabilitative
work should normally be impaired by the system being overburdened"
presumably you mean overcrowded. What do you mean by that statement?
Ms Padel: I think what I meant
was that not all prisons are overcrowded. I do think that there
are knock-on effects on all prisons from overcrowding, because
people move through them more quickly; or perhaps the sort of
person who ends up being sent to some of the lower security prisons
is slightly more demanding then they perhaps normally can deal
with. All those things have been said in the past. Just because
a prison is full should not mean that it cannot do what it is
supposed to do. It is when it is overcrowded that the problems
really kick in.
Q162 Mr Singh: Are you saying there
are problems within prisons which are not overcrowded in terms
of the delivery of education and rehabilitation programmes?
Ms Padel: Yes, I am sure there
are. I think there are a number of problems. We know that sometimes
prisons have found it very hard to recruit decent teachers. Sometimes
inspections of prison education have revealed that it is not what
it should be. We know there simply are not enough places on an
awful lot of courses and programmes in prisons. Yes, I think that
is the case.
Q163 Mr Singh: Previous witnesses
have identified administrative problems such as the failure of
records to follow the prisoner on transfer. Is that administrative
problem due to overcrowding, or is overcrowding being used as
an excuse for administrative failures?
Professor Coyle: I can answer
some of those questions from my practical experience. The answer
to your question about education and other services is, yes, there
are problems which are not related to overcrowding; because prisons,
of their nature, are not places of education; they are places
of coercion and deprivation of liberty. The education and the
other programmes which are delivered are delivered despite that
environment, not because of it. The answer to your question is,
yes, there is an inherent problem in delivering all these rehabilitative
resources in a prison setting. That is then compounded by issues
to do with overcrowding which may mean, for example, prisoners
moving at very short notice from one prison to another. I notice
in reading the previous evidence that you raised the issue specifically
of medical records. Yes, I know from my time at Brixton Prison
that prisoners would leave Brixton in the morning without us knowing
whether they were coming back to Brixton, they would then go to
Wormwood Scrubs, Swaleside or Manchester and their medical records
would be left in Brixton. I would suspect that that problem has
been compounded by the overcrowding which we now experience, rather
than administrative.
Ms Owers: I would say that the
answer to your question is both. We come across prisons who are
not managing the resources they have as well as they could. They
are not, for example, unlocking prisoners at the right time to
make sure they get to education on time, so you are slicing off
bits at both ends of the day. They are not being creative enough
in using the opportunities that they have and in ensuring that
those opportunities for work, for example, will provide skills.
I think I have said in my evidence to you that when we were compiling
the material for the Annual Report, which is not yet published,
we inspected 19 training prisons whose functions should be focused
on training; and only in five of those did we find that there
was actually enough of the right kind of education and training
happening. We found those that were managing those resources well,
and those that were managing less well. However, I think all prisons
are managing in the context of the difficulties caused by overcrowding.
When you look at local prisons, which are the ones where the short-term
prisoners we have all spoken about this morning will all serve
all or the best part of their sentence, I have not recently inspected
a local prison which is managing to do much more than what I would
call "humane containment" at best—sometimes it
is not even very humane—because of the churn of prisoners
through the prison. I quoted Leeds Prison in my evidence, which
is 60% above its certified normal accommodation and that is common,
and training prisons that are receiving people much earlier in
the sentence, before their sentences have been planned and who
may then be moving around. It is basically making it much more
difficult to manage but there are certainly management issues
involved.
Q164 Mr Singh: In your written submissions,
you say that in spite of additional resources, the gap between
the number of prisoners and the spaces available are making it
very difficult to provide sufficient positive activity for enough
prisoners. What can you do to counteract or alleviate that problem?
Ms Owers: I do not think there
is a simple answer, except the portfolio of things that we have
all been talking about this morning. The point is, when you expand
prisons, and it is training prisons in particular where the numbers
are being expanded really quite dramatically, you are always going
to face a differential between the space you have got to house
people and the space, resource, trainers and teachers that you
have got to provide them with skills. Almost invariably the people
arrive before the resources do anyway so that you are playing
catch-up. Even with that, it is going to be incredibly difficult,
and it will be extremely difficult with any government, to persuade
the Treasury to release the kind of resources that you might need
really to properly train and skill-up the numbers of people we
have got in prisons at the moment. That is why, like the other
witnesses this morning, we need to look at alternative interventions
for those people who do not need to be there.
Q165 Mr Singh: In your experiences,
is overcrowding having an impact on staff sickness levels, on
their morale and on their will to carry out educational and rehabilitative
programmes?
