Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2003
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY, MR
PETER WRENCH,
MS EITHNE
WALLIS AND
MR BRIAN
CATON
Q280 Bob Russell: I will move on,
if I may. What is being done to challenge the high levels of staff
sickness and low levels of staff morale? After you have answered
that one, I will ask Mr Caton if he agrees with your answer.
Mr Wheatley: There are high levels
of staff sickness, slightly lower this year than they were last
year, so we are 13.2 days at the moment, I think it is, as opposed
to the 14.3 outturn last year. That is a very high level of staff
sickness. We are tackling the problems in a number of different
ways and they are being tackled by governors because governors
are made responsible for managing sickness in their establishments
and, after all, this sickness is occurring across the country.
Differentially some prisons are doing better than others, but
we are making sure we follow the rules on sickness. We are civil
servants with a fairly generous sickness scheme compared to many
people who are not in the Civil Service. We follow the rules carefully
on that and make sure that we warn people if they look as though
they are misusing sickness, offer support and advice to people
who look as though they are in difficulties, operate that system
to as good an effect as we can, and we have increased sharply
the number of dismissals of people who have been off for a very
long time and who do not appear to have an illness that is going
to get better, but it does not make them unemployable, so the
number of dismissals has gone up sharply. We have introduced in
co-operation with the POA a scoring system that works to score
sickness, produce trigger points at which there is mandatory action
to be taken by management and which makes it plain to people taking
sickness what a mandatory action will be. That is being done in
agreement with the POA and I am surprised that Mr Caton says otherwise,
which is interesting. All of that is making a difference. I think
that prison officers in particular, they and nursing staff have
the highest rates of sickness and I think it is very stressful
work. I have done it and I know it is stressful. Front-line work,
dealing with prisoners is wearing and taxing and requires resilience
and I do not want to undersell the difficulties of the work that
front-line prison officers are engaged in. We know that something
like a quarter of the sickness, just over a quarter, relates to
stress, another quarter relates to muscular-skeletal injuries,
not all of them at work, I hasten to add, and we carefully analyse
what our sickness is and try to make sure that we are intervening
in a way that reduces it as far as possible.
Q281 Bob Russell: Mr Caton, perhaps
you could answer that question and combine it with a further follow-up
question because in your written evidence you commented that,
"Politicians, law-makers and those who direct the sentencing
of offenders appear to have little or no concept of the difficulties
faced by prison staff . . . attempting to rehabilitate offenders
in overcrowded prisons", so what are the major difficulties
currently faced by prison staff which presumably leads to the
high level of staff sickness and low levels of staff morale?
Mr Caton: Well, I think that the
first thing to say on that is that we feel very, very undervalued
as a profession. I think people may not understand that. When
the judge says, "Take him down", that seems to be when
society ceases to think about the offender, and I am not hoping
that the violins are going to start playing in the background,
but that is when our business begins. That is when we have to
deal with people, individuals, human beings in probably the most
traumatic state people could ever get into. They have had their
liberty taken away, they are having to face up to the realities
of the offence they have committed and been found guilty for.
We are currently doing that in fairly overcrowded prisons, certainly
with a hugely rising prisoner population and trying to do it well.
That in itself has pressures. I think equally the changes that
we are expected to bring on, as Phil quite rightly says, we are
in a business that constantly changes and I do not move away from
the fact that we need to improve, but I do not necessarily agree
that constant change is the way in which you cause improvements.
Many of the things that we are doing and having done have been
thrown out like the baby with the bath water and that in itself
is frustrating. We have in recent times been seen as having the
highest level of stress of any occupation and I can understand
why. We are dealing with violent, difficult, damaged people permanently.
We are dealing with them from when we unlock them to when we lock
them back up again of an evening and we are trying to get into
their crime, some of which itself traumatises to the extent where
prison officers never work again and where some prison officers
have taken their own lives. We have to deal with the increase
in suicide rates and we have to deal with the way in which prison
officers are thought of not only by the general public, by parliamentarians,
but by the people who manage the Prison Service, and the recognition
that we fail to get for doing those difficult jobs. It does not
surprise me that against that backdrop we have serious stress-related
sickness. The other thing I would say is that we are doing this
against a backdrop where we have very little occupational health
processes, very little respite from the problems that we have.
