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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To
be published as HC 518-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
WEDNESDAY 24 MARCH 2010
MANAGING OFFENDERS ON SHORT CUSTODIAL
SENTENCES
MINISTRY
OF JUSTICE
MR PHIL WHEATLEY
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 119
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Oral evidence
Taken before the Committee of Public
Accounts
on Wednesday 24 March 2010
Members present:
Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair
Mr Richard Bacon
Angela Browning
Mr Paul Burstow
Keith Hill
Mr Austin Mitchell
Dr John Pugh
Mr Don Touhig
________________
Mr Amyas Morse, Comptroller
and Auditor General, National Audit Office, gave evidence.
Mr Marius Gallaher, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, gave evidence.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL
MANAGING OFFENDERS ON SHORT CUSTODIAL SENTENCES (HC
431)
Examination of Witnesses
Witness: Mr Phil Wheatley, Director
General, National Offender Management Service, Ministry of Justice, gave
evidence.
Q1 Chair:
Good
afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of
Public Accounts. I would like to welcome
some overseas visitors. We have visitors
from Anguilla, Portugal and Swaziland, who
are taking part in the Public Administration International Programme,
Alternatives to Custody, so their presence is particularly relevant to us
today. We welcome back to our Committee
to discuss this Report from the Comptroller and Auditor General on Managing
Offenders on Short Custodial Sentences Phil Wheatley, who is the Director General
of the National Offender Management Service. You are shortly to retire and it is therefore
your 13th and final hearing before this Committee.
Mr Wheatley: I understand so, yes.
Q2 Chair:
We
can both enjoy our last time together, Mr Wheatley.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, I understand it is yours
as well, probably.
Q3 Chair:
Obviously
it is reassuring to read in the Report that most of these offenders are kept
safe and of course keeping them in custody does perform one very useful purpose
and that is to stop them offending back in the community. However, I am not convinced that it achieves
a great deal else and that is what I want to question you about, if I may. If we look at the summary on page five,
paragraph six, we will see that although you have succeeded in reducing the
frequency of proven adult re-offending by 10% between 2005 and 2011, despite
that, there is a 3% rise in re-offending by those released from short
sentences. Have you developed a coherent
plan as to how we can make the time in prison for these people useful so they
do not re-offend? Have you a plan?
Mr Wheatley: We have a plan to make some
improvements. I am very wary of saying
we have a plan that, with this group, will make a really significant reduction
to the rate at which they re-offend. The
group we have managed to reduce re-offending with has mainly been the longer-sentenced
prisoners, with whom we have been able to work for a greater length of time, do
offending behaviour programmes, train them and increase their literacy because
we have had the time to do it. We have
concentrated resources on that group quite deliberately because it includes the
most risky. People after all normally
get long sentences for very serious offences and I think the public rightly
expect us to work with those offenders.
For the shorter-sentenced prisoners, just the sheer practicality of
making a difference, even on a six-month sentence with HDC with no more than
seven weeks in custody is very difficult.
We have a strategy which aims to do some of the thing that this Report
identifies, not to duplicate assessments, to have an assessment that is an IT
assessment we can pass between departments and between prisons, a basic
screening tool, to deal with immediate, pressing needs, to try not to damage
some of the protective factors, so to try to make sure they keep housing, that
they do not necessarily lose their job.
We do what we can do to help them maintain their job, but we do not
think we can do much by way of intervention in the limited time available,
particularly as lots of them have drug problems and are actually detoxing
during the first couple of weeks in custody.
Q4 Chair:
We
can talk a bit about that but it is a bit of a depressing answer. You are saying that really, within current
resources, given they are only spending perhaps six weeks in prison, there is
not much more you can do. Is that what
you are saying?
Mr Wheatley: I think that is
realistic. There is more we can do but
not a complete answer for this group. We
will reduce the frequency of re-offending a bit, but I hesitate to say we are going
to make a giant step forward with the existing resources.
Q5 Chair:
It
rather begs the question why prisons are not better prepared and resourced to
try and provide the kind of useful short courses immediately available for
these prisoners that might make a difference.
If we look for instance at paragraph 3.10 on page 28 or figure 12 on
page 29, you can see that the waiting times for some of these courses are often
longer than the time they spend in prison.
If that is the case, they are simply being locked up. They are not going
on any courses and there is a sort of merry-go-round of them coming out of
prison and then re-offending. Why do you
not try to have the kind of short courses immediately available? Six weeks is quite a long time for a course. Can you not have a more pro-active system for
getting people trained in some sort of way?
Mr Wheatley: The answer to that is we can
make it more pro-active. The queuing -
and there is queuing for courses - is a result of there being less supply of
interventions, useful things to do than there is need in prisons. At no point in my time in prisons have I ever
seen the amount of need there is stacked up with prisoners, who often come from
very strange and damaged backgrounds, matched by the resources available. We have always had to prioritise people. It does reflect that. In our planning we are trying to make sure we
have more short courses but really short courses often do not make the
difference. If you want to get a
persistent offender with a drug problem out of crime, there is no short
answer. You have to motivate them to
want to be different in the first place.
It is not just simply a question of giving them a course. They have to really believe they could be
different and then you have to make quite a substantial difference to their
whole mindset.
Q6 Chair:
How
long are these courses, if they had got on them?
Mr Wheatley: The thinking skills course as
an example would probably take about a month to do. The sex offender treatment course will be a
six-month course. The violent offenders'
course is another very long course. To
change people, to make people completely different in the way they behave, is
quite a venture. It is not something you
can do in a quick way.
Q7 Chair:
Are
you even trying?
Mr Wheatley: We are trying, particularly
with education courses so we have pick up and put down courses. You can join them at any point, so we are
trying to have the sort of organisation of education that allows people to join
rather than have to wait until the end of a course, thereby avoiding
queues. We can produce and are producing
some short courses on drug treatment which are not bad courses, although for
the really persistent drug user a short dosage course is probably not going to
make a substantial difference.
Q8 Chair:
There
are some things we can do. For instance,
we read in paragraph 3.14 of this Report and we see at figure 14 that 43% of
prisons hold interviews - this is for resettlement - two weeks or less before a
prisoner's release. "For prisoners
spending more than a few weeks in custody, this is unlikely to maximise their
chances of sorting out accommodation or employment problems." You can say that again. Should you not be getting them in, planning
for when they are going to be released, getting them if you can on some kind of
short course, which is better than no course, and getting an interview or some
help with their resettlement before they leave?
Otherwise, they are coming out without a home or anything and it is not
surprising they go and immediately commit more offences.
Mr Wheatley: Again, in terms of what we
are doing and the changes we propose, we are interviewing all prisoners on
reception and we are proposing a standardised screening, very much what is
recommended in this Report. We have
trialled it. It is working in Yorkshire and Humberside.
I have no reason to believe it will not work in other parts of the
country. We hope to be in a position to
roll that out in an IT form in April.
That will become available. That
will improve the early screening. We do
have to think, as we get close to somebody's discharge date, where are they
going to live and actually the sort of accommodation that our prisoners are
likely to go into you do not book months in advance. It is a question of which hostel has a
vacancy and those decisions are taken fairly close to the wire. That is one of the reasons why, looking at
housing where you have to find accommodation for somebody near to the town they
are going out to, most of the places we are dealing with will not hold places
for a long period. The other thing is we
are never absolutely sure, until we have assessed for HDC, when prisoners are
going to go out because there is the discretionary element of Home Detention
Curfew, with that decision being taken on the basis of information about the
home which you have to get, as well as the nature of their offence and length
of their sentence.
Q9 Chair:
One
part of your work that seems to work reasonably well is drug services and
liaison with them. We read in paragraph
3.15, "With the exception of drug services, short-sentenced prisoners are
frequently released without being put in contact with the community services
they need." Many of these people have an
alcohol problem. Why can you not be as
good with helping people with alcohol problems as with drug problems?
Mr Wheatley: I would be enthusiastic to
have the same sort of service we have for our drug offenders. You have taken evidence recently on the
provision of follow-up for those who have substantial drug problems. The National Treatment Agency, in my view, is
doing a very good job. There is national
coordination. There has been substantial
investment and that provides a much more joined-up service than in areas where
there has not been the same central investment.
The investment that has gone in - it is obviously a political decision -
went in because of the very clear links between drug use and crime. I suppose, although I know there is a very
strong link between alcohol use and crime, lots of us round this table probably
take alcohol from time to time. None of
us I hope is taking drugs. The fact that
alcohol is a more legal substance has probably meant that we do not have quite
the same fear of it, although it does lead to quite a lot of particularly
violent crime.
Q10 Chair:
Others can expand on that if they want
to. If you are going to make a
difference you have to have the right sort of information. If we read these paragraphs between 12 and
17, we will see that there are huge holes in your information. For instance, NOMS does not know the cost of
its work with short-sentenced prisoners or NOMS does not know how many short-sentenced
prisoners are having accommodation and employment needs addressed. We read this again and again. Should you not have better information
systems, better screening, so you know what their needs are and whether you can
help them at all?
