HC Deb 21 February 1973 vol 851 cc647-56

11.40 p.m.

Mr. Russell Kerr (Feltham)

I rise to draw attention to a serious situation which has arisen at Her Majesty's borstal institution at Feltham, in my constituency.

Originally, in Victorian times, the Felt-ham institution was set up as an industrial school, but in recent years it has become a dumping ground for the most difficult and disturbed type of young offenders—the ones with which other institutions find it quite impossible to deal. The official description of the place is a training borstal with psychiatric unit attached. More and more disturbed lads are being sent to Feltham. In the opinion of the staff it has become more or less a psychiatric institution, or, as one popular newspaper put it recently, "a nutters' borstal". But while the institution has been taking on these rather specialised characteristics, very little attempt seems to have been made by the Home Office to equip the place with staff adequately trained or sufficiently numerous to cope with this new and challenging situation. There has been almost a mass exodus of older and more experienced officers in the past few years. Their replacements have, for the most part, been very much younger recruits, most of whom have found themselves very much out of their depth when attempting to deal with the hardened young characters who find their way, frequently after a few stops elsewhere, to Feltham.

The situation is immeasurably worsened by the present overcrowding of the institution, which has been growing steadily worse over the past few years. All the officers to whom I have talked agree that the introduction of double bunks, as a consequence of overcrowding, has greatly increased tensions in the establishment, and discipline has steadily deteriorated to the point where many officers are obviously not coping at all.

During the past year, for example, there has been a substantial increase in the number of lads put on governor's report. As a means of ensuring discipline, this has largely become a bad joke.

With the failure to cope with special problems created by putting seriously disturbed lads into an institution inade- quately equipped to handle them has come a quite frightening increase in violence, not merely among the inmates but towards the staff employed to supervise the lads. Inevitably, this has led to a serious deterioration in the all-important relationship between the inmates and their supervisors and to the erosion of that trust and understanding which alone can produce good out of what is all too frequently some fairly badly damaged raw material.

I wish to say a few words about the officers involved in the often thankless task of looking after lads committed to borstal. Along with many people of liberal views who want to see the punishment aspect of detention reduced, or even eliminated, and the reclamation aspect enhanced, I have not always been greatly impressed by the attitudes of prison officers who take on this very difficult task. Too often they have seemed to me to be dangerously narrow in their outlook, and seem more concerned to mete out punishment than to restore the inmates to a useful role in society.

However, during recent weeks I have had the opportunity of discussing their problems with a number of borstal officers from Feltham and elsewhere and I have been very impressed by their general attitude and their evident desire to help the lads in their charge to become good citizens. In effect, these officers are saying that there is too much slipshod permissiveness within Feltham Borstal at present, and that this, far from helping the lads by making their lives easier for them, is making it virtually imposible for the lads to be helped, because the trust and understanding which is the necessary prerequisite of successful reclamation work is in many instances almost totally lacking.

As one senior officer recently explained to me, it is vitally important to get to know each boy thoroughly by sharing his days throughout training. By intuition and sympathy one should seek to discover his point of view and his scale of values, to learn his likes and dislikes, what he fears or despises, his heroes and his devils. Only to a trusted supervisor will he voice his ambitions and his hopes. And only from such confidences can come understanding of what treatment is best suited to his needs and what will win his loyalty and not his defiance.

Unhappily, the recent history of Feltham Borstal suggests that the kind of environment in which this sensitive and important remedial work can take place has been almost totally lacking there. Overcrowding and inadequate staffing have been part of the explanation of this situation. So too, I fear, has been the style of management of the governor and his senior medical officer, Dr. Ellis. As a liberal all my life—a liberal with a small "1"—I am the last to call for tight, military-type discipline in a borstal or any other institution. More freedom, and not less, is what I want for people. But what has apparently been going on recently in Feltham, if Press reports and my own information from borstal officers are anything to go by, is deeply disturbing—and, more important, counter-productive in terms of helping the lads themselves.

Some people have complained publicly about the "hard porn" which, apparently, is the visual fare of many of the inmates. I have seen a selection of some of their so-called pin-ups, and I must freely admit, as a non-prude and un-hung-up Member of Parliament, I found some of the material breathtakingly obscene, and at least in my middle-aged view very much calculated to unsettle at least a minority of the young men in detention, some of them for crimes of a sexual nature. However, this may well be the famous generation gap rearing its uncomprehending head. So I pass quickly to the question of drug-taking at Feltham, which has already been the subject of considerable Press comment.

Judging from letters I have received from parents of Feltham Borstal inmates, drug-taking, including some hard drugs, has been on the Feltham scene for a considerable time. Borstal officers differ as to its extent, but there is more than enough evidence to merit the most careful inquiries by prison authorities or the Home Office. I urge that this, if nothing else, be done forthwith.

