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For the five and a half years that I was privileged to inspect prisons, the one thing that I did not find was prisoners being treated responsibly in that way. Indeed, just before I left that post, a document called
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I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, talk about things which I have heard before and which have always made me cringe. Every time a proposal is made for innovation, reasons are given as to why it cannot be done. People say, “Oh, it will interfere with the governor’s right to govern”; “Oh, it will interfere with the Inland Revenue”; or, “Oh, it will never be allowed”. I do not believe that those reasons have been tested with the people who are allegedly responsible for making those decisions. If we approach the whole idea of the Government’s policy of protecting the public by preventing people reoffending as being the aim of imprisonment and, through that, help prisoners to live useful and law-abiding lives in prison and on release, as is the aim of the Prison Service, then I believe that a completely different approach from the way that imprisonment is conducted should be encouraged.
I was always horrified by the vast number of prisoners whom I found sitting in their cells doing absolutely nothing. It seemed to me that that demonstrated a complete failure to understand the purpose of imprisonment. I believe that, in order to establish what will help someone to live a useful and law-abiding life, you have to find out what has prevented them from doing so in the first place. There could be a behavioural, educational or medical reason or it could be down to a lack of skill. Having assessed it, during the time available, be it short or long, you have to provide a programme to challenge the reason. If someone leaves prison and then comes back, you can continue where you left off, but you should always aim to help them to live useful and law-abiding lives, based on the assessment.
That should lead to the provision of what I used to call “full, purposeful and active days” for every prisoner, based around the programme that is needed to achieve that end. There will be different programmes because individual prisoners are different people with different needs. The time available will decide which you do first or which you devote most attention to, but that does not matter. The full, purposeful and active day is a completely different way of approaching imprisonment compared with what happens now, and I seriously believe that, if prisoners had full, purposeful and active days, we would see a dramatic reduction in the number of suicides and assaults and a reduction in the sheer frustration which leads them to take drugs. I strongly believe that full, purposeful and active days for people are the best antidote to those three problems.
If that is so, and bearing in mind that prisons are now suffering from two problems which are beyond their control—one is overcrowding and the other is a shortage of resources—I should have imagined that the people responsible for the Prison Service would be
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Those of you who read the wonderful report on the riots in Strangeways in 1990 by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, will remember that he highlighted the fact that the three things most likely to prevent reoffending were a home, a job and a stable relationship, all of which were put at risk by imprisonment. He advocated that one way of getting round this was to form what he called, “community clusters of prisons”, so that in each part of the country there was a sufficiency of prison places to house all prisoners from that part of the country, with the exception of high security prisoners because there was not enough of them to justify a high security prison. That meant that they would not be moved too far away from their home, so did not put home, job and stable relationship at risk.
That applies to those three factors. We are focusing on jobs, but it is relevant because there are countless examples of firms around the country that have taken work into prisons in their area, which might affect the protection of local people by helping them not to reoffend in their own area. At Lindholme prison the Yorkshire construction agency trains people in construction trades. It took the work into the prison and people come out to jobs. The National Grid programme, which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, mentioned, started with somebody identifying a shortage of forklift truck drivers in the Thames Valley, and then looking for potential trainees in Reading prison with jobs to follow. The British Leyland factory in Preston has identified a forthcoming skill shortage and recognised that there might be potential among Preston-living prisoners in Preston prison. They identified some people who had the aptitude to fill that skill, started training them and when they came out they went into something with a longer-term future.
Examples exist and I believe very strongly that if the Prison Service were to restructure itself around regional clusters of prisons, industry would be encouraged to pay more attention to the potential in prisons to help with skills shortages for the longer term. If that were so, industry could also be encouraged to take another look at the people who are in the local prison.
About three years ago, I published a book called Prison-Gate in which I advocated this sort of approach. I also included a chapter called, “It can be done”, describing what happened in Poland where, through the Government’s wisdom, they hired as the director-general someone who was the biggest critic of the prison system. They said, “If you are so critical, go in and sort it out”, and he did. One of the things he encouraged was local industries to put out-stations in those prisons where work for the firm was done in the prison by the prisoners for which they were paid. That is precisely what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, recommended.
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That had an enormous impact because the firms gained something positive; prisoners gained some skill; and, of course, money was saved because the schemes were paying for themselves and the Government did not have to pay for the provision of that work in the prison. It is possible. Heavens above, if Poland could do this in the early 1990s, surely we can do it now. With regard to the reactionary attitude of the Prison Service, I remind that service that Wormwood Scrubs prison in the 1860s was built with bricks made by prisoners who then used those bricks to build the prison. It is all there. For people who say, “Oh, what about security and the frightful problems with bringing industry in?”, I say that welding, carpentry, and so on are carried out in prisons with the appropriate tools, so what is the problem? I think that the problem is precisely as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, says: it is a lack of will to take this leap in the dark and recognise that there are ways of doing more, particularly for longer-term prisoners, by allowing people who have not been to the prison previously to bring opportunities to prisoners.