Mr Wheatley: We should and we are
developing them, bearing in mind we are a relatively new agency. In our specs and benchmarking programme - it
sounds a rather a grand phrase - what we are trying to do is have precise
specifications about what goes in an induction programme, what goes in a
resettlement programme, with benchmark costs, clarity about what we are trying
to buy to avoid there being too much variation between areas. I accept that there is quite a lot of local
variation. I do not want to have a
giant, centrally run service, but clarity about the costs of doing things. That programme is now proceeding well and we
are getting full costing across the whole range of our activity in prison and
probation. It has been and is still a
big and detailed piece of work. It is
difficult to get really good evidence on what the effect of different
interventions is simply because it has been methodologically very difficult to
untangle the effect of lots of different things. Was it the drug treatment, the caring
officer, the very good prison doctor, or was it the fact that their wife now is
standing by them that made the difference? Trying to untangle which of those it
was is very complex.
Q11 Chair:
This
is your last hearing so you can let your hair down a bit. I want to ask you really a policy point which
may be a bit unfair, but I have long thought it, ever since I was a young
barrister practising in the criminal courts.
I think that short sentences are largely pointless and ineffective. If you get sentenced to 12 months, you get
released automatically after six months, so with anything less than that you
are only in prison for a very few weeks and it is virtually impossible to get
any screening, any course, any help or anything. Should we not just scrap sentences under 12
months and replace them with community service?
Mr Wheatley: Going forward, if we are
looking for a treatment effect with very short sentences, I doubt even if you
threw lots of money at the National Offender Management Service whether we
would deliver very effectively with very short sentences. If you are looking to punish people and say
to those who have very often failed on community sentences or not cooperated,
"There is a price to pay. Punishment",
we punish effectively and we keep people safe while they are punished, that is
all we do. I would not claim any more
than that and I have always been careful not to claim more than that with this
group. It depends what we want to
do. I have sympathy with the court faced
with a repetitive offender who has had lots of community interventions, who has
very often failed them or not cooperated with them, thinking what do we do with
this person, particularly when they have obvious problems that really are very
difficult to deal with without cooperation from the offender themselves.
Q12 Chair:
There
may be something in having a minimum custodial sentence of a year.
Mr Wheatley: There may be. You would need to model through the cost of
that. Was anybody making that proposal
making sure that we could accommodate that?
I have always taken the line that I am a jailer. I do not try and sentence people.
Chair: You are a very nice jailer
anyway, Mr Wheatley.
Q13 Mr
Touhig: We see on page 12, paragraph 1.9, that you are
trialling new intensive alternatives to custody. What are these alternatives?
Mr Wheatley: They are part of a standard
variety available to the courts. What we
try to do is make sure, in areas where we have put in additional funding, that
the courts have a wider range of things that are funded and available to them
so you can put together tagging with an offending behaviour programme alongside
drug treatment, so you build in what is now available to the courts as part of
the menu but you make sure that they can do complex orders that appear to meet
the needs of offenders and offer some tight control of them. We are hoping that by running that, if we find
that the courts have a greater take-up, we may be able to move money out of
prisons into probation, but it will save money in prisons if we do not have to
expand at quite the rate we currently expect we will have to. They are only pilots at the moment.
Q14 Mr
Touhig: How long have you been trialling these?
Mr Wheatley: I cannot tell you. I would have to write and give you precise
details.
Q15 Mr
Touhig: Have you reached any conclusions so far?
Mr Wheatley: At the moment they look
promising but they are quite expensive and my ability to roll them out across
probation also depends upon availability of resources. What I have to watch is, if we use less
imprisonment, because we are so overcrowded, the effect of having slightly
fewer prisoners is not to produce a lot of cashable savings. All I really save is the cost of feeding
people and a bit of heat and light for them rather than being able to close a
prison and therefore make cashable savings.
Q16 Mr
Touhig: Have you a time frame when this is going to
end? This year, next year or whenever?
Mr Wheatley: To give you a tight timescale
and be accurate about it I would like to write but it is not in the immediate
future.
Q17 Mr
Touhig: You will have gone?
Mr Wheatley: I will have gone, which is
why I do not have it in mind. It is a
longer term programme. It is a sensible
programme and so far promising but getting cashable savings to fund it will be
a challenge.
Q18 Mr
Touhig: In the Report the Comptroller and Auditor
General tells us on page seven, paragraph 18, that one in three short-sentenced
prisoners said alcohol abuse was connected with their offending; yet the
resource that you put into treating people with alcohol problems is far less
than the resource you put into treating people with drug problems. Why is this?
Mr Wheatley: Mainly because the money that
has arrived and is given to us has come from Government, ring-fenced for use
with drugs. The Government has taken
decisions to fund drug treatment, NTA and drug treatment in prisons as part of
that. The National Health Service has
also funded detox because they now supply our health in prisons. It is not my funding that supplies health in
prison. A similar investment has not
been made in alcohol. Within our own
resources we are trying to make some available and the National Health Service
is also now much more alert to the alcohol problem and is also beginning to
develop additional resources or skewing resources for use with those who have
alcohol problems, which is a significant number, as you were saying.
Q19 Mr
Touhig: One in three.
Without wanting to ask you to comment on policy, you will surely
influence Government policy and how it develops in this sort of way. You mentioned perhaps we all take a drink and
we do not take drugs. Because most of us
will have a drink and we do not drink to excess, we do not think alcohol is a
problem. Most of us do not take drugs
but we do think drugs are a problem. It
is the perception that is a huge difficulty there. Society as a whole has a greater problem with
alcohol misuse than drug misuse. I am
sure the prison population reflects that.
Do you not really think, notwithstanding that it is not entirely within
your orbit to decide policy, that a proper alcohol strategy is very important
and more important than a drug strategy?
Mr Wheatley: I think lots of substances
are capable of being abused and, when they are abused, they cause
problems. I would quite like a strategy
that addressed substance abuse, whether it is sniffing lighter fuel or whether
it is drinking too much or using drugs.
In all my career I have seen people who have abused a variety of
substances which have led them into crime, sometimes alcohol, sometimes hard
drugs, sometimes modern designer drugs.
I would rather we viewed substance abuse as the main issue and then
tried to deal with those who have those sort of out-of-control behaviours.
Q20 Mr
Touhig: I believe that alcohol is a bigger
problem. All the figures show that
alcohol is the bigger problem.
Mr Wheatley: Alcohol is heavily related to
---
Q21 Mr
Touhig: Domestic violence?
Mr Wheatley: Violence, yes.
Q22 Mr
Touhig: It is a huge problem. I remember in a previous incarnation when I
chaired the All-Party Group on Alcohol Misuse asking a Government minister why
the Government was putting more emphasis on drug misuse than alcohol
misuse. I was told that they did not
think that alcohol misuse was such a problem and, if we had a problem with
school children, the advice we were given by the minister was to tell school
children to go and talk it over with matron.
I did not think that was a good idea in Newbridge Comprehensive
School. The point I am trying to get across is you do
influence Government policy. You do see
that one in three people in prisons have a drink-related problem. Do we not need a really big resource, a
strategy, with which we can tackle it?
Mr Wheatley: I have consistently said that
the main problem is abusing substances, which include alcohol. We should be dealing with substance
abuse. In defence of spending money on
drugs, the one thing I do know about drugs that is not true of alcohol is,
because it is an illegal trade, it is not only the use effects; it is also the
effects of the dealing, the importation and all the crime that goes with that. Drugs bring in their wake a whole other group
of crimes. When I met an armed robber
who I knew from yesteryear, he told me all the money is in drugs nowadays and
only mugs do armed robbery. That relates
to that trade, which there is not in alcohol.
Alcohol is a legitimate trade and the only people who make money are
legitimate companies.
Q23 Mr
Touhig: Yes, they do.
The only way to hit them is to hit their profits. Have you collaborated with Alcohol Concern in
any kind of strategy?
Mr Wheatley: We have collaborated. The main contacts we have in alcohol are with
the NHS, who are taking alcohol seriously so we are getting increased
investment and interest from our Primary Care Trusts and from Alcoholics
Anonymous, which is the group that we have worked with for years who have
produced some of the best support for offenders consistently over the years.
Q24 Mr
Touhig: Can I move on in terms of the assessment that
you do and so on when people are in prison for short periods? We see again from the Report that there is a
lot of wasteful repetition when people are moved from one prison to
another. What can you do to try and
avoid that repetition? I remember
dealing with a case some years ago when youngsters were statemented and every
time they moved from one area to another they had to be re-statemented. I said, "Why cannot we have a statementing
passport?" Is there not some way in
which ---?
Mr Wheatley: There is. It is a very fair criticism. The majority of these offenders we try not to
move as they are only serving very short sentences. Traditionally, they have served them in a
local prison but, as we have got more crowded, we have tended to move them to
make room for the next day's reception, so the velocity of movement through the
system has probably gone up recently.
The answer is a standardised tool that is available on our intranet,
that is part of our IT system, that means once you have entered the data
everybody can see it. You do not have to
redo it. It is the answer. We are within a month of rolling that
out.
Q25 Mr
Touhig: This repetition costs money but you do not
seem to know how much it is costing you.
Mr Wheatley: I do not by its very nature
because, unlike the ICT tool that I am about to produce where I will be able to
count it up, I cannot easily count up what governor X has done which has
amounted to bits of staff time, different grades done in different prisons in a
different way. I would have to have a
fairly substantial data collection exercise to give me that information which
would probably cost more than it is worth.
Q26 Mr
Touhig: Am I right in thinking you are going to pilot
a simple custody screening tool later this year?
Mr Wheatley: We are.