Ms Owers: I think it is certainly
impacting on stress levels of staff within prisons. As I said,
even providing a safe and decent environment, which is the bottom
line, can be incredibly difficult if you are looking at a reception
area where prisoners are arriving until late in the night. Leeds
Prison, to quote an example, was settling in 436 new prisoners
a month. That is a task in itself, and the rise in suicides within
prison is one testimony to that. Undoubtedly the stress on staff
is greater. The thing that concerns me, and I think concerns the
Prison Service, is that stress on the good staff is the greatest.
If your idea of turning up to work in the morning is you simply
want an easy life and want to lock people behind a door for 23
hours a day then, sadly there are prisons in our prison system
where that will be precisely what you can do. If actually you
want to do more then the pressure of overcrowding is making that
more difficult. I do not think it is so directly affecting what
you call the "will" to do education and training, partly
because that is actually being delivered increasingly by educationalists
and trainers, and that is where I see a lot of commitment and
very positive work happening but under a lot of stress.
Q166 Mr Singh: In the last four or
five years we have seen 44 prisons have a change of governorship.
Is that normal or unusual? What impact does that have on training
and educational programmes?
Ms Owers: It can have quite a
dramatic effect because governors can have particular programmes
or relationships with organisations outside and particular areas
of work that they want to develop. Yes, you are right, a change
in governors is fairly dramatic. I have been in my job for less
than 2½ years now and I have been in my job longer than over
90 governing governors of prisons. The change round is actually
very dramatic.
Q167 Mr Singh: We have a huge number
of transfers in our prison system. 60,000 prisoners have been
transferred in the last year or so, which is absolutely flabbergasting.
I presume that has a huge impact on rehabilitative and training
programmes. Can you assess that effect? If this is going to continue
is there any way we can minimise the impact of transfers on education
programmes?
Ms Owers: You are right that transfers
do have a huge effect. They can mean that people cannot get the
prison which has the programme they need, or that they are transferred
away from a prison before they have a chance even to start or
are in the middle of a programme they need. It also means that,
in terms of the work we have all been talking about of rehabilitating
or, as Andrew Coyle said, habilitating prisoners, if they are
held far away from home that task is much more difficult. I do
not think it is always managed as well as it could be. I do recognise
that the pressure on the front end of the prison system at the
moment means that the pressure on managers and those managing
the population is to find spaces, but it does have a very damaging
effect. I think we need to look at it more from a regional area
focus. I have seen young men, for example, in Ashfield Young Offender
Institution literally waking up in the morning shaking with fear
in case there is going to be a knock on the door and they are
going to be removed to another prison that they do not want to
go to. That has a subtle undermining effect too. It means that
building up relationships, and having confidence in a programme
is diminished because all the time you are looking over your shoulder
wondering where you may be moved to next.
Q168 Mr Singh: I am interested in
why we have such a high level of transfers. What is the reason?
I can understand sending someone to the nearest prison as a holding
measure, but with transfers on top of that, to me, the system
seems quite chaotic?
Ms Owers: It is, but it is partly
because people are having to move in order to accommodate what
is going on at the front end; and also because in parts of the
prison system—women's prisons, young offender institutions
and so on—there are relatively few of them and the movements
can be fairly dramatic. You may be moving someone to the nearest
prison and from there to the next one and the next one in a process
that is a bit like dominoes.
Professor Coyle: I think one of
the regrets about the Prison Service in recent years is that it
has given the impression that they can cope, and we have seen
the numbers going up almost inexorably with the feeling that the
prison system can cope, but I am not sure it actually can cope.
We use euphemistic words like "operational capacity",
whereas what we really mean is a "safe overcrowding level".
Operational capacity is not the actual number of places you have
got but how many beds you can squeeze in. What that does not take
account of is the pressure on the kitchen, the pressure on the
visits, the pressure on reception and all the other activities
in a prison. That is what contributes to the increase in moving
prisoners around, as the Chief Inspector said. If two prisoners
are released from Preston today and another two extra prisoners
come to Wandsworth then the two beds are at Preston and not in
Wandsworth, and you have this domino effect down the line.
Q169 Chairman: Could I just stop
you there. I think the Committee is getting the impression that
if you have two beds in Preston and two prisoners come into Wandsworth,
that somehow about 20 prisoners move all round the country in
order to fill the ones in Preston. If it was as simple as going
to Preston we might understand. Could you say a little bit more
about why there is such a knock-on effect around the system? I
am sure there is a very good answer, and I think it would be very
useful if we understood that.
