Examination of Witnesses (Questions 225
- 239)
TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2003
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY, MR
PETER WRENCH,
MS EITHNE
WALLIS AND
MR BRIAN
CATON
Q225 Chairman: Good morning. Thank
you very much indeed for attending this morning. Perhaps I could
just ask each of you, for the record, to introduce yourselves
and give your positions.
Mr Wheatley: Phil Wheatley, Director
General of the public sector Prison Service.
Mr Wrench: Peter Wrench, Director
of Resettlement in the Prison Service.
Ms Wallis: Eithne Wallis, Director
General of the National Probation Service for England and Wales.
Mr Caton: Brian Caton, the General
Secretary of the Prison Officers' Association in the United Kingdom.
Q226 Chairman: Welcome this morning.
Obviously with four witnesses we have to get a balance between
getting through the questions and hearing all of your evidence.
Obviously if there are particular differences in emphasis between
you perhaps more than one of you could answer the question, otherwise
if we could concentrate on one person answering the questions.
I would like to start by asking about your assessment of how well
the Prison Service is doing at the moment. You have a statutory
obligation to ensure that "the purpose of the training and
treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist
them to lead a good and useful life". How well do you think
the current Prison Service is reaching that aim at the moment?
Mr Wheatley: I think the Prison
Service is doing better than at any point in its past. I have
a past with the Prison Service that goes back 34 years. We have
got a broad coherent strategy. We are using programmes and interventions
of various sorts that are better researched than ever before,
and we are reaching more prisoners than we used to reach in terms
of delivering real change, of any behaviour programmes, education
and drug treatment; but we are still not touching everybody. I
am not claiming this is perfection; I am saying it is a big improvement
on the position we have been in previously. We are trying to direct
our efforts on to those who are most needy, and those who are
with us long enough to make reasonable interventions. There are
obviously problems with quite a lot of our population in terms
of doing things that make a real difference. In many cases they
are only with us on remand and not even convicted—they spend
a brief period with us on remand and then go out again; or they
are doing relatively short sentences, or they are doing longer
sentences but have spent a long time on remand, a period which
counts towards their eventual sentence so the period with us,
when convicted, is relatively short.
Q227 Chairman: We will pick up a
number of those points in questions. The measures you described
are basically input measures and are things the Prison Service
are trying to deliver to prisoners. In terms of the outcomes from
the Prison Service, you saying you are doing better than ever
before. How can you demonstrate that you are doing better than
ever before?
Mr Wheatley: We have a commitment
to reducing re-offending by 5% as against what we would otherwise
have expected. You obviously have to work out what the rate of
re-offending is on the basis of who we are holding and what their
pre-convictions are. The rate of re-offending is, to some extent,
dictated by who we take in and what degree of risk they are. Early
measures suggest that we are reducing the rate of re-offending.
It is always difficult in this area to be certain that that is
a result of prison intervention or work the Probation Service
are doing outside, because it is a joint correctional service
target in total, or whether there is some change in the pattern
of crime outside which is making a difference. It is very difficult
to measure but, insofar as we can measure it, it looks as though
we are making a significant difference.
Q228 Chairman: You say "early
measures", can you give us some indication of that? You have
a target to reduce re-offending by April 2004 but if you look,
say, over the last three years 2000-03 can you demonstrate a reduction
in re-offending over that period of time?
Mr Wrench: The specific target
is to get 5% lower by April 2004, against a 1997 baseline, and
5% again by April 2006. We are still at the indicative stage really
of picking out trends, rather than being able to point to hard
evidence.
Q229 Chairman: What happened, say,
between 1997-2003? 1997-2004 is a seven-year period, we have had
six years of it, do you know what the re-offending rates have
done over the last six years?
Mr Wheatley: The last advice I
saw, and this is indicative stuff so it is not the published final
version, said that the re-conviction results coming in from the
tranches of prisoners who have been discharged over earlier years
were consistent with us making a reduction. It looks as though
we are making that reduction, but one would hesitate to be certain
until we have reached the end of the period and we measure it
carefully. It is difficult to measure because you have to measure
what the likelihood was of a particular group re-offending in
any case; and the input to the Prison Service changes over time
depending on what the courts do.