We do not have a process, like other services, where people can
be taken out and we do not have convalescence areas, though we
have never needed them because of the so-called macho image of
prisoner officers. Prison officers actually believe they are pretty
tough people and live that life, so people look at prison officers
and say, "Well, you are a prison officer, so you are very
tough", and they live other people's expectations and beliefs
about them. Yes, sickness is a blight, but what I would say to
Phil is yes, we agree with the way in which you are trying to
tackle sickness, but I do not think you can drive prison officers
like a herd of cattle towards better and lower sickness rates.
I think some need driving and some need care, and I do not think
we get a great deal of care, but I think we get lots and lots
of driving. The effect that it has on the way in which the Prison
Service carries out its work is shown in staff sickness levels.
If I could add one thing to try and resolve this, it would be
a determination by the Prison Service, the Board and parliamentarians
to try to understand the difficulties of dealing with prisoners
and to give us good occupational health methods to take us away,
allow us to be away from it and that would mean additional resources,
additional staff.
Q282 Bob Russell: Mr Caton, that
was quite a catalogue and hopefully the inquiry this Committee
is doing will lead to some recommendations which may assist your
members, but we will have to see what happens. Mr Wrench, the
current treatment of remand prisoners, short-term prisoners really,
means, as Lord Woolf has commented, that, "they are often
at the bottom of the pack when they should be, as unconvicted
prisoners, at the top of the pack". How can this be justified?
Mr Wrench: There are difficulties
dealing with remand prisoners, firstly, because of the uncertainties
about how long you have got them for and the fact that they can
get pulled out of regime activities for legal appearances and
other requirements. Then there are difficulties in that they are
going to be held in the local prisons which are under the particular
pressures that Phil Wheatley described earlier. But clearly we
want to do as much as we can for them while they are in that position.
Q283 Bob Russell: Bearing in mind
that these are unconvicted prisoners in many instances, would
you agree with me that if the facilities provided for their visitors
are not good facilities, it has an adverse impact on their whole
wellbeing?
Mr Wrench: I think that applies
to prisoners generally. Obviously the better the visit facilities,
the easier it is to maintain family ties and to not have the bad
effect of imprisonment in that crucial area.
Q284 Bob Russell: Mr Wheatley, does
the Prison Service have a policy about prison visitor facilities?
Mr Wheatley: We have a policy
about prison visits in which we try to ensure that we have got
good-quality visitor rooms with good surveillance so that we can
have good visits and we can see what is happening and we can prevent
visits being misused.
Q285 Bob Russell: We will watch this
space on that one. You will be aware that a previous inquiry by
the Home Affairs Select Committee led to recommendations to do
with alternatives to prison sentences and I think it is widely
agreed that the short custodial sentences are a poor alternative
to sentences to be served in the community, so what strategies
does the Prison Service and the Probation Service adopt to increase
the credibility and effectiveness of community sentences?
Ms Wallis: It is just two and
a half years since the National Probation Service was created.
We had 54 quite autonomous probation services before that and
the Government took the decision that those should be deconstructed
and the National Probation Service should be created. The whole
focus of the new Service was a move away from our old responsibilities,
which were couched legally in terms of advising, assisting and
befriending, into a new organisation where the focus would be
on keeping offenders to task to the terms of the orders, it would
be about reducing recidivism and it would be about public protection,
so in the last two and a half years what we have set about doing
is profoundly changing our practice with offenders and with victims
and we have been reskilling, retraining and retooling our staff.
In the first instance, we have been building new building blocks
for new sentences and offender practice. We supervise every day
over 200,000 offenders and clearly the start point is that your
staff must have a good tool for assessment. You have got to be
able to differentiate what those 200,000 offenders have done,
the level of risk that they pose and also separate out their needs,
what was the offending actually about, and that is why with prisoners
we have built the offender assessment tool which you have heard
about, the expectation then being that when you have a sharp assessment,
then you can build a good supervision plan, so we have been together
again trying to build models of joint case management and we hope
to roll those out next year. We have been building offender programmes
and interventions so that sentencers actually have different choices
now from what they had, for example, three years ago and that
is the case. There are a number of new sentences, many new interventions
and programmes available to tackle re-offending.
Q286 Bob Russell: Notwithstanding
that the prison population is growing, and we will come back to
what you have been doing, it is still relatively early days, so
are those building blocks working? Does it need any fine-tuning
or a major overhaul or are you on course to achieve what you wish
to achieve?