Professor Coyle: There is an answer
but I am not sure it is a very good one, Chairman. There is a
dedicated group in prison headquarters whose job is to make sure
that every prisoner has a bed each night, that is the overriding
priority. So clearly it is not dealing with my simplistic example
of two prisoners in Preston, it is dealing with 138 prisons with
all of this going on. You cannot divorce this from the way the
court system operates. The decision about moving these prisoners
back from court to prison is probably not made until late in the
afternoon and then everyone has got to swing into action and say
where are the beds, who is going to be released tomorrow morning
etc. So there are all these different elements in the equation.
Sometimes, unfortunately, it does mean that you have 20 moves
in order to fill these two places.
Ms Owers: The other thing is that
although there may be 1,000 people in the prison, only a proportion
of those in a local prison will be sentenced. The remand prisoners
have to be kept in that local prison because they have to be near
the court at which they are going to have to appear. The proportion
of prisoners that you can move is precisely those who you could
do most work with, the convicted prisoners who may be a minority
of prisoners in some prisons, but they are the only ones that
you have got the flexibility to move.
Q170 Chairman: Is it the case that
the Prison Service, with honourable exceptions like Canterbury,
have largely given up on doing anything with their short-term
prisoners? Chief Inspector, you said that the prisons where short-term
prisoners are held are struggling to provide the basics of decency
and safety let alone purposeful activity and rehabilitation. Is
that a reflection not just of what is happening but a general
sense in the Prison Service that they cannot be expected to do
any more than that?
Ms Owers: I do not think that
is strictly true, no. I do see prisons and whole areas of the
Prison Service trying to provide something better for their short-term
prisoners, trying to ensure that re-settlement, rehabilitation
starts at reception, that a custody plan is drawn up trying to
link in with the local area even though they do not have to do
a sentence plan for anyone who is serving less than a year. There
is a lot of work going on with voluntary organisations but that
is becoming more difficult. I think re-settlement in some ways
is better developed in local prisons now than purposeful activity—actually
being able to provide skills and education. Local prisons are
trying to focus on that but our reports over and over again find
that the deficits that exist are the deficits in purposeful activity
and sometimes in being able to do effective re-settlement work.
I do not think it means the Prison Service has given up on it
because there is a strong commitment in some areas.
Q171 Chairman: There has been the
suggestion, mainly coming from an NAO Report, that short-term
prisoners should commence courses in custody and complete them
in the community. When Custody Plus comes in that should become
the norm in many cases. When you were talking about Custody Plus
earlier you were pretty sceptical about whether that would work.
Is that because the policy is badly designed or just because your
experience is that no one will actually manage to get it together
and organise a proper system so that there is a programme in prison
that is followed through in the community?
Ms Padel: I think it is a bit
of both. I think there is a lack of synergy at the moment between
the Prison Service and the Probation Service, the same programmes
are not necessarily available in the community as in prisons,
different programmes are available in different areas of the country
and different programmes are run at different prisons, so it would
be quite difficult to manage that at the moment and there simply
are not the resources at the moment as well, I think that is the
thing.
Q172 Chairman: If any of the witnesses
were to suggest one thing that the Committee could recommend that
would make a significant difference to the approach that is taken
to short-term prisoners, both remand and convicted prisoners,
what would it be?
Professor Coyle: First of all
to have less of them.
Q173 Chairman: Let us rule that one
out. The Committee has heard all the evidence that has been made
about sentencing policy when the Criminal Justice Bills goes through
and it is therefore faced with the problem we have got at the
moment. What is the one thing that we should be pressing for when
we report that will make a significant difference to what everybody
agrees is a major problem in the prison system?
Professor Coyle: Structurally
it is very difficult for prisons to deliver programmes which will
reduce re-offending, that is not really the purpose of the prison
system. What it can do particularly in terms of short-term prisoners
is use the time that they are in prison to introduce them to the
resources that exist in the community which might make it less
likely that they will commit crime in the future.
Ms Owers: I think I would like
to get back to some of the debates that were happening before
the over-crowding crisis in its present form hit the Prison Service,
which is to look at alternative models of dealing with people,
holding people in different kinds of custodial environment or
within the community and for those to be available to sentencers
and not necessarily, as Andrew Coyle said, run through criminal
justice but through other means. If we do not crack that, if we
do not provide alternative places where people can get the kind
of intensive supervision and treatment they may need and places
which can provide that support once they leave then we are in
that circle and that circle will not be broken.