Q230 Chairman: You said you are doing
much better than ever before and the difference is significant,
but it all sounds a bit tentative?
Mr Wheatley: It is tentative.
Q231 Chairman: I want to press you
on the evidence as to whether things are really getting that much
better?
Mr Wheatley: We have not reached
the end of measuring it. We are running this as a big programme
with a careful programme management structure and looking at the
data on a monthly basis. The data, to date, suggests that we are
making that reduction. I do not want to claim for certain because
we are not at the end of the period yet.
Q232 David Winnick: The figures given
to us by the Prison Reform Trust paint a picture which is very
poor indeed. I wonder if you wish to challenge the figures in
any way, but the Prison Reform Trust say that 59% of prisoners
are re-convicted within two years of release. If that is not bad
enough, when it comes, however, to those under 21 the figure,
according to the Prison Reform Trust, is 74%. It is pretty appalling,
is it not? I am not suggesting that the Prison Service is responsible
but, nevertheless, these statistics are pretty appalling and there
is a danger to the community.
Mr Wheatley: I recognise the statistics
and they are accurate statistics. We are holding people, because
the courts have selected people for us, who are a substantial
danger to the community; they have either committed very serious
offences or, in many cases, probably the bulk of people coming
in to us have been committing persistent offences. They have a
very high probability of re-conviction. Whether in prison or on
community sentences they are a very risky group. The question
is: can we reduce the rate at which they re-offend, as opposed
to what you would otherwise have predicted from a series of quite
factual data—age, number of pre-convictions, marital status,
do they live in the country, do they live in the city—where
you apply a predictor which does predict very high rates of re-conviction
for this group? They are, in the main, persistent and regular
criminals and that is why the court has sent them to us. There
are obviously exceptions to that, and there are people coming
in for a single very serious offence. The majority of our population
fit in this group, who are very likely to re-offend. It is not
a product of being in prison; it is a product of having begun
on a criminal career and persisted with it over time.
Q233 David Winnick: You are not challenging
the Prison Reform Trust statistics, are you?
Mr Wheatley: No, not at all.
Q234 David Winnick: In this Inquiry
we are dealing with rehabilitation and have no illusions about
some of the difficulties of those people sentenced and how they
are treated.
Mr Wheatley: My view is if 41%
of them are not re-convicted, given where many of them come from,
that is not total failure.
David Winnick: It is not total failure,
but it not a very appealing picture.
Q235 Chairman: One of the things
we have been trying to get to grips with in the Committee is actually
whether prison can have any really positive impact on rehabilitation.
To have a 5% reduction in re-offending over a seven year period
of time suggests that, even if things are not going very well,
prisons are not doing a great deal to rehabilitate. People like
the Howard League have said that "the best that can be hoped
for is to minimise the damage that is actually caused by the prison
system itself". Do you share that rather pessimistic view
of what you can actually achieve in prisons?
Mr Wheatley: I think one has to
be very careful of talking up any treatment intervention as the
answer to crime. I think prison has a role to play in holding
some very dangerous people and some persistent criminals. There
are challenging community sentences which, again, succeed sometimes
in making a difference, but it depends on the input and the number
of pre-convictions and sort of risk that people present even when
they are in the community. I think we can make a small difference
as a result of interventions in custody, which will reduce the
rate of re-conviction. We also do other things. We protect the
public from serious and persistent criminals. Prison, for our
society, is the most extreme form of punishment given for offences
that the courts think must be punished severely. We do all those
other things as well. We do indeed have to be careful that the
experience of imprisonment is not itself damaging. Getting through
imprisonment as a prisoner is a difficult thing to do. Long sentences
are not easy and we have to work hard to make sure that prisoners
arrive at the end of that point intact, improved, not having contemplated
suicide and tried to commit suicide, and coming out at the end
of their sentence with reduced problems and with a better chance
of succeeding in the future.