Ms Wallis: Well, it has been a
major overhaul and I really cannot stress that enough. We have
a whole range now of accredited programmes. There are general
offending programmes, we have got approaching 2,000 sex offender
treatment programmes running and we have got a target this year
to achieve 9,000 drug treatment and testing orders and we hope
to achieve that. We have just upgraded the community punishment
order; there were eight million hours of unpaid work done in the
community last year, so we have just introduced a new element
to that which is that while the offender is doing the hours of
community service, at the same time, they have the opportunity
to acquire training skills and employment skills which are actually
accredited and awarded so that as well as being punished and as
well as making reparation to the community, we hope that we can
actually make an impact on rehabilitation as well. That is just
a flavour of the different kinds of programmes that have been
put in place, but we are going to add to that in partnership with
prisons. This is a joint development, and we build these programmes
very often together. Some programmes are delivered in prison and
we try to make sure that we build ours with a view to matching.
For example, with our sex offender treatment programme, it is
meant either to be able to stand alone if there has not been one
delivered in custody or if there has been one delivered in custody,
then ours is designed to build on that. We are building booster
programmes so that again when Phil and his team deliver offending
behaviour programmes and the offender comes out in the future,
we hope to be able to deliver booster programmes that both hold
the effect of what has been achieved and actually add to it.
Q287 Bob Russell: Thank you for that
very encouraging response. There is just one final question continuing
the theme of joined-up thinking between the two agencies. Much
of the education and course work in prisons has already been covered
by earlier questions, but I just want to home in on this one where
a short-term prisoner has commenced an educational training course
and then returns to the community. Do you feel that the community
social service agencies are sufficiently engaged in that rehabilitation
agenda so that the work follows through to completion?
Mr Wrench: There is more we can
do certainly. We are in the process of an exercise to put new
contracts in place for education in prisons and one of the key
things we will be trying to achieve in that exercise is a greater
equality of standards between the provision in the community and
in prison, and through that a greater transferability of learning
experience back out into the community.
Q288 Chairman: Relating back to what
you have said about new developments and having sat here for the
last few weeks, it is a little hard to avoid the impression that
so far as short-term prisoners are concerned, everybody, and I
do not just mean the Service, has largely given up on them in
terms of what can be delivered for them, but perhaps they should
not be in prison and perhaps they should be doing community penalty
work, so if they are there for three to six months, including
being on remand, is the truth really that not very much is going
to happen to them and they are likely to re-enter the community
with very little having been done to address their offending behaviour?
I can see that for those having longer sentences, the system is
more joined up and better co-ordinated, whereas we have a huge
group of people with shorter sentences who go in and come out
unchanged or worse and carry on re-offending and really there
is not a strategy for them yet, is there?
Mr Wheatley: There are strategies,
but you are right, it is very difficult to deal with them. We,
for instance, are trying to work in prisons with the local community
to try and link offenders very quickly back into housing and jobs
and that is not just done for long-termers. I was doing a visit
to Bedford Prison and seeing prisoners on the day after reception
going immediately to get housing advice, whether they can keep
their flat, where they are going to go, and that is mainly for
the short-termers, immediately seeing somebody from the job centre,
and again mainly aimed at short-termers.
Q289 Chairman: But the islands of
good practice do not really illustrate a consistent approach to
maximising the impact on the short-term prisoners. That would
be fair, would it not?
Mr Wheatley: It is probably not
far from that. It is not entirely fair because the resettlement
money we are putting up, the £14.5 million of additional
money for resettlement, lots of that is going into the sort of
thing I am seeing at Bedford and our strategy is to try to work
with the local community, with job centres—
Q290 Chairman: That money is?
Mr Wheatley: That has gone out
this year.
Q291 Chairman: And that is spread
equally among short-termers and longer-term prisoners?
Mr Wheatley: It is available in
order to get people back into work and we are going to have a
target next year of getting them into accommodation. It is designed
to help us with that and that is obviously aimed at the highest
number of discharges, so mainly short-termers, so that money is
there and primarily being spent on the short-term end of the market,
but it is probably falls short of being an all-encompassing strategy
and I am not saying that.
Ms Wallis: Could I just say that
you know already that the Probation Service is not involved with
those serving less than 12 months in the adult population. We
hope that through Custody Plus, for example, when we get an opportunity
to implement the Criminal Justice Act that will change and we
would expect that when that is implemented, something like 63,000
of these offenders would actually start their time in custody
and then come under the statutory supervision of probation. We
have not been idle on this. What we have been trying to do in
the last year is actually build the pathways, actually try to
establish what good practice might actually look like between
prisons and probation in that respect, anticipating the day when
hopefully we will get the resource now that we have got the legislation.