Q27 Mr
Touhig: It would be a good idea to know what the
present system is costing you and what waste is in the present system to make
sure it is not built into the new system.
Mr Wheatley: What I am doing in the
piloted establishments, which are Yorkshire
and Humberside establishments - it includes Hull and Moorland for example, where one of
my directors has recently been - is looking at what they used to spend versus
what this new tool does. That is giving
us the information in the piloted sites and that will allow us to compare it.
Q28 Angela
Browning: Why is it that seven and a half years after
you accepted the recommendation of this Committee that you would be able to
monitor and identify whether you were actually helping to reduce re-offending
with these short-term prisoners, you are still not able to measure your
success?
Mr Wheatley: The answer to that is the
complexity of the research task. That is
the real difficulty. I can measure accurately
whether we are reducing re-offending in this group. The annually produced statistics which give
us the re-offending data, the last ones produced on 18 March, last week, do
tell me whether we are reducing re-offending in this group or not. At the moment they say in this group we have
made some reductions in the very high rates of re-offending versus what we
thought would happen, the predicted rate, but they are still doing worse than
the predictor. I have information on
that. Working out precisely which
intervention has which effect is, in methodological terms, really the devil and
no criminologist has effectively found a way of isolating enough of the other
factors to be sure that the one you are looking at is the one that you are
really measuring.
Q29 Angela
Browning: You are not going to give us any hope today
that you might be able to resolve this problem?
Mr Wheatley: No. What we are doing at the moment, which I
think will get us nearer to resolving the problem, is we have a really
intensive piece of work on a tranche of offenders, a large group of offenders,
on which we are acquiring lots and lots of detail, following them over time to
see what happens to them, trying to relate the different bits so that we can
make more sense of it. It is a long-term
piece of research being done by the Ministry of Justice research statistics
outfit, which is clever stuff. I think
that will get us more information. There
is another stream of information coming out of mainstream criminology, which is
looking at offenders who have given up crime and saying to them, "Why did you
give up crime?" and trying to understand not just why people go wrong but also
why they give up. That desistance criminology,
as it is called, is I think producing some real insights which say that the
thing that changes people is being motivated to think they could be
different. That often depends on really
powerful, influential people working with them who do not necessarily have to
be wildly professionally trained and may include their family or friends, but
probably will be a member of staff who says, "Actually, there is something
about you that means you do not need to live this sort of life" and them
clicking and thinking they are right.
Then you have to stack in behind them some practical help and not send
them back to a house, sharing it with another four drug users, all of whom are
thieving.
Q30 Angela
Browning: Perhaps we could come onto that a little bit
more in a moment. I would just like to
talk about drug and alcohol offenders.
Would it be right to say that those who get a short-term custodial
sentence are people who are either not eligible for drug and alcohol treatment
centres, as far as the courts are concerned, or have breached that award from
the court in the first place?
Mr Wheatley: I am not sure because I
cannot always get into sentencers' minds, but I think that is probably a valid
statement. The courts will often use a
short-term sentence with somebody who is not cooperating with other treatment
options.
Q31 Angela
Browning: Just picking up on what the Chairman said
about should we really be considering whether these short-term sentences are
effective or not, would it then be fair to say that short-term sentences are
really for containment and that it is unrealistic for us to expect you to carry
out rehabilitation?
Mr Wheatley: It is the same as the answer
I gave to the Chairman really. My view
is that it is likely with very short sentences - bearing in mind this is quite
a wide spectrum, up to 12 months - and with the majority of them only getting
sentences of three months or less that we will not realistically be able to
make a big difference while they are inside.
The most we can do is identify their problems and try to signpost them
into other services. It is easy with
drugs because there is a national service.
It is less easy with housing and things like that, where there is lots
of local provision and different views by different local authorities about how
much they want to help this group.
Q32 Angela
Browning: There do seem to be in this NAO Report
exemplars of, for example, liaison with employment and housing. If we look on page 27 we can see how
important having a job and having a place to live is in terms of
re-offending. This is from the offenders
themselves. Presumably some of these
people are not actually sentenced in a prison close to their home, so for the
prison to liaise with the charitable or voluntary sector or statutory services
close to home I assume creates a practical problem?
Mr Wheatley: It does. We have been trying to encourage governors
and probation officers because we are dealing with the same group. They may have done a community sentence one
time and then they get a short-term sentence.
We have been trying to encourage them to do local deals with local
providers, local authorities, local charities, which is one of the reasons why
we do not have a perfectly standardised product. That works best in the big unitaries. Most of our local prisons are in big crime-producing
areas. I do not want to be rude about
the big cities but that is where most crime comes from. It is much less easy to make links, shall we
say, from Leeds Prison out with the wilds of North
Yorkshire, although they will draw on North
Yorkshire. It is much
easier for them to make links in Leeds and Bradford where the majority of offenders will come from,
so we are ending up with a fairly patchy service. The services we are trying to tap into are
local services controlled locally with quite different views in different local
authorities about how much they want to invest in giving things to what some of
their voters might see as the undeserving poor.
Q33 Angela
Browning: As I am looking at it, if somebody is in for
six months and that is the period of the sentence, that is not very long to
deal with people who very often have very, very complex problems, not just the
obvious drug or alcohol problem but some of the issues that you talked about
earlier on. In that six-month window
that you have, I come back to this question: is it unrealistic to expect you to
do more than give them a bed and some food?
Is it really practical to expect you to do more? When I look at page 27, I see that in some
prisons they have spent time training people to work in call centres and
offered a scaffolding course. That comes
straight back to the thing that was right at the top of the list on
re-offending and that is having a job.
If some prisons can do that, why are not those exemplars being spread
out more widely among the Prison Service?
Mr Wheatley: We are trying to spread the
ideas. These are innovative ideas
developed locally. I do not think
everything is good that we develop at the centre. They have often been done in cooperation with
other agencies that have put some of their money in to help deliver these
things. It is one of the interesting
things about what we have been succeeding in doing. We are spreading those. I have just been to a conference where we
have been speaking about some of these really successful schemes so that other
people know what is possible. They
probably even then do not work with the very short-sentenced prisoners. I am using this term advisedly because your
six-month sentence I only have them for three months. When this Report was being done, I had them
for less than that because they were getting ECL,
out 18 days before the end of their sentence otherwise, and they may also get
Home Detention Curfew after a quarter of a sentence, providing they have served
30 days. In practice, what sounds like
six months, in terms of time with me, is much less than that.
Q34 Angela
Browning: Just coming back to the drug and alcohol
situation, I think we see this all the time.
Okay, it may be a policy priority to deal with drugs but both of these
are addictions, are they not? If
somebody is addicted to alcohol and that is part of their problem and why they
were there in the first place, if the alcohol has created a violent situation
which led to the sentence, you are actually going to be sending them out in no
better a state than they came in, are you?
Mr Wheatley: No. We will have dried them out for a bit because
they will not be drinking inside. We are
quite good at that. We will have
probably sorted their health out a bit.
We do some practical things about that.
We will have fed them properly.
They will go out and the risk is they will go out and have a drink
straight away. We will try to connect
them with Alcoholics Anonymous. We will
have looked for people who wanted to give up.
Motivating people and following through on it in, say, the course of
what in many cases is a two-month sentence, four weeks inside of which a week
has been on remand when they were not actually convicted; they were innocent
people awaiting trial, is very difficult.
I do not want to claim more than is realistic.
Q35 Angela
Browning: No. I
am reminded that I have had case work of people who are addicted to alcohol,
who are not in prison but are in the community, where relatives have tried to
get that person on an alcohol treatment programme through their GP or the local
health authority. The question always
comes back, unless they themselves, the person who is addicted, are
demonstrating that they are willing to be pro-active on the course, it is
denied them. To a degree that is a
chicken and egg situation, is it not?
For someone who is addicted to something to be able to have the clarity
at any given point in time to say, "No" or, "Yes, I will cooperate", is that
not the complexity of alcohol? Is that
not why both in the community and in prison it has been downgraded, if you
like, because it is much more complex than it looks on the surface?
Mr Wheatley: It is certainly complex. It is very difficult to treat people who are
not cooperating.
Q36 Angela
Browning: I agree with you but if they are addicted ---
Mr Wheatley: We will dry them out. I can tell you, in terms of dealing with
addiction, when we meet somebody who is deeply addicted to alcohol - and some
of our offenders are; some are just problem drinkers. They can manage without it but when they
drink they are a problem. They lose
control and hit people - it is more difficult to detox somebody through an
alcohol detox than it is getting them off heroin.
Q37 Angela
Browning: You said it but that was rather what I was
referring to.
Mr Wheatley: We do that. The medical detoxes are available and that is
governed by the NHS. It is a different
thing from saying then, "Okay. What
services are available in the community, even when you have detoxed somebody,
to support somebody with a substantial alcohol problem?" It is true that there is nothing equivalent
to the National Treatment Agency for alcohol.
Q38 Angela
Browning: That is what my experience in my constituency
has been where I have seen it work successfully after the drying out
period. People have then gone to a
half-way house where there has been an extended period of rehabilitation to
normal social relationships and normal living and they have then moved on from
there. That is quite a costly and time-consuming
process. That is why I just wonder if
you can even attempt it in a short sentence.