Ms Padel: I agree with both points,
but I think the third thing that I would say is that prisoners
must be kept close to home, short-term prisoners particularly
so that they are able to make use of the community resources and
maintain their family links or any links in the community they
may have. I think any approach with short-term prisoners needs
to look at what they have going for them already and maximise
that. All too often, as I have said in my evidence, visits and
family ties are given very low priority. Prisons are very bad
at doing things like making sure that booking lines operate well
for visits. The few positive things that some prisoners have got
in their lives are fundamentally disrupted by the process of imprisonment
and then they are much more likely to go out homeless.
Q174 David Winnick: In the evidence
which has been given to us by the Howard League and other organisations
like the Prison Reform Trust the emphasis is on the fact that
part of the obvious problem is that people go into prison who
should not be in prison and you have touched on that, Professor
Coyle. Do you believe that to a large extent people are going
into prison who otherwise could be treated by alternative means
for the offences they have committed and been convicted of?
Ms Owers: I think I pointed to
two classes of people in one of my earlier interventions who are
in prison in many cases because of the absence of effective alternatives
elsewhere. Those are people with mental illness, of whom there
are many in our prisons and where the closure of the large mental
hospitals, as Martin Narey said, has led to care in custody rather
than care in the community and those needing treatment for substance
abuse problems (including alcohol abuse which is rather poorly
dealt with at the moment) and for whom it is not clear that even
if the prison system detoxifies them and gives them some kind
of treatment they will actually be able to manage those problems
once they return to the place from which they came with all the
temptations and lifestyles that that will involve. So I certainly
think that we need to look at different kinds of interventions.
In my view that would be more effective than simply sending people
to prison. Undoubtedly prisons are doing some good work and I
think undoubtedly they are doing better work than they were a
few years ago. However, there is the real danger that, because
of that, people will be sent to prison to have good done to them
in circumstances where that work could be done elsewhere.
Q175 David Winnick: Professor Coyle,
you have 25 years experience in the Prison Service as well as
your academic work. Do you feel we could drastically cut the number
of people in prison and at the same time make sure that those
who have offended are punished?
Professor Coyle: I will make two
quick comments, if I may, Mr Winnick, one as an academic, which
is that we have roughly twice as many people in prison as many
Continental countries and I do not know why that is so. I do not
think it is because people in this country are more criminal,
nor do I think that people in this country feel more safe as a
result. Secondly, putting on my former prison governor hat and
particularly the last six years I spent as governor of Brixton.
Before that all my experience was with high security prisons where
there really was no debate that the people who were in prison
needed to be there and needed to be managed decently and humanely.
The biggest thing that struck me when I went to Brixton was that
a significant proportion of people by any measure really did not
need to be there. There were 300 prisoners in what was then known
as F-Wing who were by any measure mentally disordered prisoners
and they were there because there was nowhere else in the system
to put them and I think Brixton was not alone in that.
Ms Padel: I agree with what both
the others have said. I think part of our problem is that short-term
prison sentences are a matter of last resort, but they seem to
be reaching the last resort more quickly because everything seems
to have moved up-tariff. The Probation Service is now supervising
many offenders who have far lower risk of re-offending and far
less danger than previously and low level penalties like the Conditional
Discharge are hardly used and I think we need to pull it back
again and re-balance it a bit so that the people who are going
into prisons are the ones who should be there.
Q176 Miss Widdecombe: Could I ask
you in answering these questions to address the world as it is
rather than the world as you might like it to be. There are 74,000
people in prison and the question is how you deploy the days for
those people in prison and what good it might do. Do you agree
that the majority of people who come into prison are either illiterate
or innumerate or they are very poorly qualified, quite often with
no qualifications at all? In addition to that, do you agree that
an awful lot of them come from unstructured and disorderly backgrounds
where they have never seen the pattern of a modestly successful
lifestyle around them, to whom order and structure and aspiration
are foreign concepts and the sort of daily approach that the rest
of the world takes for granted has just never been inculcated,
is absent? If you do agree with that, do you agree that what we
should be doing in our prisons is having structured days and particularly
inculcating the habit of work when in fact there is very little
work in our prisons? If you take Coldingley out of the equation
and you look at most other prisons, there is certainly insufficient
work for every prisoner to be doing a full working day. Such work
that there is is largely purposeless though not entirely and because
it does not come in from real contractors for delivery to real
customers it is not paid for, it is just pocket money supported
and it is also, therefore, a drain on the taxpayer because it
is not paying for itself. If you accept that, the third proposition
is that what we should be doing is having full working days—and
this is not something you can do by the middle of next week but
it is what we should be working towards—for all prisoners
on work supplied by real contractors and for delivery to real
customers so that we can pay some real wages and make some real
deductions for the upkeep of families, savings and victim repatriation
so that you inculcate not only the habit of a structured day in
the outside world but that you also inculcate the habits of an
orderly disposition of earnings at least at a very basic level.