The other matter to which I should like to make passing reference is the publication last June of an inmates magazine called "Crack-Up", which advocated drug-taking, sex, violence, prostitution and even homosexuality all in one issue. The Home Office, when its attention was drawn to this, claimed that this was a one-off illegal publication with only a few copies produced and distributed, but according to my information considerable numbers were produced and distributed.

However that may be, the point is that such material is hardly calculated to help the reclamation of already disturbed, frequently anti-social young men, and certainly makes the task of borstal officers immensely harder.

Without going into further detail—the hour is already late—I hope that I have indicated that all is not well at Feltham Borstal. The staff—a body of dedicated and sympathetic men, trying to do the near impossible—certainly deserve far better than they are getting. Leaving aside for a moment the question of overcrowding and inadequate staffing, it would seem that a thoroughgoing inquiry, preferably in public, is urgently needed in order that we may know what has gone wrong and how it may be put right. There is much else that I could have outlined tonight, but the important thing is that the Minister should not be fobbed off by people in his Department as on a previous occasion quite recently but should start with an open mind and a clean sheet of paper in order that an already intolerable situation, unfair alike to the borstal staff, the public and the lads, can be carefully investigated and a start made to correct a situation which is worrying to many of us.

11.52 p.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Mark Carlisle)

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Feltham (Mr. Russell Kerr) for raising this matter tonight and for giving me an opportunity to say something about Feltham Borstal. I know and welcome the fact that he has recently had meetings with representatives of the Prison Officers Association, and should he wish to go around the borstal at Feltham, which I would certainly welcome, I will make all arrangements for him to be able to do so.

No one would suggest that from the point of view of the staff Feltham is in any way an easy establishment to run. It is, as the hon. Member said, a psychiatrically supported establishment for just over 300 young people between the ages of 15 and 21, a substantial proportion of whom are in need of full-time psychiatric treatment. It is the only borstal that specialises in the problems of the psychiatrically disturbed, and it is run by a staff which I accept at once is regrettably under strength, but not more under strength than are our other establishments, though this of course is also unfortunate. There are two full-time doctors.

But, as the hon. Member said, we cannot look at Feltham purely in isolation, and it is bound to be affected severely by the overcrowding in the borstal system to which he has referred. Therefore, before I come to the comments he made about Feltham I want to say one or two things about the strain under which the whole system operates. The borstal system has shared in the rise in the number of offenders who have come into custody over recent years. The number of young men sentenced to borstal training was in 1967, for example, 5,012. By 1971 there was an increase of about 40 per cent., to 6,858. We are now undertaking the biggest ever prison building programme. Unfortunately, in spite of that, we have not been able to increase accommodation in borstals at anything like the same rate at which the borstal population has increased. That means that the borstal system is having to deal with greatly increased numbers in accommodation which was thought insufficient even for smaller numbers five or so years ago. In Feltham there is the greater difficulty that much of the accommodation is old-fashioned, unsatisfactory and Victorian, and designed originally for an entirely different purpose.

Again, we must realise that within that rise in the borstal population is included a higher proportion of the younger, more immature offenders and an increasing proportion of disturbed young people requiring full-time psychiatric care. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that that latter group is a very difficult one for any service to treat and control. It demands skills and resources—particularly psychiatric resources—which are in short supply, whether within the prison department or in the country as a whole. Within that situation Feltham is really the only borstal that we have. A certain amount of psychiatric care is given at Rochester, but Feltham is virtually the only borstal where those resources can be provided.

Our immediate concern, within that picture, has been, overall, to ensure that those who are sentenced to borstal do not suffer unnecessarily from the effects of the pressure of numbers and overcrowding, and to avoid the delays in moving young men from local prisons to borstal allocation centres. We have also attempted to reduce the amount of overcrowding in borstals because it is difficult for constructive training to take place in overcrowded conditions. What we have not in the end been able to do—this relates to Feltham—is to avoid an increase in the number of young men whom the training borstals have had to receive and therefore some reduction in the time that they spend there. In Feltham this has meant that the number passing through has increased from 345 in 1967 to 494 in 1972. The average period spent in custody by those sent to Feltham has dropped in the meantime. Feltham has had to take new arrivals at weekly intervals instead of once a month, so as to accelerate its induction and to operate at a faster tempo generally.

To underline what the lion. Gentleman has said, the situation in which we are working at the moment is bound to impose further strains on borstals such as Feltham. I recognise that all these factors have placed a considerable strain on the staff, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would wish to join me—as, indeed, he did at the end of his speech—in paying tribute to the way in which the staff have responded to these problems.

In Feltham they have had to take a large number of inmates, many of whom are in need of treatment from a psychotherapist and all of whom are there because, on assessment, it has been considered that they need to be sent to a borstal which has full-time medical and psychiatric facilities available. Some of them-61 last year—have been sent to Feltham from other borstals because they were in need of psychiatric care.