So we have run resettlement pathfinders in some areas, we have
run a programme known as Focus on Resettlement. For example, we
have looked very specifically at women prisoners as well in the
adult population and I had indicated that we were building a joint
case management model, so there are many things in process and
laid to build good practice so that we know what it actually looks
like and we know what other kind of organisations we need to help
us to create the provision. Clearly for prisoners on probation,
our staff with all their many competencies are not educationalists,
they are not mental health experts and we cannot provide the accommodation
ourselves, so we need to get those powerful relationships with
other people. It would be giving a wrong impression to suggest
that we are not trying to do anything about this or that our staff
actually are not working with great determination to try and build
the practice, get other providers on board and that is about the
national rehabilitation strategy as well. We have also got a Joint
Sentence Planning and Implementation Group between us already
designing and building new sentences so that the moment we have
the resource and the opportunity for sentencers to have Custody
Plus and Custody Minus available, we will not just be starting
then, but we will actually be ready. So I do not want you to have
the impression that we have been sat simply watching this scenario
and hoping and waiting. A great deal of effort has already gone
into that preparation.
Q292 Chairman: When do you think
you will have Custody Plus?
Ms Wallis: Well, this is entirely
dependent obviously on the resources being available. What I am
being told at the moment is to be ready for the start of the implementation
of the generic community sentence at the back end of next year,
with Custody Minus in 2005 and Custody Plus in 2006, but these
are very tentative planning dates and obviously they are not within
the control of either prisons or probation, but we are getting
ready and we are very anxious and eager to be part of this.
Chairman: Thank you for that. That is
actually very helpful to the Committee to know where you are.
Q293 Mr Clappison: Mr Caton has already
made an interesting remark about prison workshops and working
prisons. Can I ask both him and Mr Wheatley if we feel that the
prison workshops which there are are providing the right kind
of skills for prisoners and that there is not too much emphasis
on menial work rather than the acquisition of skills, which has
been suggested by some of the submissions that we have received?
Mr Wheatley: There is provision
of skills in workshops and particularly vocational training workshops
and there is quite a substantial amount of new money around from
the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) because DfES will
now be responsible for all vocational training in prison and there
is in their baseline substantial new money which will go into
this area. We have run big prison workshops and many of them are
designed just to occupy prisoners for relatively short periods
of time, particularly in local prisons where we know people are
going to go through, which is the point I made earlier, and so
it is to some extent a transit camp in the criminal justice system.
You can take somebody on to get them working probably for two
or three weeks before they go on to their training prison and
that has a role, I think, in that it occupies the prisoners and
gets them out of their cells. We know from some of the research
we are doing on suicide that that in itself is quite valuable,
helping people to cope particularly during the early period of
their imprisonment, so we have got workshops that are doing work
that is not particularly inspiring, but occupies people. We have
also got some workshops that are doing skilled work, which also
makes us money, and I can think of, for instance, the workshops
that produce, rather bizarrely, our own bars in the workshops.
That produces some really quite skilled and good metalworking
because prisoners like that work and it is helpful from our point
of view. It is not too bad if they are making bars, but if they
were making anything else, I might worry about it. We do that
in a number of establishments. We have difficulty guaranteeing
a supply of good work. We are obviously in competition with other
people who want to do the work and there are some quite difficult
areas around whether we should be making things that somebody
in the private sector, perhaps your constituents, would be better
making and whether we should be taking this work away from them,
so there are all sorts of sensitivities about prison workshops.
Q294 Mr Clappison: Could you tell
us a bit about the level of involvement of private employers in
prison work initiatives?
Mr Wheatley: Quite a number of
our workshops are doing work for private industry, supervised
usually by our staff, so we have got workshops doing work that
we are making a profit on actually, both work from the private
industry and doing work for them, and there is a wide range of
those contracts. We have got some specific contracts with employers
who are actually helping us train people. We have a contract with
Toyota which has a workshop at Aylesbury which is a very good
workshop which helps to train young people in lots of work to
do with maintaining cars and things like that, so it is good stuff.
There are one or two other links with the private sector which
are working very well. There are links with Transco and we are
helping train people who will get a job outside working for Transco
on the provision of gas mains, that sort of thing, so there are
one or two links like that which are proving very productive,
making real training opportunities and which help solve skill
shortage problems for some employers.