Mr Wheatley: We will not get that
follow-through in a short sentence. We
probably cannot immediately match them into that provision in the community for
the reasons you have just identified. In
any case, the whole treatment process is expensive. It may not actually save money immediately,
but it is probably the best way of getting a really addicted person off. Lots of the people we deal with are problem
drinkers - ie, when in drink they do foolish, dangerous and criminal things and
are dangerous to other people.
Chair: Thank God, Mr Wheatley, that
we do not become institutionalised.
Sometimes we do in this place. We
are long-term inmates. Talking of which,
Mr Mitchell?
Q39 Mr
Mitchell: Still as charming as ever! This Report is pretty depressing to me. It is a story of failure really, is it
not? I do not see that prison has any
relevance except in so far as it keeps people off the streets for a period
short or long, but it is certainly useless at redemption.
Mr Wheatley: Because you have asked the
question about prison itself, prison for long-term prisoners is making quite a
substantial difference to re-offending.
Q40 Mr
Mitchell: But not for short-termers?
Mr Wheatley: For the long-termers it makes
a real difference. For short-termers it
does not. It may be depressing but it is
a realistic and accurate Report.
Q41 Mr
Mitchell: Why is that?
You said in answer to Angela Browning that short-term sentences are
pretty useless. Is it because of that,
that it is really a useless way of treating people, or is it because the
prisons are overcrowded and we do not spend enough money on them, we do not do
enough in training and all the rest of it?
Mr Wheatley: I have never had enough money
at any time while I have been in charge of the service.
Q42 Mr
Mitchell: Which is the major cause of the problem?
Mr Wheatley: I have never had enough money
to do lots of things with short-term offenders.--
Q43 Mr
Mitchell: You never will.
Mr Wheatley: I cannot judge what would
happen if I did. We have spent money in
improving what we do with long-termers, the one year and over group, and made a
substantial improvement. The very best
results are with the four year and over group.
I am comparing the eventual reconviction with what we expected would
happen based on their age and number of convictions. I think it is a genuine treatment
effect. I have not seen it with short-termers
and I am fairly sceptical about whether we can achieve it with very short-sentenced
prisoners, honestly.
Q44 Mr
Mitchell: You said in a short period all you can do is
kind of signpost their needs and assess their needs, but even that seems to
fail because the rate of offending is very high. I see on figure 11 that Angela Browning has
just quoted the main factors in stopping re-offending as reported by the
prisoners themselves are, one, having a job; two, having a place to live, which
are the areas where you help the least.
You say you do a good deal on drugs but it is having a job and having
somewhere to live that are the most important things.
Mr Wheatley: In terms of helping people to
get into accommodation, we have made some substantial progress.
Q45 Mr
Mitchell: But not enough.
Mr Wheatley: Something like 96%. The latest data suggests that they are going
into what we call "settled housing". I
would not want to rave about the quality of the places they are going to.
Q46 Mr
Mitchell: You assess them too late there, do you not,
because you have to get them on a housing list early, whereas it is often left
until the last couple of weeks before they are out?
Mr Wheatley: We will not be getting them
into local authority housing or anything of that quality. It will probably be bedsits, probably
reasonable-quality bedsits. We have done
some reasonable work there but I am not claiming too much. Although I think we have made some
improvements there, this is a very difficult group to help. The reason why they re-offend a lot is because
they have lots of previous offences. We would
predict they would re-offend on the basis of having offended previously.
Q47 Mr
Mitchell: The purpose in establishing the National
Offender Management Service, we were told at the time, was that you could
provide a through service, often supervised by one person, which would help
them when they were in prison and help them when they came out. That has not been achieved.
Mr Wheatley: That is unfair as a
criticism. Where we have that power,
which is where we supervise people after release, which we do with all the 12
month and over prisoners, we are making a difference in re-offending and we can
see that on the data. With this group,
there is no follow-through because statutorily we have no power over them once
they leave us; whereas with a 12 month and over prisoner we have the power to
supervise them. Where we have that
power, we are offering a better tie up between the prison and the community
that is paying off. This is not an area
where we have that power.
Q48 Mr
Mitchell: The rest you are washing your hands of.
Mr Wheatley: Nobody has given me the power
which I would need to follow through on them.
What I think we are probably underselling - and this is not a claim I am
making for me - is many local authorities working with the police are
introducing what are called "integrated offender management schemes" where,
although it is voluntary, they are getting sign up from offenders who are
pleased to have the assistance and they are working with some of the riskiest
people.
Q49 Mr
Mitchell: I am glad to hear that. Can you quantify it? You said many local authorities. How many local authorities?
Mr Wheatley: No, I cannot tell you how
many local authorities. I can tell you
there are six pilots going on that the Home Office is sponsoring.
Q50 Mr
Mitchell: We have more pilots in this Government than
British Airways. Is it all pilots?
Mr Wheatley: These pilots are working! This makes sense and the police are very keen
on it. It depends on local police
forces. This is not being run from the
centre. I believe in localism. That means that local people have power. Some local authorities are thinking this is
something to work on. The local police
are working with them. I visited one in
Tameside which is Ashton-under-Lyne and Denton as I would know
it. It is really very good joint
working.
Q51 Mr
Mitchell: I am glad to hear that. Let me move back into prison. While you say good work is done when they
come out, it looks as though the time in prison is pretty useless. They say between a third and a half of short-sentenced
prisoners, including those with the least motivation to seek help, are not
involved in work or courses and spend almost all day in their cells. At HMP
Doncaster, short-sentenced prisoners undertake an average of 31 minutes of
purposeful activity every week day.
Presumably they sit and look at the wall for the rest of the day. I know Doncaster
is not an exciting place when I go through it but it cannot be as bad as that.
Mr Wheatley: Many of these offenders in
local prisons are, as the Report accurately says, locked up in their cells.
Q52 Mr
Mitchell: Why is that?
Mr Wheatley: Because there is not enough
resource - that is both money and buildings - to provide the sort of occupation
that would get people out of their cells, which is an expensive business. I am running overcrowded prisons very often
with facilities that were provided years ago for a different service and trying
to make the best I can of that. That
does not allow me to occupy all prisoners every day in a way that I would like.
Q53 Mr
Mitchell: You are saying that, within this overcrowded
service, the short-termers get the worst deal of all?
Mr Wheatley: That is accurate, yes. If it comes to a choice, if I am honest,
about whether we look after a long-termer, a lifer, with substantial problems,
a very dangerous individual we are going to have to get through a long
sentence, the resources will go to make sure we get that person through a long
sentence. If we prioritise the short-termers
and ignore the long-termers, the consequences in terms of suicide, disorder and
public criticism, because the people concerned would either not ever be
released because we would never reduce their risk or, when released off fixed
sentences, are that you would say, "You knew this person was dangerous and you
have done nothing with them." They get
the priority. In public accountability
terms I think that is right.
Q54 Mr
Mitchell: I can understand that in the present strained
system but it is not desirable, is it?
Mr Wheatley: No.
Q55 Mr
Mitchell: It seems to me, within that context, that you
are still not doing enough for the short-sentenced people in prison because it
says in the Report at 3.11 that 40% of short-sentenced prisoners reported
receiving no help to meet any of their needs during their sentence. What is the point of assessment if they are
not getting any help?
Mr Wheatley: The corollary of that is 60%
did get some help of course, so it is not entirely as bad as you paint it.
Q56 Mr
Mitchell: I think this is pathetic.
Mr Wheatley: I am not dodging it. In a constrained system this is a group that
is serving very little time, in many cases only weeks, less than weeks in some
cases. We are not giving them anything
near a Rolls-Royce service and some get only a very, very basic service. We are proposing better assessment,
signposting the riskiest into local authority services and trying to make the
links with local authorities and others to give them better provision outside if
they will volunteer. I have no powers to
force them because I have no statutory control over them once they leave
prison.
Q57 Mr
Mitchell: You have in prison. Paragraph 3.15 tells us that aside from drug
users, who you have emphasised and rightly so, most short-sentenced prisoners
leave prison in the same or a worse situation than they arrived in.
Mr Wheatley: They will probably have had
their drugs problem sorted out. They
will have had their immediate detox arrangements taking place. They will otherwise be unlikely to have had
much by way of additional assistance on very short sentences. That is not true of the slightly longer group
because we are lumping all the under 12 month group together. The bulk of them are serving under three
months and they would get the least.
Q58 Mr
Mitchell: Why have you not set out any guidance to
prison governors on expectations of what they should do?
Mr Wheatley: We tend not to have guidance
that is specific about sentence length.
The guidance to governors is to assess, to try and meet needs where they
can. What I am aware of is that the
provision that they have, particularly of offending behaviour programmes which
are quite long, simply does not match this group. We have been saying to governors, rather than
writing guidance, "Try and develop local partnerships. Try and work in cooperation." That is why we have been getting some of
these innovative answers, but it has relied on the local ability to connect
through with local services in your area and the willingness of different
charities, local authorities and local bodies to cooperate with this group,
which is quite patchy.
Mr Mitchell: Thanks. I would like to ask more but my sentence has
expired.
Q59 Chair:
I am
going to keep asking the same question and you keep giving the same
answer. I am not sure it is as hopeless
as you intimate. If we look at page 35,
figure 16, we see "Analysis of costs at HMP Lincoln" which is my local prison,
a very famous prison. Eamon de Valera walked
out of it, did he not? You were not in
charge so do not worry.
Mr Wheatley: He went on to greater things.