Comment!
Ms Owers: Can I break that up
into some bite size chunks, if I may. First of all, yes, of course
I agree that most of the people coming into prisons have literacy
and numeracy standards well below that which is required in the
workplace. It is around 70% of people coming into prisons that
have literacy and numeracy levels below Level 2, which is generally
regarded as the employability level; and that is very much connected
with the fact that a great majority of them have been excluded
from school or have truanted from school. So I think that one
of the things that prisons have been doing much more of and certainly
should continue to do is to provide the education that makes good
some of those deficits and provides some of those skills. I also
agree with you that the majority of short-term prisoners coming
into local prisons have come from chaotic lifestyles in which
there has been little order, little trust and little by way of
social relationships. I think it was Andrew Coyle who said earlier
that they are not habilitated people in the first place and certainly
the structured environment that can be provided in a prison and
which I would argue could be provided in another kind of environment
too is very important in order to restructure those lives. I have
seen prisons which get close to a working day, not just Coldingley.
I have also seen prisons which are quite well resourced in the
system, such as some of our dispersal prisons, which do not get
anywhere near that. There are also some prisons that have tried
quite ingeniously to stretch what they have at least to get as
close as they can, for example a prison which has gone to the
local comprehensive school and worked out how it structures its
timetable and decided that by stretching the resources they have
got they can provide four full working days for prisoners and
on the other day they can do visits and meet their probation officers
and other things. So at least you provide an eight to four experience
and get prisoners out of their cells to do that. I agree with
you that the more that we can move towards that model the better,
but what I would also want to inject into your equation as well
as work is the acquisition of skills, it is making sure wherever
possible that the work that prisoners are engaged in, whether
it is cleaning or laundry or whether it is something like bricklaying
and carpentry and so on and so forth, carries with it the possibility
of acquiring the National Vocational Qualifications which employers
will be looking for when those prisoners leave.
Q177 Miss Widdecombe: Could I ask
perhaps Professor Coyle to comment on what he has seen of working
regimes in other countries in prisons?
Professor Coyle: There is no argument
with the first premise of your presentation because the evidence
is there from the Social Exclusion Unit, it is there from the
Prison Service itself, Martin Narey trumpeted loud and clear what
needed to be done and of course prisons which by and large hold
young men should be places of activity. We talk about the Prison
Service reaching 24 hours a week activity, that is three and a
half hours a day, but that means twenty and a half hours a day
locked up in a cell. Whether you can actually reach your vision
in the prison setting is questionable, but I wish we could. The
evidence in respect of most other countries which do it well is
that those countries which do it best are those which have smaller
prisons linked to their communities and with strong links not
only to the social and other services but to employment and other
resources in the community. I am thinking of countries like Sweden
where they have a strong link with companies like Ikea, where
much of the furniture that one buys from Ikea has been made by
prisoners in Sweden or Finland. There are examples of where it
does work, but it will not work in isolation, it will only work
if that is what the ethos of the system is and that is not the
ethos that we have in this country.
Q178 Miss Widdecombe: I am glad to
know that when we had all those Ikea chairs at the Tory Party
Conference we were supporting the prisoners of Sweden. Could I
ask you to comment on the German system? Have you studied it?
Professor Coyle: Yes. Germany
is usually quoted as an example when one talks about work in prisons.
If I may say so, that is largely because some academics in Germany
have written about prison labour. It is actually quite difficult
to get an overview of the German system because it is a federal
system based on the Länder and each state has quite different
systems. I anticipated you might ask this question this morning
and last night I looked up the latest evidence that we have of
what goes on in Germany and I think the best one can say is that
it is very patchy. I would find it difficult—and I have
some good contacts in Germany—to hold the German model up
as an example. Where it does succeed is along the lines I have
mentioned before about those small prisons which are linked to
the community and which have links to employment and other facilities.
There are some patches where it delivers better.
Q179 Miss Widdecombe: I do not want
to go through each country in turn, but could I ask you to comment
on one other country which is Switzerland?
Professor Coyle: It is not a country
which immediately springs to mind again in this respect because
again it is a cantonal system, there is no national prison system
and this may be a lesson for us. Each canton has its own prison
system, although it has a relatively low number of prisoners.
I think another feature of the Swiss system is that an unduly
high proportion of prisoners are foreign prisoners. I would be
very happy to go away and do some research, but I am not sure
if Switzerland looms large in this area.
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