Q295 Mr Clappison: Is it part of
your plan that what you describe as one or two programmes with
the private sector which are good stuff, as you put it, is it
part of your plan to expand that as much as possible?
Mr Wheatley: We are trying to
expand that as much as possible. From our point of view, it is
very good stuff. We get real high-quality training and a direct
link with an employer who is interested in employing, so that
fits with getting people back to work in areas where prisoners
reasonably can get employment. You obviously have to be careful
in what you are training people in because there is no point in
training people in, shall we say, being a bank teller because
it is not that likely that we are going to get people into that
sort of work, so you have got to make sure that you have targeted
the sort of work that our prisoners with their track record can
reasonably expect to get.
Mr Caton: I think the picture
that Phil paints is an accurate one, but it gives the impression
that we are doing lots and lots of excellent work in workshops
when the work that is being done is, I think, sporadic and dotted
around rather than there being a whole or holistic approach to
it. We have this Project Rex currently taking place which is intended
to privatise the education side of the Prison Service and with
it will go very experienced instructional officers who are PCS
members, not members of ours, although some are. We have expressed
some concern about that and obviously with our sister unions we
will continue to express that, that we are worried by that. The
other thing that I think is always a difficulty in prison labour
is that a private company comes in and the international obligations
on them to use prison labour is an issue in itself, but the only
thing is whether they really want offenders to be used to take
away jobs from people who have not committed offences. That will
always be a difficulty. If someone wins a contract in a prison,
is it taking work away from another small company that needs that
work to survive? I think that the thrust of prison labour, as
always, whether it be growing food for the Prison Service or raising
animals for slaughter for the Prison Service or indeed, like Phil
says, doing work that will save the prisons money by producing
building materials, prison doors, prison gates, bars, et cetera,
that is useful work in this day and age where there is a skills
shortage and if we can teach prisoners to actually build something
and save money for the Prison Service in doing so, I think that
is good. The difficulty of course is that we have over a period
of time had this swing backwards and forwards on whether we really
want prisoners to be put to work and do all the useful jobs or
whether we are all about security and making sure that they do
not escape. I think that under the stewardship of Martin Narey
and Phil, we have tried to steady that pendulum, although with
the next big escape issue it will swing away again and then it
will perhaps start collapsing because some money is needed somewhere
else. It is always a difficult thing to do, but I would not want
to see people thrown out of work in society to provide cheaper
products being produced in prison. I think that is a balance that
the Committee ought to look at as well when looking at prison
labour, which we have looked at on many occasions. Prison officers
themselves do deliver a lot of trade training. Some of these trades
are obviously needed. How many on the Committee who pick up and
want a plumber will have major difficulties? We used to produce
lots and lots of plumbers.
Mr Clappison: Can I go on to asking you
both again about how prisoners are assessed for educational programmes
and if you could perhaps deal with what I believe is the `Jeffrey
Archer' point because he says, I believe, that there is an economic
disincentive for prisoners to attend education rather than work
because they are not being paid to do education.
Q296 David Winnick: As long as they
are not forced to read his books!
Mr Wheatley: Another reason for
literacy! We assess prisoners on reception to see what their education
skills are and there is a standard battery of tests which are
applied and I think it probably is these that do not necessarily
travel between prisons and should, but sometimes they are repeated
unnecessarily which I think is something we should be trying to
sort out. That gives us an assessment of prisoners' needs. We
have little difficulty in filling education places. Education
is normally highly prized in prison and we have not a great difficulty,
interestingly, in persuading people who have got low standards
of literacy into taking education. We are trying actually to move
away from a full-time education approach as I think that is not
the best way of teaching basic skills. It is better taught in
smaller amounts rather than taking people away from work full-time,
so that to some extent means that I am less interested, although
prisoners themselves have quite an interest in what they are being
paid at work because they are still at work than in spending some
time doing basic skills. We are even trying to get basic skills
into the workshops so that we can teach it alongside doing things
and that is probably the most effective way of doing it. Again
there is an example from one prison I visited recently where there
was a concrete-block-building workshop making building materials
and fork-lift truck-driving was taught in the workshop and basic
skills by the instructors working in the workshop, which is a
very neat way of doing education. I would be very reluctant to
get into a position where education always paid more than everything
else because actually for those who are engaged in production
workshops that are boring and where actually the only pay-off
is the money you get for it, and, like education, where actually
there is a substantial pay-off for prisoners both in terms of
increased skills and actually while doing the education being
able entirely to escape from prison in your head is one of the
very interesting things about why education is prized because
it is a way of forgetting you are in prison for a bit. You are
engaged in something with your mind really actively occupied.