Q60 Chair:
That
is a matter of opinion. Why is it that
apparently - I may have this wrong - we are spending an average amount per short-sentenced
prisoner in Lincoln,
my local prison, of 1,300 and in New Hall it is 3,100? What is going on?
Mr Wheatley: New Hall is a women's prison.
Q61 Chair:
Why
is there this difference?
Mr Wheatley: Because of the complex
problems that women bring with them.
They do bring more complex problems, particularly more drug problems
than the male population. Often there
are children issues. They are the
primary carers for children and, because of the prevalence of mental health
problems, we over-invest in women compared to some of the male prisons. We say that is not straightforward
discrimination. That is because they
have a different ---
Q62 Chair:
That
is fair enough. I am not complaining
about that. Do you have success then? You are spending a lot more money, over twice
as much. Are you having success?
Mr Wheatley: Given the scale of problems
we are managing with women, the courts tend not to send women offenders down to
us unless they really feel it is the last resort. I think most courts are very unwilling to
sentence women to custody, so they usually come in with a complex series of problems. We manage those better, preventing suicide
and dealing with some quite significant mental health problems and really heavy
drug addiction. A lot of the women have
used opiates extensively. Yes, we
successfully manage that. I am not
claiming that has a giant effect on re-offending, but we have that duty to look
after people in difficulties and keep them alive.
Q63 Dr
Pugh: It says in 3.26, "Prisons have little
understanding of the outcomes of the work they do in any of the seven Reducing
Re-offending Pathways." In 3.23 it says,
"Prisons have a poor understanding of the quality and impact of the work they
do with short-sentenced prisoners. This
is partly because information about good and bad practice is not generated or
shared ..." Am I right to conclude that
there is good practice in the service but it is not either built on or readily
identified and, if there is success, it is almost random?
Mr Wheatley: There is some justice in that
criticism. Because we have let prison
governors have more freedom than I am normally characterised as allowing prison
governors - I am usually seen as an authoritarian person who flies everybody by
wire - it does mean that people generate new things because they thought of
them which I do not know about at the centre.
What we have been trying to do is use our regional management system to
identify where we have things that are successful and highlight them. I have just come from a conference which
includes quite a lot of that as we try and spread some of the better ideas
around. It does mean that small-scale
ideas will not get heavyweight evaluation, so that is the risk of allowing that
sort of approach. Because it is so
difficult to work out what is really making a difference in this area, that
means we do not learn as much as we would if we had lots of money to spend on
evaluation, but it would need lots of money to do really quality work so we
could be certain that what we had was not a random effect or the result of some
other change we had made.
Q64 Dr
Pugh: You are not entirely clear about what does
work well with a short sentence, but what you are I think fairly convinced of,
and we all are fairly convinced of, is that long sentences by and large from
the re-offending point of view work better.
Mr Wheatley: The evidence clearly shows
that.
Q65 Dr
Pugh: Two-year community orders work better and are
cheaper and so on. I suppose therefore
you need to go back to the thrust of the Chairman's original question, which is
why do we have short-term sentences at all.
You have reduced the numbers, have you not, or the system has fewer short-term
sentences in it?
Mr Wheatley: The percentage of offenders
in the population on a short sentence is less than it used to be. There are still lots of short-sentenced prisoners
but it is usually running at about the 8,000 level out of my 84,000-plus
offenders, so it is round about the 10% mark, I think, and 9% at the point this
Report was done. We are holding it at
that level. Historically that is very
low and compared to other prison systems that is very low. You could put it the other way round and say
our prison system has lots of long-sentenced prisoners. You can look at it both ways round.
Q66 Dr
Pugh: What also appears to be the case and what you
seem to be saying to us at any rate is that the people who do get these
ineffective, short-term sentences are by and large people for whom other
remedies have been tried and they have not worked. Have you any stats for that? How many people who get short-term sentences
have been on ---?
Mr Wheatley: There are stats on it in that
we can look at the number of short-sentenced prisoners and say how many
convictions have they previously had.
Q67 Dr
Pugh: Short-term ones have more. It says that in the Report.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, that is right. That shows that they have had more
convictions. I cannot tell you which
paragraph it is in but in the Report it tells you I think the number who are in
for breach of community sentences.
Certainly that is data that is available. I ought to point out there are different
groups in the short-sentenced population.
It will also include some first-time offenders, mainly coming in for the
sorts of things the courts looked at and thought that must be prison because it
is so important: breach of trust by senior and responsible people, violence by
people who do not regularly commit violence but they have committed a serious
act of violence. They have a very low
probability of offending. The courts
have given a prison sentence because of the seriousness of their offence and
the actual reality with that group seems to be they do even better than the
prediction. I am told that paragraph 13
and figure 16 too have the data in.
Q68 Dr
Pugh: Is there a case for something like a short-term
plus, an amalgam sentence, which puts people in for a short period and then
follows that through with something approaching a community order system?
Mr Wheatley: On the statute book there is
what is called "Custody Plus" which did just that.
Q69 Dr
Pugh: Is it noticeably more effective?
Mr Wheatley: It has never been activated
by the Government so I could not tell you how effective it is, but it does
exist. It is on the statute book. It was never activated.
Q70 Dr
Pugh: On figure eight, page 20, you have figures on
gambling addiction which is I do not think the sort of addiction we have talked
about beforehand. There seems to be very
little done about that and very little identification of it. Is it the case that you basically cannot size
that problem out or, even if you can, you do not know what to do about it? Clearly if somebody has a gambling addiction
and gets themselves in debt constantly, they will go right back to crime.
Mr Wheatley: You are right in thinking
that, apart from some contact with Gamblers' Anonymous which we have had some
contact with over the years, we do not have a gambling course as such. In my experience, I am a bit wary of the
reference to "gambling addiction" because it is not like the sort of chemical
addiction that you get to alcohol and to drugs.
Q71 Dr
Pugh: It can be just as serious.
Mr Wheatley: It is more the addiction to a
very risky, taking chances lifestyle that often goes with a whole clump of
other criminal behaviours, which are the behaviours we try and tackle.
Q72 Dr
Pugh: On page 30, figure 13, victim awareness,
"Activities undertaken by a group of prisoners during sentences". The figure for victim awareness, which
presumably makes people aware of who actually suffer from their crimes, is very
low indeed. Is there a reason for that
or is it just difficult to arrange it in prison?
Mr Wheatley: This was the percentage of
prisoners serving 12 months or longer who said they received this. It shows the difference between the longer
sentenced and the shorter sentenced.
Q73 Dr
Pugh: Yes, a massive difference.
Mr Wheatley: Victim awareness is usually
part of the offending behaviour courses that we do. You cannot have a quick session with somebody
and say, "Remember this victim", this is getting people to think quite
differently, and the thinking quite differently about victims takes time which
is not available on these short sentences.
It relates to not doing offending behaviour courses with very short
sentences because they simply do not match the timescale.
Q74 Keith
Hill: Mr Wheatley, are these kinds of prisoners what
you might call prolific offenders? Is
that the kind of expression you would use about them?
Mr Wheatley: Many of this group will be
prolific. They do vary from this one-off
group right through to 20 previous convictions, been doing it since they were a
lad and they are now in their fifties with a drug problem, which they still
have, mainly funded by shoplifting. If
you look at the offences committed by this group, theft is the main offence. Within the group there is quite a wide
variety, but there is a substantial group of regular offenders with a substance
abuse problem, particularly a drug problem, and if it is a drug problem you
have almost certainly got to fund it from crime once you are well into drug
use. The most ordinary crime is prolific
shoplifting.
Q75 Keith
Hill: I am looking at figure two on page 13, to
which the NAO has just drawn our attention.
It looks as though about half the crimes - theft and handling, burglary
and robbery, drug offences, violence against the person - might be said to be
associated with various forms of substance and alcohol abuse.
Mr Wheatley: The violence is particularly
alcohol abuse.
Q76 Keith
Hill: Do we know how many there are?
Mr Wheatley: Other than the information
here, no is the answer to that. This is
as good information as we have got on this group.
Q77 Keith
Hill: Do we know how many short-sentenced offenders
there are in total in our society? Is it
possible to put a number on that?
Mr Wheatley: I cannot tell you the number
of people in society who have had a short sentence at some point, no, I have
not got figures on that. I can tell you
there are approximately 8,000 in our custody at any one time.
Q78 Keith
Hill: The 10% that you have talked about. How many short sentences will a typical short
sentence offender have undergone?
Mr Wheatley: Again, if I am not mistaken,
we have got stats in the Report on that, figure four, which tells us how many
people have had how many sentences That
is criminal history of short-sentenced prisoners. It shows a fairly substantial number in 2008
with 20-plus previous convictions. Yes,
it includes some very prolific offenders.
Q79 Keith
Hill: They are about 10% of the prison population at
any one time. What does that 10%
represent in terms of the cost to the prison system?
Mr Wheatley: The cost per place per
prisoner is approximately £40,000 taking account of the capital cost of
prisons. The add-on cost that comes from
holding somebody having 10% overcrowding in Pentonville today rather than being
dead on their CNA is not very great because the additional cost of holding
people once you are overcrowding is simply the cost of feeding them and a
little bit of additional cost for discharge grants and things like that. It is difficult to give you a straightforward
answer. I think the best way of seeing
it is to say that the cost per prisoner place is in the order of £40,000 once
you take account of the cost of having to have a prison in the first place. That is the real cost to us as the public.
