Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 305)
TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2003
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY, MR
PETER WRENCH,
MS EITHNE
WALLIS AND
MR BRIAN
CATON
Q300 Mrs Dean: Over 75% of female
prisoners have been sentenced to 12 months or less. Could more
be dealt with without coming into prison?
Mr Wheatley: That is not really
a question for me. I am the jailer, not the person who decides
what they do. Really you should ask a judge or a magistrate that.
We have got to hold them once they come to us.
Q301 Mrs Dean: Ms Wallis, do you
have a view on that?
Ms Wallis: Yes, I do. I have a
very definite view on that. I think that if you look at the seriousness
of the offences and you look at the offender needs and you look
at the risk assessment of these women, then I would argue that
we now have both the kind of capabilities in the community that
genuinely give sentencers a choice in terms of whether they keep
some of these women in the community or whether they actually
choose to sentence them to custody.
Mr Caton: Could I just say that
one of the things I think was a major step forward in dealing
with women in prisons was the Prison Service's decision to have
a separate directorate to deal with it which has now been scrapped
and I think that was in itself a mistake. Had that been managed
better, dare I say, I think that is a successful way forward.
I think that they have particular needs, very serious needs. I
think that as we see the contraction of the secure psychiatric
provision in the high-security psychiatric hospitals, we will
see more of those people who either have been or would have been
in those units coming into prison. I think that in line with that,
as Phil quite rightly says, we have no control over it. The re-roling
exercise is very disturbing to staff. I think we are going to
get ourselves in a position where we are going to have to relook
at how women are dealt with when they are in prison because there
do not seem to be many people sentencing women in any other way
than they have done in the last couple of years. I do express
the POA's concern in the area of women in prison and I do not
think we are dealing with it altogether well.
Q302 Mrs Dean: Can I ask, Mr Wheatley,
why you have changed the system so that women's prisons are not
dealt with separately in a women's estate?
Mr Wheatley: Actually to try and
improve delivery, what we realised was that because the women's
estate had grown so sharply, and it originally was a small estate
with a single area manager in charge of it, and it grew rapidly,
we had to re-role places, and we had added in another area manager
to assist, so there are two people working together, and a small
policy group supporting them, all accountable to me as the Deputy
Director General and now the Director of Operations. There is
a big geographical spread. Keeping enough contact with the prisons
for the area manager so that they knew what they were doing, making
sure they visited often enough given the fact that this is a national
estate which goes down from Durham to Winchester by way of a prison
in Kent, one down nearly in Bristol, so it is very widely spread,
was proving difficult, and getting knitted into what looks like
an increasing area for us, which is area resettlement strategies,
working together with the Probation Service and with other providers,
particularly local authorities in some cases, housing and things
like that, we thought we needed to bring together the women's
establishments to get that sense of grip visited regularly under
the area manager and integration into a resettlement strategy
if we wanted to get women to get access to it via the area managers
who are leading that. We know we have got to try and hold together
the policy issues and not just policy issues, but just spotting
trends across the women's prisons, for instance, the number of
psychiatrically disturbed people, those with severe problems who
are coming in, the extent of drug abuse, problems that come from
mother and baby units, problems that come from having children
in care and trying to keep in contact with the women in prison,
so we need to find a way of crossing that over. We have developed
an operational policy group which will work to the Director of
Operations and we think we can get the best of all worlds out
of that. It is never easy to get management arrangements right
so that they match all the various needs you have got and there
are inevitably compromises because I think the developing area
of the resettlement agenda and development of the regions actually
has entities that count, which means that we have got to make
sure that women are tapped into that and we were missing out there.
We were missing on some of the support, such as drug action teams
and all the rest of it because they were only speaking to those
who were male prisoners. I think the compromise of having the
operational policy group which will have one of the area managers,
who was previously working in this area, in charge of it and all
the same staff will give us the crossover nicely with a better
sense of grip and better integration to the regional agenda because
it is very tempting at the moment to knock it and say that we
should have stuck with what we were doing, although actually when
I speak to most people, they mention some of the failings in what
we were doing, and I would like to be judged probably about 18
months down the line as to whether this is delivering better.
It is certainly designed to and there is no other agenda than
to make sure we do this properly and it is difficult work.
Q303 Mrs Dean: Turning to those prisoners
with mental health problems, we have had witnesses say and it
has been mentioned earlier today that where these people are concerned,
the lack of adequate mental health care services in the community
is the reason that people end up in custody. Do you share those
concerns?