Working in one of my pick-up and put-down workshops, putting together
plugs, you are not very engaged with anything actually and the
pay-off there is money, so I prefer leaving the pay-scales to
prison governors against the clear knowledge that we are managing
to fill education places quite nicely and we have been particularly
good at getting those who have got substantial levels of illiteracy
and very poor numeracy skills into education, hence the fact that
we are over-providing against our targets in terms of achieving
basic skills.
Mr Caton: I agree that vocational
education during vocational training is a good way forward. I
think there are some very, very talented people who teach the
basics which are needed to do a particular vocation in the construction
industry or whatever the prisoner has set his mind on doing. Of
course that is in an ideal world and in a world where things are
not disrupted constantly, and of course people will lose heart
in linking their education to their future employment where they
are constantly told, "No, I'm sorry, you are going back to
your cell this afternoon". That is the difficulty, I think,
that we all face, but I am a great advocate of education, having
dealt with it early on in my time at the education centre at Wakefield
Prison where we could pay £25 an hour to teach somebody Russian,
but we could not spend money on the very basic skills that people
were needing to move on in their prison chosen areas of work and
learning. It seemed very, very perverse to me that that was happening,
bigger ticks for bigger education. Well, I am sorry, but small
education will matter if we are going to deter people from going
back to crime.
Ms Wallis: Could I just say that
I think this is an area where prison colleagues really should
be commended. It is undoubtedly the case that in the last two
years they really have made enormous strides and very substantial
numbers of prisoners have been given access to education. This
then gives the Probation Service a challenge, which is whether
we can build on that when the offenders come out into the community,
so not just a challenge for probation, but for the education providers.
We also took basic skills and education provision into our portfolio
of service delivery last year. We have a national agreement with
the Learning Skills Councils (LSC) and we are in partnership with
them where we are meant to be doing the assessments, identifying
the offenders either because they have come through custody or
because they are in the community and actually making these referrals
to the education providers and then of course case-managing, supporting
and sustaining, really pushing them and helping follow them through.
The LSC provision is still very inconsistent across England and
Wales, so there are some parts of the country where colleagues
have started them when they come out and we are able to see this
being connected in because the tuition provision is there, but
it is also true to say that there are some areas where this infrastructure
is not yet in place and again we are trying to work on that and
trying to make sure that this happens. Many of these offenders,
if you are talking about getting an offender from almost no basic
literacy and numeracy through to a position where they reach levels
of attainment to make them employable, where they can genuinely
compete in the employment market, you are talking about hundreds
of hours' tuition and if that has begun in custody, then obviously
we want to be able to continue that tuition through providers
through the period of the licence. Indeed if they still have not
reached the levels of attainment by that time, we want the community
to continue with that investment in them, so again together we
have made very considerable strides there, but it is true to say
that the issue of tutors is still patchy in some areas.
Q297 Mrs Dean: How do you view the
recent Home Office research which found that there were no differences
in the one and two-year re-conviction rates between adult men
who started a prison-based cognitive skills programme and their
matched comparison group?
Mr Wheatley: Well, I have viewed
the offending behaviour programme as in effect a giant research
project. We are the only jurisdiction I know that has gone to
such a scale on delivering offending behaviour programmes which
have a good research base. I joined the Service after an interest
in criminology and was amongst the people involved in visiting
Canada as we looked at what worked initially in Canada back in
the very early 1990s. It was always essential, it seemed to me,
that we researched what we did carefully and we learned from that
research, so, firstly, I welcome the research and I think that
is the right way to do things. The initial research, the first
tranche, looked as though we were achieving about a 14% change
in re-conviction which was really very impressive, but often in
bringing in new things you find that if you do something new,
you get the so-called "Hawthorne effect", everybody
thinks, "This is wonderful, we are involved in an experiment",
but when it becomes normal and you are doing it across lots and
lots of places, it is much more difficult to keep that enthusiasm
going. The second two tranches about this are both, from the point
of view of making big differences, depressing. There was some
quite interesting information in them. If we take out those who
have dropped out of the programmes, those who have failed and
simply said, "I'm not going to do these things", for
those who have completed, there does seem to be an effect and
a significant effect. Also now, because I think we know the research
itself into this sort of programme is as good as there is in the
corrections world, we need to crawl back over our programmes and
see which ones have succeeded and which have not and then whether
we can find ways of making sure that more succeed, and we are
doing that in co-operation with the accreditation panel which
helps us accredit these programme, which is independent of us
and has on it experts of some standing. We think that we have
probably been over-emphasising some procedural processes of the
programmes rather than concentrating on what is probably absolutely
the key thing which is the style of delivery and actually the
personality and standard of the person who delivers the programmes.