Q80 Keith
Hill: You are saying they represent 10% of the cost?
Mr Wheatley: If we had 8,000 less people
in we would need 8,000 less prison places and that would mean you could close a
lot of prisons or not build prisons.
Q81 Keith
Hill: I understand that point. Can I just pursue the issue that Mr Touhig
raised, which is the new intensive alternatives to custody you are
trialling. Could you say a little more
about what they are?
Mr Wheatley: They are just that, they are
intensive: ie the range of things the court normally has available as choices
when dealing with an offender, we are making sure that we can fund them and
have a wide variety of things so we are able to say to the court, "If you give
this offender a community sentence, in this case we are able to supply tagging,
an offending behaviour course, we will be putting a mentor with them, we think
we can get them on a training course".
So you put together a package of measures which are more expensive than
the average community sentence and more intense. We are hoping that is attractive to the
courts and, therefore, they make less use of prison custody. We are hoping it also has a therapeutic
effect and will get a better result in terms of reducing re-offending.
Q82 Keith
Hill: You said that although it is early days these
are looking promising. What does that
mean?
Mr Wheatley: At the moment the information
I have got is they are looking promising.
The issue is if you were going to scale with them they would have a cost
implication across the Probation Service which I would have to have a way of
funding by getting cashable savings from something else. Unless I am closing places I am not expecting
to close at the moment, that will not give me cashable savings. Next year I have to find £200 million worth
of savings across the system because as a result of the previous spending
review and minor changes to it during the course of the last few years we have
a tough settlement to live within. The country, after all, is not rich at the
moment and I am expecting that nobody will give us more money, we will have to
make those £200 million savings before we do anything else.
Q83 Keith
Hill: Thank you for flagging that up. Other colleagues may wish to pursue
that. You mentioned, and the NAO in its
Report also draws attention to the fact that one in six short-sentenced
prisoners are in prison because they have breached their community order. That is paragraph 1.10, page 12. What are the implications of this for dealing
with offenders more effectively in the community?
Mr Wheatley: I am not sure there are
implications. I think if we are going to
make community sentences work and magistrates believe in them we have to breach
people who do not follow them through.
If we do not do that we bring our community sentences into
disrepute. I also think that unless you
set very clear boundaries for offenders and mean them people will start to take
advantage of you. I feel quite strongly
that if we want community sentences to work we have to accept that we will
breach people and there has to be a consequence for breach which the average
person looks at and thinks, "That's not a good idea". Prison does meet that need. Most people do not volunteer for prison. There are a few who do, but most do not.
Q84 Keith
Hill: Do you move these prisoners around very much?
Mr Wheatley: As little as we can help, but
we have been moving them around as we have been very full, particularly in London. London
has more criminals convicted than there is space to deal with them in the London prisons. Being a big metropolitan area it generates a
lot of crime but has basically got the infrastructure the Victorians left, plus
Belmarsh and Feltham, and that means we have to move prisoners on to make room
for the next day's receptions. In that
area we move prisoners out to other prisons, sometimes to other local prisons,
that have got spare capacity. We have
also been moving short-termers increasingly to open prisons. They normally have little incentive to escape
and our abscond rate has been dropping actually. I am wary about this information because it
comes out of the first look at how re-offending rates break out by individual
prisoners, but it looks as though open prisons do not have quite the same
effect on prisoners as closed prisons and probably do not confirm them in their
criminal stereotype in quite the same way.
We look as though we are getting some slightly better effects out of the
open prisons, even with short-sentenced prisoners. It is only a marginal effect and it is far
too early to say that is a real effect and not just a selection effect, that we
are just being clever at selecting the right people.
Q85 Keith
Hill: Presumably a downside of open prisons, at
least I assume it is a downside because I have an image of open prisons as
being in the countryside, is they are removed from the locality from which the
prisoner comes.
Mr Wheatley: That is the downside. On the other hand, they are also removed from
the other effect of prison. If you are
held in the local prison alongside lots of other offenders you know, because
offenders often do know each other, they meet in the same bars, pubs, clubs and
in prison, and often reinforce each other's behaviour, there are some
advantages in taking them outside their normal closed prison environment and
holding them in an open prison in a country area, but it does not help make
local links, you are absolutely right.
Q86 Keith
Hill: Which you have emphasised, of course. I think I quote you in saying the priority
you give to thinking about where these prisoners are going to live. How do you do that if they are in an open
prison?
Mr Wheatley: You can do that. Taking the Chairman's area, if you go from Lincoln down to North Sea
Camp, there is no reason why North Sea Camp cannot think about how it makes
links with Lincoln, one of the biggest cities in the area, and making sure it
has made those links. That is not
impossible. Nowadays we can use video
links much more productively to make sure you can interview somebody who is
coming out to an area via a video link rather than having to always get in your
car to go and see them. There are ways
round it, but it is not as easy. The
advantage is that you are holding them in somewhere that does not feel like
something you see in Porridge, where
we probably have got work to give them and it does not confirm their view of
themselves as a hardened criminal because they are not in quite the place they
ordinarily would be. You cannot do that
with people who are still detoxing. It
may be that it is just a selection effect, that because we are putting down the
rather better group of offenders what we are seeing is the effect of us picking
rather well. Early days is the answer.
Q87 Keith
Hill: I think Mr Mitchell drew attention to the
statistics about the weakness of the contact with local housing authorities in
terms of the aftercare, as it were, the after accommodation of prisoners. Is NOMS going to do a piece of work about the
specific issue of accommodation?
Mr Wheatley: We have been trying to do
some specific work on accommodation. The
answer is very often local. We are using
the Department of Communities and Local Government to try to make sure they
establish priorities for local authorities with central policy that supports
working in a way that enables us to get housing for offenders, but these are
local decisions and there are local authorities who take quite a strong line on
those they regard as having made themselves intentionally homeless by
committing offences and coming into prison.
We have not got the power to insist, we have to persuade.
Q88 Chair:
Nobody has mentioned figure ten, which is
interesting: "Minimum length of time needed to assist prisoners in addressing
their offending behaviour. Number of
prison governors giving this response".
You can see that 50% of them say 25 weeks or more, do they not? These are your own people and they know more
about this than anybody else.
Mr Wheatley: I am a bit more optimistic
than them because I think we can do a bit more in that period.
Q89 Chair:
This
is the point we are trying to drive home to you again and again in all of these
questions.
Mr Wheatley: I am not denying that ---
Q90 Chair:
You
keep saying you are not a sentencer.
Mr Wheatley: I cannot be responsible for
sentencing.
Q91 Mr
Bacon: It is interesting that you saying you are a
bit more optimistic than them, but maybe because they are prison governors now
and you were a prison governor a while ago and, therefore, you look at it with
the optimism of hindsight and distance and they are up at the sharp end, is
that not the likely explanation?
Mr Wheatley: You could make that criticism
of me although I visit prisons regularly enough to try to make sure I keep
myself up-to-date and walk the floor with keys, without an escort, to try to
make sure I absorb what it is really like rather than going on the Cook's tour
with the governor guiding me showing me all the nicest places. My optimism comes from the fact that I think
we can organise better. I have some
faith in organising better. Governors
faced with today's pressure may be less sure that we are able to organise
better. I would not claim, and would be
careful not to claim, that with this group in custody we will make a big
difference.
Q92 Mr
Bacon: The most depressing sentence I found in this
report was in 3.25 where it points out that 29% of short-term offenders who
were interviewed in this survey felt they had been encouraged to address their
offending behaviour, so 71% felt they had not, and 27% felt they were being
helped to lead law-abiding lives on release, so 73% felt they had not. Underneath it there it says - this was the
sentence I found truly depressing - after all this analysis and all this discussion:
"There is no information about what was making the difference for those
short-sentenced prisoners who felt that their risk of re-offending had
diminished". That is the absolute
essence of this. Finding out the answer
to that question is the essence of this and there is no information.
Mr Wheatley: The latest and best
information is what comes out of desistance criminology, and that does say, and
this makes sense to us practitioners, the crucial thing is persuading somebody
that they could be different. It is
motivating people.
Q93 Mr
Bacon: You said "being motivated to think you can be
different", which I thought was a very interesting way of doing it.
Mr Wheatley: It is like imaging you are
not going to be an MP and are going to do something different. It is a big change to move from one thing to
another and you have got to get your head round it to do it successfully.
Q94 Mr
Bacon: Plainly getting people out of their cells for
longer cheaply is part of the solution to this.
Mr Wheatley: My experience of just getting
prisoners out of their cells is not always positive. Cheaply getting people out of their cells to
mill around can produce ---
Q95 Mr
Bacon: I did not say "mill around". I said "cheaply".
Mr Wheatley: You have got to do something
constructive with them.