I would add that instead of having a civil servant in charge of this process, I would bring in people from industry in every region of the country and Prison Service headquarters to be made responsible for giving an industrial business-like look at this activity, and not be put off by all the alleged excuses that have stopped this happening until now.
2.55 pm
Lord Elton: My Lords, through the medium of this debate I extend a word of comfort and reassurance to the staff of Her Majesty’s Prison Service and tell them not to be alarmed by what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has just been saying. If you are in a great, time-honoured institution, which is growing and under stress, the way in which to survive from day to day is to learn its norms, behaviour and procedures, and learn how to conform so that acting together you can control the system and keep it going. That takes up most of your energy and does not leave much time for standing back and looking to see whether it is really worth while. If they do stand back and look at their current efforts, they will see that they are not achieving what they were put there to do. The figures are well known—the rate of reoffending is 67 per cent in two years. The staff are there to protect society and to help people become members of it.
What has been happening for many years is that if somebody is sentenced to four years, as chosen by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs—the Barbed project refers to four years—they have failed to make a success of life; they have not made society work for them. They have not managed to learn how to live in society. They are then taken out of it and put in an environment in which there is no possible prospect of learning anything about society because they are no longer in contact with it. They are returned to that society in a worse condition than when they left it.
I remember my frustration many years ago as a Minister responsible for prisons in tackling the question—at a much less advanced stage—of how to keep people purposefully occupied, not how to
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The experiment to which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, draws our attention, and on which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has elaborated, is important and exciting. The difficulty with having realistic conditions in employment in prisons is largely the shrieks of “unfair competition” from commercial concerns outside the prison which happen to make light fittings, or whatever. I remember that we had terrific trouble over the ladders we were making. The competitors proved to be in Canada, which made it easier to persuade the Prime Minister to continue with the effort, but it was a real pressure.
If the prisoners had been paid and if their pay had been in part docked to take account of the ordinary expenses of living provided by the prison—their bed and board—and if they had been subject to taxation, national insurance and pension deductions, there would have been no competition and no reason for other firms to complain. In fact, they would have become the sort of local resource that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has suggested they should have been. If you add that to the element of local involvement suggested by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in his project, you start getting an interaction between society and the prisoners within it. Those who have failed to make a success of life in uncontrolled conditions are now going to be given an opportunity to make a success of it, in economic terms, in controlled conditions with the help of the prison staff. That is exactly what prison ought to be for.
I add two riders to that. First, we must not lose sight of the fact that a large proportion, if not the majority, of prisoners are semi-illiterate or completely illiterate, and the programme of work must allow for a programme of education. There must therefore be something reminiscent of day release, so that these people can still work in a programme that they would be working at in economic society outside while, under the same terms, able to get education inside.
My second rider is much smaller, but it occurred to me many years ago and was not followed up. If you want to get local people of good will involved in the prison, every prison has a chaplain; I think that they are still part of the prison staff. There would be admirable economic as well as ecclesiastical reasons for making the chaplaincy in a prison a curacy in the local parish, thus taking it off the prison books, allowing a number of extra prison staff and firmly involving the local PCC and the parish in what is going on—I look to the right reverend Prelate for a reflection on that. The prison will then become not a menacing hulk on the horizon full of threatening
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3.02 pm
The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for raising this important issue and for giving us the opportunity to press for greater work opportunities in the complex environment of our prisons.
I hope to extend the debate a little so that it takes account of more than simply those who have been in prison for four years. Although there is a rather different set of issues for those who are there for short terms, they are equally important and crucial to this debate. I think, for example, of young offender institutions and my own experience, largely at Deerbolt in County Durham and Wetherby in Yorkshire, and how there is excellent training and skills development in our YOIs. There is a considerable commitment to educational courses, which benefit prisoners and improve their opportunities for employment on release. Yet both those YOIs are committed to a full employment regime, but find that far more difficult to encourage and implement.
It is difficult partly because of the unwillingness of the young men there to take part in employment, partly because of financial constraints. The unwillingness comes about, as other noble Lords have said, because the young men there have very little experience of a work environment; they find it difficult to adapt to the environment being sought within the prison. They need that opportunity if they are to take advantage of their future lives outside the prison. The financial issues are well known to all involved in the Prison Service, who know the need for greater funding of our prisons if they are to provide work environments for people.
I have listened with interest and approval to what has been said by the noble Lords, Lord Dubs, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Elton, on the particular needs of those serving terms of four years or more. There, too, there is little incentive for such prisoners to develop patterns of work which will benefit them or society. While I too applaud the Barbed experiment at Coldingley, sadly the major point about it is that it is so small, and has not been duplicated—at all, I think; certainly not consistently—within the our country’s prisons. There must be much more willingness to look outside the box and provide a greater variety of opportunity for our prisoners in ways which will encourage them where they are, and into the future. It is an exception which demonstrates that it can be done, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said. Far more common, however, is menial and boring work, which comes over as part of the punishment rather than an opportunity for the future. We are not far from the era of stitching mailbags.