Q236 Chairman: Basically as part
of the overall Criminal Justice System you are saying we should
have fairly low expectations about how much can be achieved by
prison in terms of rehabilitating offenders and reducing offences?
Mr Wheatley: I am saying for any
of us involved in reducing re-offending we have always got to
have realistic expectations of what can be achieved. We have certain
advantages in prison. We will find it easier to get people to
courses, and have many of the distractions that are in the community
removed, access to drugs and things like that, but I do not expect
us to achieve more than the 5% reduction we are speaking about
and we have to keep on working at that and there will be more
to do. We are not going to see enormous reductions in crime as
a result of imprisonment.
Q237 Chairman: This is such an important
philosophical point about what prison is there for.
Mr Caton: From a staff perspective,
and from someone who has served as a prison officer, my view and
that of the POA is fairly simplistic. If you approach the rehabilitation
of offenders purely from a prison perspective, and that of itself
should be the rehabilitative process, then I think it is a bit
short sighted. I know later we will probably discuss the joined-up
methods we can use but to use the figures to say that prison is
not in itself rehabilitative I think belies the fact that when
people leave prison they need to be looked after, and need to
continue the rehabilitative process. If that process ends, for
whatever reason, if you go back into the same kind of social climate
you have come out of which contributed or caused your criminal
behaviour, if your mental health problems cease to be adjusted
or corrected at the prison gate, if you cease to take medication
for mental health problems, if you cease to get intervention with
regard to your personality disorder, or if you go back into a
community where hard drugs are normal then one should not be surprised,
when you compare those people coming out of prison, that the re-offending
rate actually is not as good as anyone would like.
Ms Wallis: What I would add to
this issue is that the sentence of imprisonment is, of course,
one that is partly served in custody, and for part of the time
the offender is actually released back into the community. Where
the sentence is less than 12 months of course there is no statutory
supervision, although we hope this is going to change with the
implementation of the Criminal Justice Act. Where the offender
has been sentenced to more than 12 months imprisonment then the
bulk of those offenders are actually returned under statutory
supervision, and that is obviously supervision by the Probation
Service. Although on one level you might say that the pickings
have been slim, as it were, that should not belie the ongoing
work that is there, and the fact that in recent years (the last
couple of years in particular) probation and prisons have been
working hand-in-glove to try and, first of all, gather the evidence
not just across England and Wales but actually from around the
world as to whether anybody is doing any better. Is there anything
we can learn from elsewhere? Together we have been trying to build
new tools, new programmes, new interventions and, indeed, get
into different kinds of partnerships with other providers in the
system, like education, accommodation and health, to actually
help us provide the best chance of successfully rehabilitating
the prisoner.
Q238 Chairman: When we look at the
statistics about re-offending we are measuring, in effect, the
combined impact of the Prison Service and the Probation Service,
are we not?
Ms Wallis: Yes, we are with the
12 month plus. Obviously there is no supervision for the under
12 month.
Mr Wheatley: For the under 12
month we are not but for the rest there is statutory supervision.
Q239 Chairman: We will come back
to that in a moment. Could you clarify one point that has been
raised by witnesses? It has been suggested to us several times
that as prisons get better at providing drug treatment, for example,
or in some cases dealing with women with mental health problems
in specialist units and so on, that sentencers are becoming more
willing to send people to prison, or actually sending people to
prison in order to gain access to those things that are not available
outside. We do not have any evidence as to whether that is the
case or not but it seems to be a widely held belief. Can you clarify
whether this does happen in your view, or not?
Mr Wheatley: I have no evidence
that it occurs. From the evidence I have seen—and the Prison
Reform Trust sponsored a careful piece of work by Professor Mike
Hough looking at what sentencers were doing—sentencers specifically
deny doing that. They are thinking, they say,—and this confirms
everything I have ever heard from sentencers, and I include judges
as part of that community—should prison be the right thing,
before deciding anything else, and not whether this person should
get treatment, but is prison the right award for this person and
this offence?
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