Faced with these problems, it is to the credit of the staff that the training, on the whole, is going well and that the success rate in Feltham is certainly as good as it is at any comparable other borstal establishment.

Mr. Kerr indicated dissent.

Mr. Carlisle

The hon. Gentleman may shake his head. It would be equally true to say that the failure rate is the same, but the fact remains that the success rate is, I am advised, as good as one would expect.

But what is more important, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, is that they are undertaking many adventurous training initiatives in Feltham, putting out inmates to work with the Community Service Volunteers and other groups of that kind. In the end it all comes down to the responsibility and dedication of the staff, and it depends entirely on the relationship which individual members of the staff can manage to create with individual trainees. I appreciate that they are understaffed. In the long run we shall help to solve the problems of Feltham only by providing more and better resources and more and better accommodation of the kind that is suitable for the type of offender going there.

I do not want to dwell on this now, as it was not dealt with by the hon. Gentleman, but he will know that we are in the process of building a new establishment at Glen Pava which is aimed to help to take the psychiatrically disturbed, among others, and there is a programme for rebuilding Feltham with a remand centre and assessment centre and a psychiatrically-aimed borstal.

The hon. Gentleman rightly dwelt on discipline within Feltham. I repeat what I said at the beginning of my speech—that the nature of the inmates and the number of disturbed people there makes discipline more difficult than at many other similar establishments.

I accept, as one must, that Feltham has had a large number of offences against discipline, but I have looked at the figures and I do not think that the numbers show that they are more than one would expect in a similar type of institution dealing with people of the same kind.

It is right to say that, although the proportion of inmates appearing on charge before the governor does not seem to be greater, they appear to commit more disciplinary offences per individual than at other similar borstals.

I am glad to be able to tell the hon. Gentleman that although his information is reasonably up to date, during the first few weeks of this year there has been a considerable drop in the number of people appearing before the governor on charges. He refers to that number, and it is high, but we must remember that the number of reports before the governor may depend on many circumstances, including the decision of the individual officer whether to refer a person to the governor or to the assistant governor, so that this may not be a complete mirror of the volume of disciplinary offences. I do not question the hon. Gentleman's words when he said that during last year the number of disciplinary offences was high.

The hon. Gentleman referred to drug offences. All I can say is that I have no evidence of drug taking of the kind he mentioned. I understand that any isolated incident of drug taking which comes to notice is firmly dealt with, and I shall be only too willing to listen to and examine any evidence which the hon. Gentleman may wish to give me about that.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to pornographic displays or pin-ups by the beds of inmates. I should make clear that the rules allow for a board on which the individual can pin photographs. They are mainly for family photographs, but he is allowed to have one pin-up. I am told that a pin-up is allowed only if it comes from a periodical which is on sale to the general public, and that the staff have instructions to bring to the governor's attention any which are felt to be unsuitable. Despite what the hon. Gentleman has said, I am advised that no such pin-ups have been brought to the governor's attention in recent months.

Mr. Kerr

Will the hon. and learned Gentleman take it from me that I have in my file on this case a quite impressive collection of pin-ups from magazines on public sale but which will scare the pants off him when he looks at them?

Mr. Carlisle

I accept what the hon. Gentleman says about the pin-ups that one sees on public sale, although I have to look upon them from under a different hat from that which I wear as being responsible for prisons. I am, saying, however, that nothing is allowed unless it is on sale publicly, and it is difficult, in a way, to say that those allowed for public sale are inappropriate. But the staff have been instructed to bring to the governor's notice any which they feel to be unsuitable, and no such pin-ups have been brought to his notice recently. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will look at any evidence he has with regard to this matter.

I accept that Feltham is a difficult establishment in which to work. It shares staff shortages and shortcomings which are a feature of many parts of the penal system. It has had problems arising from the special character of its population. We have recognised those problems in the decision we have taken to provide a second training borstal which will specialise in the provision of psychiatric facilities, and in the decision to rebuild Feltham. We are doing what we can within the limitations of the penal system to make the task of the staff easier and to improve the quality of the training and treatment we give to the trainees.

I believe that there are some indications that the situation is improving. It depends on the loyalty and enthusiasm with which the staff carry out their difficult task. I know, having spoken to him, that the governor would very much welcome as much direct contact as he can have with the staff association, so that they can discuss together these difficult problems of maintaining discipline and providing the best form of training in an establishment which, by its very nature, contains many difficult and disturbed young people.

I hope very much that the hon. Gentleman will take up my offer to him to look again round the establishment, and that the staff association will feel free and able to discuss with the governor the problems and difficulties of the staff as they see them in dealing with individual trainees.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at nine minutes past Twelve o'clock.