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I want to encourage more thought about how public/private partnership can be used profitably for those in prison. The danger is, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has already said, that it effectively uses prisoners as cheap labour. That need not be so, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has given some examples of real partnerships between a prison and the local community, in places such as Lindholme. I wish, however, that I was as optimistic as the noble Lord appeared to be in thinking of the number of examples of this sort of partnership. I fear that I think more of the number of places where those partnerships do not exist and need to be encouraged.
All that fits in with what the noble Lord, Lord Elton, was saying about the relationship between a prison and its community. That applies particularly to local prisons such as Leeds where many are serving comparatively short sentences. Although 18 months may sound short, it is a long time for those serving it and can be destructive of their community, their family and life. The more we can persuade firms to be involved with their local prisons, the more opportunity there will be for genuine partnership between the prison and the community in which it stands.
I go along with the noble Lord, Lord Elton, when he says that one way to do this is through chaplaincy not being confined as it now often is to the prison itself but linking up with the local parishes, so that those from the parishes have the opportunity to go into the prison and feel that they are a part of that. In a number of areas of the country, not least west Yorkshire, there are multifaith community chaplaincies that integrate work in prisons with that which occurs following release.
One of the major issues at the moment is the reluctance of local industry to employ ex-prisoners. The CRB check can in practice simply become a bar to employment. If there were a more coherent policy to work with local industry to provide proper work for prisoners then all would benefit: the prison community, industry, the local society and society as a whole.
I referred earlier to the benefits of skills training, particularly in YOIs. The immense pressure that prison management and prison officers are under too often means that the education and work elements of a prison regime are inadequately integrated. Again, collaboration with local industry could lead to still more effective training together with the establishment of work opportunities.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for giving us this opportunity to support the enhancement of work in prisons. I look forward to positive responses from the Government which will be for the benefit of prisoners, the prison regimes and our whole community in that people will be drawn back into a proper place within our society and our communities.
3.10 pm
The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, very warmly for securing this important debate to look at proper work for prisoners
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My noble friend Lord Ramsbotham spoke about the importance of regional clusters of prisons. To be a child who has a father or mother in prison is hard enough, but for them to be many miles away is a cruel injustice. It is well established that prisoners who keep family contacts are far less likely to reoffend. I hope the Minister will look careful at his proposal and will examine what appears to be being done so successfully in Poland on local prisons and on getting real businesses into prisons.
I hope I may speak from a script in order to keep to time on this occasion. My noble friend Lady Howe of Idlicote drew attention to the National Grid Transco offender programme in her contribution to the debate on the Queen's Speech. Noble Lords have also mentioned it this afternoon. The Education and Skills and the Home Affairs Select Committees of the other place have enthused about the programme, and the Prime Minister gave the scheme his strongest support when Chancellor. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, kindly introduced me to the architect of the programme, Dr Mary Harris, five years ago. I was particularly interested because at that time it was focused on young people, and we know that a small proportion of young people in care go into custody, but they are more highly represented in prison than those who have not had that experience. They have predominantly been let down by their families before they enter care, and care has often let them down further, so I was very keen to see approaches that could rectify the way that we as a society have let them down.
The programme reduces reoffending from above 70 per cent to 7 per cent. It has now passed its target for this year of having trained 1,000 since its inception. It now works out of 25 prisons: adult and young offender; closed and open; male and female. Sir John Parker, the chairman of National Grid Transco, has persuaded 80 companies from five industry sectors to sign up to the project. Dr Mary Harris employed her discipline as a scientist rigorously to develop and perfect this universally respected programme.
In a nutshell, the programme selects likely candidates vouched for by the governor of the prison. They receive a mentor from National Grid and three months’ national vocational qualification training with a promise of a guaranteed job if they achieve their qualification. I was pleased to see the success of four of those graduates celebrated at Anglian Water. Their mothers, partners and children were present. With their consent, they were quizzed for 10 minutes before the audience by a senior Anglian executive on what they had learnt. The questions were technical, and the answers were full, correct and confidently given.
It is hard to express how uplifting it was to see those young men perform so outstandingly before their families—young men unlikely to have previously achieved at school or elsewhere. Seeing the young children of two of the trainees, one could think that they were now unlikely to grow up with a father out of
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So who benefits from the National Grid Transco programme? First, it is the victims of crime; secondly, it is business: businesses with an ageing workforce recruit and retain loyal, motivated young people. Businesses find the morale of their people is boosted as their staff relish making such a difference to the life of young people. It has often been commented that the public enjoy the fruits of a liberal economy, which tends not to interfere with business, but often fail to make the connection between their own prosperity and such business freedom when it comes to elections. So, the National Grid Transco programme is likely to assist in sustaining continuing market liberalism as it shows business manifestly putting back into society. Thirdly, National Grid and its partners benefit the young people whom they move out of criminality. Often these young people will have had no experience of a responsible father, of positive achievement or of a supportive family. The programme provides them with all these things. They receive a mentor and then work in a small unit often led by a responsible man in his late 40s or 50s.
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