Certainly looking at the evidence of the early Canadian programmes,
that was one of the big crucial issues. At the moment, therefore,
I think we are not at the stage where we have got enough evidence
to say, "This is just a complete failure and we should throw
it away", but we are at the stage where we have got enough
evidence to say, "We need to do further work to tell us what
is going on here and we need to keep on testing it, and actually
if it does not work all the time, we shouldn't do things that
don't work". I have always thought that, but we should be
careful in this sort of area where you have got to do careful
research and think carefully about exactly what is going on, that
we really have understood properly what is going on, drawn the
lessons from it and tested them, so that is where I stand on the
current research.
Q298 Mrs Dean: Is it selecting the
right type of offenders as well?
Mr Wheatley: That is key to it.
OASys helps with that because it produces over the years an assessment
system. We have been relying on area psychologists to help select
people, so at least some are, and we have selected those who were
not ideal for the programme because these programmes need targeting
as they do not work on everyone. They are not a panacea. They
are pretty good when well targeted and built consistently by high-quality
people and yes, targeting and the quality of delivery are, I think,
the key things we need now to do work on and then test again.
Ms Wallis: I think we have to
remember that this is one programme at one point in time, so of
course it is a disappointing result, but it should not deflect
us from our determination to actually keep trying and to build
this evidence. If medical research, for example, had given up
every time there was a disappointing result, then I think that
we would all be a lot less healthy. This is a very new field,
as Mr Wheatley has said. I think the other confusion around the
whole breadth of offending behaviour programmes is often they
are described as if there is only one particular offending behaviour
programme, but in fact when you talk about our joint What Works
Programme and the accredited programmes, there is a whole range
I talked about sex offender treatment programmes, there are drink-driver
programmes, there are drugs programmes, so there is an enormous
portfolio. If you take the sex offender treatment programmes,
that is an example where we have stuck with it and we have got
longer-term research now, so for one of our sex offender treatment
programmes, that we run in the National Probation Service, the
two-year follow-up re-conviction rates for those who completed
the programme, show very substantial gains. They have reduced
the predicted re-conviction rate for sex offending by about 7½%.
Those same offenders have reduced by around 11% for other crimes
of violence and, given that these offenders very often get into
acquisitive crime as well as sex offending, they have reduced
the acquisitive crime re-conviction rates by around 22%, so there
is an example of another accredited programme which had we given
up too quickly or too easily, we would never have actually got
to this point. But they must be properly targeted and we need
to improve how well we equip our staff to deliver them and we
have obviously to get the offenders through to completion because
that also is a very important success factor.
Q299 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to how
we treat women prisoners. A number of bodies advocate that women
prisoners should be held in smaller secure units as close to their
home community as possible. Obviously this would also help in
making sure that they have contact with their children. What is
the Prison Service doing to bring this about?
Mr Wheatley: We are not building
smaller units as we have not got the resource or it is not money
that I have available to spend in that way. What we are trying
to do is to hold the population in prisons as near to their homes
as we can. We have increased the size of the women's estate in
response to the fairly rapid increase in the women's population.
As we have re-roled places because we have re-roled male prisons,
we have tried to select male prisons for re-roling and it gave
us a better closeness-to-home match, so Buckley Hall, for instance,
was picked because it was a secure prison in the north-west where
we did not have enough places for women, so we have tried to use
expansion to help a bit. We also run our women's establishments
mainly as multi-functional establishments, so we do not expect
to move people around as much between places, so a prison like
New Hall, for example, which I visited recently, has remands,
has a mother and baby unit, it is holding young offender juveniles,
and the Youth Justice Board has got a young offender wing which
does de-tox and it has women who are involved in education as
convicted prisoners who do their sentences there and if it feeds
into an open prison, it will feed into Askham Grange near York,
and New Hall is near Wakefield, so we have got a reasonable compromise.
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