Q96 Mr
Bacon: To give you an example: when I was in the
Territorial Army I stayed in some pretty unprepossessing places. It is true it was a group of motivated people
who had chosen to join the Territorial Army, so you have got to factor that in,
but nonetheless we stayed in pretty unprepossessing and cheap locations on
fairly rundown Army camps, people getting up early in the morning and being
involved in purposeful activity so that by ten in the morning you would look at
your watch and think, "Goodness, I've done a lot today already". The reason I say it is plainly the case that
you need to get people out of their cells for longer cheaply is because you are
not going to get a lot more money, but if you are going to improve the
situation you do need to get people out of their cells purposefully and have
them doing more things and you have got to do it with less money. This brings me on to my question. I appreciate the enormous difficulties that
you face, we all do, and you have been a very impressive witness when you have
come to us over the last few years, and it is hard not to stray into policy
questions in this area but since it is your last hearing hopefully you will be
a little expansive. What interests me
is, given the enormous difficulties you face, what innovation is going on? Mr Hill mentioned the intensive alternatives
to custody, but what about innovative alternatives within custody that are
completely different from anything that anybody has tried before where you take
people out of their existing environment, where you have perhaps cheaper
buildings that are lower security? I was
fascinated by what you said about open prisons because presumably a lot of
these people are not that dangerous and, therefore, the security cost factor could
be a lot lower and you could cut costs that way.
Mr Wheatley: In terms of innovative
things, moving this group of offenders to open prisons is probably one of the
most innovative things we have done. We
have done that in the face of substantial pressure on the prison estate, ie
lots of population and not enough places.
Traditionally we would not have done that, but we thought it was a
better use of open prison places to put in short-termers who will not escape
and probably better for them because that is an area, using North Sea Camp as an
example, where you may well be working on the farm, the market gardens that
there are, and doing hard work but it passes the time, is properly constructive
and does not confirm you in your criminal stereotype. Using open prisons extensively, which we have
done ---
Q97 Mr
Bacon: What scope is there for expanding that, making
things more purposeful and saving more money at the same time?
Mr Wheatley: I think there may be scope
for doing that. You cannot do it - this
is the bit to be careful of - with the most disturbed and most drug addicted.
Q98 Mr
Bacon: No, plainly.
That was why my question was how much scope is there.
Mr Wheatley: I think there is scope to do
more than we have been doing. We have
identified that and are beginning to think how we can expand this group and
make better use of open prisons to look after this group. We would like to follow through more
carefully on the emerging evidence about reconviction out of open prisons. That is an issue we were addressing at our
conference last week and we intend to see what more we can do there. You can do more in closed prisons on some of
the work that is mentioned in here, like the scaffolding course which some
short-sentenced prisoners have been able to go on. That does work but probably not for the very
short-sentenced. You can do more with
the three to six month group.
Q99 Mr
Bacon: For the people whom you are trying to help it
must be the case that an institutional setting where you control their time all
the time in a way that you do not in a community sentence may actually be a
better course and better value for money than even an intensive non-custodial
sentence in terms of reducing the likelihood of their re-offending. We read that of the £9.5 billion to £13
billion that re-offending costs, £7 billion to £10 billon comes from this
group, and that is a real cost to the economy and society, is it not?
Mr Wheatley: Yes. Preventing offending does not give me further
investment, those are issues for Government.
I take the money that Parliament has voted for our use and use it as
best I can. I am not trying to waste it,
I am trying to use it as hard as I can.
Although you might say imprisonment could be cheaper than community
sentences and more effective, because the full cost of imprisonment and the
security that goes with it, providing buildings, is substantial, on the NAO's
figures it is more expensive than community sentences.
Q100 Mr
Bacon: Therefore, what are you doing in terms of
innovation, in terms of experiments, in terms of talking to, I do not know,
NACRO or the Howard League, and saying, "Here is a small number of millions of
pounds, why don't you take X number of prisoners and see if you can get a
better result for less money"?
Mr Wheatley: The most innovative scheme we
have just announced is the scheme with the social impact bond which is being
trialled in Peterborough Prison and effectively says, "You take these people
and if you can reduce their re-offending we will pay you at the end of the
period. If you do not reduce their
re-offending, we will not". That is an
innovative approach.
Q101 Mr
Bacon: That is with a private prison, is it?
Mr Wheatley: Peterborough is a private prison, but it does
not have to be a private prison, that just happens to be the place where we
have run that option of something that has been developed within the Ministry
of Justice and my service. There may be
more scope to do that: better use of open prisons, which I think makes sense,
the sort of innovative work that produces better community sentences, which the
Report says are cheaper than custody, and seeing whether we can reduce the use
of custody and produce some cashable savings out of that that we can recycle
into it, and allowing governors to innovate and then trying to spread the
results of their innovation.
Particularly working closely with local authorities which, where that
works well, and Hull Prison springs to mind at this point, is a very
interesting way and we get resources from other people who want to see
investment in their offenders produce a real effect for them.
Q102 Mr
Bacon: You bring me on to my next question which is
simply why is it that some prisons are more successful than others in occupying
short-term prisoners?
Mr Wheatley: Some of it is because they
have got better investment, better buildings, they have got workshops, proper
education centres. The provision of
prison places is not even in the provision of facilities that go with it. Sometimes they have better
infrastructure. Sometimes they have got
better local links, and that is as much to do with the cooperation of the local
people as it is to do with what the governor does, although the governor is
very important in this. Some of it is
because we have allowed innovation, we have said, "You can do things
differently", and when you allow innovation you get different results. If you want to do it uniformly I have got to
fly it DuCane-like, who was the first Prison Commissioner.
Q103 Mr
Bacon: It is the innovation that interests me because
you have got to square a very difficult circle and you are plainly not going to
get any more money with which to do it, so innovation could be very interesting
and you are doing some, which is terrific news.
What proportion of the total universe of this group of people,
short-sentenced prisoners, is affected by this innovation at the moment?
Mr Wheatley: I cannot give you an accurate
account of that, I would have to do more research than is either present in the
Report or I have got in my head.
Q104 Mr
Bacon: It is not very many, you are talking a few hundreds?
Mr Wheatley: It will not be a major part
of it. Most of the innovative schemes
affect a small number of individuals.
The innovation in the community, which is the really interesting thing,
follow-through in the community via the integrated offender management, which
is growing and driven largely by local authorities and police with probation
cooperating fully, has got an increasing number of people on it but will not be
touching the majority. I would be telling
lies if I said that.
Q105 Mr
Bacon: Finally, one of the things you said earlier in
response to a previous question was the reason they re-offend is because they
have lots of previous offences. I think
what you meant was it is possible to predict the likelihood of re-offending by
the fact that they have had lots of previous offences.
Mr Wheatley: The best predictor is
previous behaviour.
Q106 Mr
Bacon: But my question is if it is untrue, which it
must be, to say the reason they re-offend is because they have lots of previous
offences, and I do not think that was what you meant, what is the reason they
re-offend?
Mr Wheatley: That was sloppy drafting on
my part, you are right. It makes it
likely they will re-offend. You can
predict they are likely to re-offend.
The answer to why they do is quite complicated. Once people have entered a criminal
lifestyle, ie mixed with other criminals, know how to fence stuff, quite enjoy
the buzz of committing crime or have a serious drug habit which realistically,
because they are not very employable, they are only going to be able to fund by
stealing, it is very difficult to break free from that. It is like most addictive behaviour and most
bad things that people in this room will have done and occasionally tried to
give up, such as smoking. I will not go
on because it will probably be embarrassing.
It is difficult to give up bad habits once you have got used to them and
the buzz and the gain that comes from them.
They have probably also made it very difficult to be successful because
once they have tattooed themselves all over their face they are not going to
easily turn into a chief executive of a FTSE company and would probably not
have got the sort of education that would get a whole range of jobs that might
make it easier to escape from crime because they probably got involved in crime
early on and dropped out of school, and probably had bad parenting. They have got a whole clump of disadvantages,
which most of this group possess, which makes breaking free of crime difficult
for them. It is not an excuse, it is
just difficult once you have got into that bind.
Q107 Chair:
Mr
Hill was making this point to me earlier.
One of these courses was scaffolding and a lot of these people like the
risk, so give them a course that might be an exciting job.
Mr Wheatley: If we just give people
mindless jobs that probably will not enable them to think of themselves
differently, so try to give them something with a bit of a buzz where they can
make some money. We have done very well,
for example, not just with short-sentenced prisoners, by getting prisoners
working for Transco laying big pipelines.
As many a prisoner would see it, its man's work, mainly male prisoners,
out and about, quite good money, touring the country as they are putting their
pipelines in. That works quite well for
a number of people. Just mundane pick up
and put down production line work which is probably not paying very well will
not work as well. We are getting lots of
jobs in the recycling industry.
Recycling is quite interesting in a way, there is lots of moving around
of stuff, forklift truck driving, it is the sort of place where you can work
even though you have got convictions, and it is a developing area because there
is more recycling going on. We are
trying to spot those opportunities and pay some attention to what goes on in
the economy so you do not do what happened when I first joined the service
which was train people for jobs that had almost disappeared because you had
bought yourself an instructor.
Q108 Chair:
Like
sewing mailbags!
Mr Wheatley: In my case it was pattern
making for an industry that no longer used wooden patterns.
Q109 Mr
Burstow: I just want to ask a couple of questions about
the data that you have and the understanding of it. Can you say a bit about the short-stay
prisoner cohort and the long-stay prisoner cohort? How interchangeable are they at a time? What I am trying to get at is what research
exists to show those who start out on a pattern of short-term offending which
leads to short-term sentences, is there a trajectory that sees them eventually
enter that long-stay population?