Mr Wheatley: I am sure that we
end up with some people coming to us that the courts have sent
to us because they did not think they could make any other disposal
because they had a serious problem with the mental health of the
person standing in front of them and felt that prison provided
a place of safety and I think that happens from time to time,
yes. It is very difficult, I suspect, sometimes for the courts
to get offenders or alleged offenders to appear before them straight
into the sort of psychiatric care that the court think they may
need. We do allow the opportunity to assess and with much better
links with the National Health Service nowadays and a rather probably
faster track into getting prisoners transferred where that is
necessary, but still it is not always easy. I do not particularly
want to find that we are the sort of easy way of getting difficult
people into secure psychiatric care or at least appropriate psychiatric
care and I think that does happen from time to time.
Q304 Mrs Dean: What measures are
in place to ensure the continuity of care for prisoners with mental
health needs on leaving prison?
Ms Wallis: Well, the honest position
is that they are inconsistent and to date it very much depends
on which part of the country you are in, and also in a way what
kinds of offences you have committed. Ironically, the best provision
is probably for those offenders who have committed the most serious
offences because you may or may not be aware of the arrangements
that we have in place, multi-agency public protection arrangements,
across England and Wales and police and probation have a statutory
duty together to identify those dangerous offenders in the community
or it is for our prison colleagues to identify those that we are
likely to be bringing back in the not too distant future. Last
year, for example, we took almost 58,000 offenders through these
arrangements and on any given day we assessed about 3,000 as being
imminently dangerous and I understand that in terms of those who
were actually charged with a further serious conviction last year
it was less than 2%, so I think that here is an area where prisons,
probation and the police are actually doing very well. I say "ironically"
because it is easier to get provision sometimes for these offenders
who have mental health needs because we bring around the table
in the individual cases those agencies who are actually key to
both the management of the risk of this individual offender, but
also where there is particular need, so it is very often possible
to get health providers to come to these panels and to really
meet those obligations. However, when you get into the less serious
offenders, then it becomes more difficult. Again if you look at
our approved premises estate, we have got 100 approved premises,
which used to be called "hostels". If you look through
that estate we have got very good relationships and we are generally
well served by community psychiatric nurses and such like. It
is when you move out into the wider population that we really
still do not have a good enough evidence base and we are not clear
enough across the whole country as to where the services are good
and where they are not, but we are in the process of trying to
do that, that mapping exercise, and really get to grips with that
information. We are starting to talk to mental health providers
and as opposed to in the past with 42 operational areas, where
we were left to form our own arrangements, we are now trying to
get a national strategy together on this and really trying to
put some national weight and clout into it. However, I would be
misleading you if I said that I was at all happy with the distribution
of facilities that are available or if I tried to suggest that
the service available was in any way consistent when it is not.
Mr Caton: I feel that probably
the POA is well placed to comment on the issue of mental health
of people in prison because we represent those working in the
high-security estate in the NHS, in medium-secure units, but basically
across the NHS in secure psychiatric units and indeed those who
have a job to deal with mentally ill people in prison. The vast
majority of those who fall through the net that Eithne has just
identified do end up on prison landings with very little professional
help. The finest community psychiatric nurses I have seen are
the prison officers, prison officers working in house blocks and
on landings who have the task of dealing with mentally ill people
who have found their way through the system, come into prison,
have got serious, serious problems with their mental health and
the instability that that brings, are dangerous and self-damaging
because of it, are a danger to other prisoners and staff because
of it and are, if you like, being dealt with by people who are
learning the task of assessment and psychiatric intervention on
the hoof. I think it is a shameful example of society, not the
Prison Service, not necessarily the Government, not this Government,
but in part the last Government for deciding that care in the
community would be brought in without necessarily ring-fencing
the resources they got from selling all the old sites back into
it. It is shameful, I think, that we in this day and age use prison
to deal with those with serious mental health problems. There
may well be a view that we house these people in prison health
care centres, but we do not. There are too many with mental health
difficulties of all kinds to house them in, if you like, a proper
therapeutic health centre. They are on the landings, they are
a very serious danger to themselves and others and personally
I think this is probably for me one of the major areas that the
Prison Service, the Probation Service and indeed the Government
need to tackle because there are just so many of them.
