Prisons -Westminster Hall

Speech by Annette Brooke on Tue 1st Jul 2003

Mrs. Annette L. Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole): I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) on securing this timely and important debate, although I hesitate to congratulate him on the large number of prisoners in his constituency.

We have heard many examples from particular prisons, and a great deal about the deficiencies in health care for prisoners. I should like to underline the particular deficiencies in mental health care, which can lead to so many other problems. Members' comments have complemented the comprehensive study that the Prison Reform Trust has recently published, and I should like to associate myself with all the comments made by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe), who has drawn on many of the study's findings.

We all want our communities to be safer, and we all want there to be fewer victims of crime. To those ends, some excellent work is being carried out, and I do not want to undermine the contributions being made by professionals and volunteers. However, we must recognise that an outcome of the Government's trying to achieve those objectives is the massive escalation in the size of the prison population that other Members have described. The size of the prison population is certainly rising at an exponential rate.

Since November last year, I have served on three Standing Committees with the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), all of which have dealt with the early release of offenders with electronic tagging. We have questioned whether those measures are part of the Government's overall strategic policy, or quick fixes to attempt to address the problem of rising prison numbers. We cannot be proud of the fact that we now have the highest imprisonment rate in the European Union, and we can be even less proud of—and should be greatly concerned about—the projections for the end of this decade, by which time the Home Office is suggesting that there could be a prison population of 91,000, and perhaps as much as 110,000. What are we going to do? Are we going to build more prisons, or are we going to examine carefully what is happening to give us more and more prisoners?

I want to comment on women prisoners, as there has been a particularly rapid rise in their numbers. Although those numbers are relatively small, an increase of 191 per cent. in 10 years must be highlighted. I shall also touch later on the number of prisoners under 18. I am relieved to see that that is now below 3,000, but there is still an awfully long way to go. I think that it is true to say that the spiralling prison population is unplanned. It is difficult to see how it fits into an overall strategy to reduce crime, and the unintended consequences have been graphically described by many other hon. Members this morning. We have built 13 new prisons in the past 10 years, but overcrowding is now at its highest recorded level in 90 out of 138 prisons. That overcrowding, as we have heard, threatens prison safety and has led to unacceptable conditions for prisoners. Linked to that is the massive rise in suicides, particularly in the past year, tragically including nine women. Those suicides must be linked to overcrowding.

Another result of the vast numbers coming into custody is that people have to be moved up and down the country—I understand that that is known as the churn factor. Prisoners are being moved around the system to accommodate demands from local courts and to avoid overcrowding in certain prisons. That has caused disruption to important education and drugs programmes, fewer opportunities for teachers to become fully involved, offending behaviour programmes to be suspended and family ties and resettlement work to be affected. We have just heard how important it is for prisoners to have good, strong links with the family and home community. The number of cases of prisoners absconding increases as more move around the country, and the work of prison officers is made much more difficult, as they find it hard to build up relationships and trust with inmates.

Further problems, as we have heard, involve the numbers of prison officers, staff shortages, the high level of staff vacancies in one third of all prisons, and record sickness levels among prison officers. In the reply to a parliamentary question that I submitted recently, I learned that 17 prisons are understaffed by more than 10 per cent. There are some staggering figures involved, and the problem is clearly causing a morale vacuum. The more members of staff who leave, or who are absent because of stress and illness, the greater the stress and work load for those who remain. It is a vicious cycle.

Mr. Francois : Does the hon. Lady agree that the whole picture painted by this morning's debate is of a system under incredible pressure, and that we therefore cannot rehabilitate offenders because the resources are barely there to keep them confined at all?

Mrs. Brooke : Absolutely. We really have a crisis. Our prisoners are locked up for longer, and not engaging in activities, which makes it impossible to make progress.

Among women prisoners, there is a high reconviction rate, and the majority are serving short sentences. There must be alternatives to custodial sentences for some of them. Mothers are separated from their children, and the knock-on effects for our social system are enormous. We have only 68 places in mother and baby units. A further 22 more places are planned, but how many are needed? There has been no recent survey, but a survey from 1994 suggests, if we project its figures, that we need something like 178 such places.

Some women have to make a terrible choice to keep their baby with them for perhaps 18 months at a particular prison, when that takes them further away from their other children. That is scandalous if we are to move forward and describe ourselves as living in a civilised society. There is also the issue of children in prison, and it is questionable whether we are meeting children's rights in this country. How long will it take to provide all the placements for children? Will the Home Secretary meet his commitment to having no young girls in prison by the end of this year? There have been promises since 1999, but when will action be taken?

We have said a great deal, but perhaps the issue is in the sentencing. The Criminal Justice Bill refers to a new custodial scale including custody plus and custody minus, but is there not a case for a royal commission to look at the whole issue of punishment? The media say that sentences must be tough and there seems to have been a reaction to that, but, more recently, the media have been concerned about conditions in prison. We have had a whole series of articles about incidents in prison, including an article headed

"Inside Holloway—one woman inmate's harrowing story of life on the dark side".

We must marry the two issues together, and we must give leadership.

We must move forward and think about what prison is trying to achieve. I believe that it is achieving punishment, but not rehabilitation and health care. We want a prison system that works and which the community supports with a full review of sentencing. As the Magistrates Association has suggested, we could even have an interim community penalty between a fine and the current community sentences. We must be imaginative and try to make fines work more effectively. We must use prison when serious, violent crimes have been committed, but for some of the shorter sentences we should use our money more effectively by treating people, preventing re-offending and making our society better.