Mr Wheatley: Not reliably. You can certainly look at some chaotic
offenders who have lots of short-term custody but then get involved in a fight,
injure somebody very badly and end up with a very long sentence. The same behaviour that generated their
short-term imprisonment or non-custodial sentences eventually produces the big
one. It is difficult to spot which
people will do that. Some will just
continue to engage in minor fracas after being thrown out of pubs and never injure
anybody very badly, and you can see that sort of behaviour. You can see people who begin young and start
with minor crime but escalate up into bigger crime, normally nowadays via drug
crime. It used to be via robbery and now
it is via drug crime: they use, they carry stuff for people, they are a minder
for a group who are dealing with drugs and then move up into the big-time and
become one of the people who move large amounts around and begin to make money
out of it. Many people will just stick
with fairly repetitive crime nowadays often linked to a drug habit funded by
relatively low level, not very dangerous, but from society's point of view not
acceptable theft.
Q110 Mr
Burstow: I appreciate that you would not necessarily
have the statistics to hand today, but the position of many is often not very
accurate and I wondered whether or not behind that the organisation would have
access to the data to be able to determine what proportion of the long-stay
population have a trajectory that came from short-stay.
Mr Wheatley: I know about this group
because they are the group I have worked with most of my life in one form or
another. Even though I am now at
headquarters I still visit prisons and probation areas often enough to know
about them and meet them. I am not sure
what data we hold that I can provide that would give you the proper background
to back up what I have just described. I
am sure I am right, but less sure what data there is. I can look and see what data there is.
Q111 Mr
Burstow: If you could have a look and come back to us
with a note, that would be very useful.
Mr Wheatley: We will research what there
is and write.
Q112 Mr
Burstow: Thank you very much. That brings me on to a related question about
what data you would anticipate having to enable you, or successors, to better
understand whether or not you are actually being successful at reducing
re-offending. Obviously there have been
commitments given to recommendations of this Committee in the past. How long before we would have data and measures
that you would be using that we could have before the Committee that would tell
us whether or not there was a movement in the right direction?
Mr Wheatley: The big study following up a
tranche of 2,000-plus offenders is a long-term study that is beginning to
produce data, although not yet in a publishable form. It will follow them through for a period of
time and I think that is intended to run for the next four or five years. Again, I should write so I give you accurate
information on that. The data on each
year on re-offending, which is now quite detailed and has more tables than you
probably care to look at, it is extensive, is published for the world to look
at. As I say, the most recent data came
out last week and includes lots of breakdown of information about how many
convictions people have and what happens with particular disposals. It does provide quite a lot of base
information and meets some of the promises that were made earlier. That is regularly available, published every
year.
Q113 Mr
Burstow: On the exchange you had with Mr Bacon just
now, I just wanted to ask around the data you have. Do you think you could construct the model
necessary to look at the benefits that would arise from a more innovative
approach around sentencing?
Mr Wheatley: Because we are looking for
fairly small effects, realistically in this area if you make a 5% or 10%
reduction in re-offending you are doing well.
That probably means if 50 out of 100 were going to re-offend, 45 out of
100 will re-offend. To see whether you
are getting a real effect rather than just a random fluctuation you need very
big samples. You probably need a sample
of 1,000 to see whether you are making a realistic difference. In the ideal world, in the criminological
world, you do random allocation to different treatments. That is very difficult in our case because
courts are effectively our allocators and they will not behave randomly, and
nor should they. We would not accept
that in justice terms and it would not be allowed. Normally we cannot work with random
allocation and, therefore, we have to use either matched samples, and it is
very difficult to match the samples, or the one that I prefer because it is
easier to use is prediction, so we say what we would expect from these number
of offenders given their age, number of convictions, marital status, hard
facts, and then work out what we predict would happen and see what happens
between different groups. That is quite
good although it does not produce research quality data, gold standard research
that you could say beyond all reasonable doubt had proved this worked. It is probably the same standard we would use
in the private sector in a supermarket to see whether we should place our baked
beans on the top shelf or the bottom shelf if we want to sell more. It is using the data in an intelligent way
and then trying to respond to what you see happening by making changes and then
seeing whether you can see that repeated.
We have got now a short-term indicator which we are using for the
Probation Service on short-term re-offending which looks at whether the
re-offending within a six month period is better or worse than the
predictor. That is proving very useful
for probation. We may be able to develop
a similar method for prisons.
Q114 Mr
Burstow: You have said several times that you do not
want to fly by wire and direct from the centre, as it were, and you have
mentioned the role of governors in a number of your answers. In answer to Mr Hill just now you talked
about working through the Department of Communities and Local Government to
deal with the housing issue. I was a bit
puzzled why you felt you needed to work through a central Government department
when the agents for delivering this are themselves the local authorities.
Mr Wheatley: We are trying to do it both
ways. We are trying to make sure the
messaging from Department of Communities and Local Government says to them,
"Don't exclude offenders. Don't say they
have just made themselves intentionally homeless", which guarantees that they
will not get into local authority housing.
We are trying to do deals locally.
I am quite, excited is the wrong word, I do not want to sound too
excited about it, but I do think that operating at local level, now local
authorities are engaging with this, is the way forward and we are probably
going to have to accept much more variety across the system both in prisons and
in probation because there will be different views locally about what we want
to do in our town, our city.
Q115 Mr
Burstow: There are clearly differences between
different institutions and different governors in terms of the way in which
they embrace that sort of engagement locally.
Mr Wheatley: The messaging to governors is
pretty clear. One of the big messages
from conference is, "Let's try and work this way". We are trying to use the regional structure
to support that. We have a regional
structure which is tight, because I do not want too much spent on management,
and are trying to encourage that way of behaving. It is more difficult in, say, the long-term
prison system. If I was the governor of
Frankland at the moment with long-term prisoners, many of whom are not going to
be discharged this next 20 years, coping with a prison that is always
difficult, I would not be worrying too much about doing deals with my local
authorities because I am probably not going to discharge direct from Frankland
more than three or four a year. It will
make sense at Leeds, Doncaster,
Exeter, the
local prisons, and probably make sense at some of the big open prisons and
Category C prisons to begin to try and make local links. We are trying to encourage that and enthuse
other agencies, where we can, to work with us.
We are getting good buy-in and the police in particular have moved from
thinking "Let's catch people" to thinking, "Actually, if we can get some
engagement with them to change them, isn't that better than just sending them
down on a regular basis with all the effort we have to put into that, and won't
we prevent more crime by doing that".
That is one of the main drivers for the offender management approaches
that are being adopted in an increasing number of local areas.
Q116 Mr
Burstow: I have one last set of questions which is
about the funding. Again, you have said
several times that you have never had enough money to deal with short-term
prisoners, and you have said that in several different ways.
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q117 Mr
Burstow: That has been a very consistent point you have
made. Is it just to do with finance
because from the National Audit Office Report there are differences in outcome
being achieved in different parts of the country by different institutions and,
therefore, surely there are operational issues here and choices at an
operational level?
Mr Wheatley: There are. The specs and benchmarking programme is
trying to standardise what is the basic offer you have got to hit in an
establishment and how much should it cost, and to some extent I am going to
have to hold governors to that because if you are going to take £200 million
out of a business which will come out of the roughly £3 billion we are spending
that is not contractually committed I am going to have to make sure that people
are not doing a Rolls-Royce job, they are doing the basic job and we are
managing to cover that first. Specs and
benchmarking will give me a better handle as to what is an efficient place and
that is a big programme we have put in position which is delivering. We will always get people who will find new
ways of doing things and will develop new benchmarks. We have got to think we have not got this
system right, it will constantly need adjusting and we need to learn. I expect my successor will appear before PACs
of the future, probably doing a better job than me, saying, "We think we have
now found some cleverer things we can do".
Q118 Chair:
That
is probably the end of our hearing, Mr Wheatley. In one sense this is a very depressing report
because we read that prisoners who are sentenced to less than 12 months have
the dismal record of holding more previous convictions than other prisoners, on
average 16 each, they are more likely to re-offend than other prisoners with
60% being convicted of another offence, and this re-offending costs society £10
billion. Although it is a depressing
report, as usual you have been a most persuasive witness. I would like to thank you for your incredibly
long service. You started off in the
Prison Service in 1969, is that right?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, that is right.
Q119 Chair:
Before you leave, for one last time is there
anything else you want to say by way of valedictory to us for your successor on
how we can try and reduce this cost of £10 billion. It may be worth spending a little bit on
redemption so that we can save money in the long-term. It is up to you to have a last word.
Mr Wheatley: In this area we are able to
show that where there has been investment, and since 2000 there has been
investment in reducing re-offending, we have reduced re-offending, particularly
in the long-sentenced group and the community.
The Probation Service are delivering reduced re-offending. It is a matter for governments as to where
they want to invest but we are able to show we got additional money, we used it
for what it was meant and we have produced some improvement, although that does
not mean we cannot do more. Just in
terms of my dealings with the PAC, I have always enjoyed it and, although it is
tough because you need to know your stuff because you are hard at holding me to
account, it has always been fair and I have come to quite enjoy it. I think we do better when, like on this
occasion, we have been able to probe some of the issues rather than me just
trying to remember everything and not fall over my lines. As a result of these sorts of sessions we do
learn more with reports that genuinely unpick a difficult issue, and our issues
are always difficult. I have just been
reading a book about Winston Churchill in 1910-11 as Home Secretary, suitably
learned, looking back at the previous papers, and he was grappling with all the
same problems, particularly wondering whether we should end short-term
imprisonment, I noticed. He decided not,
although he was very tempted.
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