Q305 Chairman: I would just like
to ask one last question, if I may, because we have covered a
lot of the ground on resettlement in bits and pieces of the evidence,
and this is really to ask you about the structures which would
be useful to get other agencies, education, housing, social services
and so on better focused on resettlement. You mentioned those
agencies and you also mentioned the LSCs. If the overall aim of
the exercise is to reduce re-offending, and we have in every local
area a crime reduction partnership, is there a case for requiring
crime reduction partnerships to make resettlement strategies an
explicit part of their local crime reduction strategy so that
the commitment of health, education, all the agencies who sit
around the table at the moment, probably not the LSCs, but all
the rest who sit around the table at the moment is actually to
deal with it locally in every local area? Is that the type of
mechanism which would help you tie in these other agencies whose
support you need, but over whom you have no direct levers at the
moment?
Mr Wheatley: I can certainly respond
from our point of view. We are finding that the big crime and
disorder reduction partnerships in the big conurbations are one
of the key players for just that reason and many of them are engaging
with this because they can see that if they can do something about
repeat prolific offenders, that will make a difference. There
is lots of good local work being done on that, some really good
stuff in the south-west, in Bristol, some good stuff down in Kent
based on Canterbury Prison, and it is usually around the crime
and disorder reduction partnership group. It is probably more
problematic with smaller crime and disorder partnerships which,
from the Prison Service point of view, are a bit difficult to
deal with because we are serving such large areas with so many
crime and disorder reduction partnerships in them. I have certainly
been advocating to area managers to make links with the big crime
and disorder reduction partnerships and that seems to be paying
off. It is possible to do more with them to give them rather more
responsibility in this area and I would be quite keen on that
because it seems to me a very good working system which is bringing
real local co-operation which we would like to tap into. It is
a bit difficult to deal with an area that is perhaps serving something
like 30 or 40 crime and disorder reduction partnerships, many
relatively small, as you have said.
Mr Wrench: Just to add to that,
I think as a national organisation the Prison Service needs to
have more strategic engagement with resettlement partners as well
and that is where I think that the regional resettlement strategies
which focused on the government office of a particular region
had a critical role to play in getting all the local partners
together. However, having said that, as I said earlier in relation
to the CJIP, I think that capacity at the local level to anticipate
the problems that are going to arise when that community's offenders
return to that area is critical. There is probably more that needs
to be done to tie up what is being done by the Drug Action Teams
and what the crime and disorder reduction partnerships are doing,
but that ability to think about the local problems and reach back
into the custodial system and anticipate the problems that are
coming back to them I think will be critical.
Ms Wallis: I think I would want
in a very simplistic way to segment the prison population to answer
the question. If I can go back to the very heavy, serious end,
then certainly the whole map of infrastructure has been powerfully
effective and of course we are extending that and building on
that. Certainly that critical relationship, as I have said, between
probation, the police and prisons is working very well and now
that prisons, under the Criminal Justice Act, have been made a
responsible authority also, this will help. It remains to be seen
whether the new provision in that Act which places a statutory
duty to co-operate on some of the other players, for example health,
local authorities, housing providers and so forth, we need to
see whether that statutory duty to co-operate actually bites,
but I am optimistic about that. I do not agree with Peter about
those prisoners that we are trying to resettle who are not actually
violent and dangerous. For these as well the national rehabilitation
strategy and regional rehabilitation strategies and how they connect
into the crime and disorder reduction partnerships and the other
organisations I think are very important. We also now have local
criminal justice boards in place and I know that their focus is
on narrowing the justice gap and increasing confidence in criminal
justice and so forth, but again there are powerful players around
that table who might think they can have an influence in bringing
people to the table. I think the other engagement has to be political,
that the big departments of state, as it were, really do share
cross-cutting, common objectives in a way so that whether it is
health or education, it is not just that they help with the provision,
but that they in their policies think about whether this policy
is likely to be crime-increasing or whether this policy is actually
likely to be crime-reducing.
Mr Caton: We hear time and time
again in the Prison Service, the Probation Service and the justice
system about good practice. There is lots of good practice. I
have to say that most of it is reliant on one or two good people,
but because they are good they get moved and then that part of
it collapses. The issue to me is that if you think small, you
get small and if you think big, you get big. If we have got good
ideas, then let's share them and let's make sure that it works
better and let's tackle it so that on a range of issues which
the Committee has heard from us today, there is, I think, sufficient
to tell the Committee that what we should be doing is making sure
that people work together better because we are not working together
very well at all and I think that both reaching in from those
agencies outside of prisons and indeed prison officers working
out in the community will do two things: firstly, it will make
things work better; and, secondly, it will give the general public
the confidence that non-custodial sentences are actually not a
soft option.
Chairman: That is a very good note to
end on. Thank you all very much indeed.
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