HL Deb 01 April 1963 vol 248 cc356-69

2.58 p.m.

LORD STONHAM rose to call attention to the apparent disparity between the penal policy of Her Majesty's Government and the actual practice in Her Majesty's prisons as reported in the Prison Reform Council's publication Inside Story; and to the urgent need for the strengthening and reorganisation of the After-Care Service; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, it is fitting, I think, that on the first day in 86 years that we have not had Prison Commissioners we should consider the present position and actual shape of the prison service. I am very glad to see that noble Lords from all parts of the House have indicated that they are willing to speak on the subject and also that we are to have the benefit of the views of two of the right reverend Prelates who sit on the Bishops' Benches.

The Report, Inside Story, referred to in my Motion, records the experiences in twelve different prisons during 1961 and 1962 of 30 young men and women of good character. They submitted their first draft to me, stood up to many hours of questioning and accepted the amendments I suggested. For example, there is only a passing reference to brutality in the infliction of punishment. They wished to give specific examples, but agreed to their deletion when I explained my view that this was unfair and undesirable.

I notice that the excellent leader in The Times to-day refers to a certain absence of perspective in the Report. The question of perspective depends upon from which end you are looking at the subject. This Report is a prisoner's view—if you like, the worm's eye view—but I submit that in this case the worms are intelligent, sincere and educated people, who have put forward not only what they have seen and experienced but also some very constructive suggestions. Indeed, anyone who has read the Report will agree that its language is restrained and its objectives wholly commendable. I submit it to your Lordships as a document in which every factual statement, however shocking, is true.

I emphasise this because recently, in another place, the Home Secretary said that Inside Story "contained grave inaccuracies." He only gave one example [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 673 (No. 75), col. 1309]—namely, that it was … quite untrue that food which has been rejected for ordinary use is given to prisoners and that porridge is made of pig meal No. 3. He added: There is not the faintest trace of foundation for those allegations. There is, in fact, a very firm foundation, because members of the Committee, at three different prisons, have personally handled the meal sacks, marked "Pig-meal III." The noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, recently spent 1½ hours in discussion with seven of these young people, of whom two men and one woman had this experience. I am sure he will agree with me, having met them, that if they gave that evidence in a court of law, they would be believed.

It will be also within the recollection of your Lordships that on February 21 the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor referred to what he called "the somewhat lurid account" I had given of conditions in Her Majesty's prisons, which the Government did not accept as accurate. In particular, he said that the 11s. a week for a prisoner's food ignored the value of food produced in prisons, adding that the food was fully adequate for health and that there had been great improvements in recent years.

The Government have now admitted that the total value of food produced in prisons is only £101,000—that is, just over 1s. a week per prisoner, making a total of 12s. a week. Anyone with wholesale catering experience knows that it costs 30s. a week to provide food fully adequate for health. It cannot be done for 12s. However many arguments and personal experiences are recorded, that basic fact cannot be gainsaid. I have also ascertained that in 1958 we were spending, not 12s., but 13s. 6d. a week on prisoner's food. So, allowing for the fact that prices meanwhile have risen, it is demonstrably untrue for the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor to say that things have improved in recent years. On the contrary, the food position, in real terms, is 20 per cent. worse that it was five years ago. I can and I will name prisons where they spend more and where the food is tolerably good. That obviously only means that others spend less per head and the food is appalling.

A few days ago, I visited Smithfield Market to find out how the contractor could deliver meat to prisons at 1s. a lb. or less. The whole vast quantity of meat in the market must be sold every day and the market cleared by one o'clock. When I was there, prices were very low and I could have bought a flank of beef for 5d. and ewe mutton for 8d. a lb., all in good condition, perfectly edible and recognisable as meat. But I was given particulars of porterage, delivery charges and other costs, which proved that it was impossible to buy even the cheapest cuts of good meat over a period and sell it at 1s. a lb.

I learned about Yugoslavian beef. This is delivered fresh, not chilled, and it frequently arrives "sticky", as the trade call it, or out of condition. When that happens it must be cleaned up and used almost at once. They cannot hang it. The schools have banned it and few butchers will buy it, so buyers who will take it can practically name their own price. Some of it goes to the soapmakers and some to the prisons. This is the foundation for prison goulash, and it is the proof, despite the Home Secretary's denials, that food rejected for ordinary use is given to prisoners. I have dealt with these points at some length because they must not be brushed aside. I do not want anyone to think that I am not telling the truth. I do not claim that everything in Inside Story happens in all prisons. I know that conditions vary. But all the facts are true of some prisons and some of the facts are true of all of them; and I am prepared to prove it.

It is the Government's official policy that a man is sent to prison as a punishment, not to be constantly punished while he is there. He is to be rehabilitated; treated in such a way as to encourage his self-respect; helped to maintain a high standard of cleanliness, and guided in the awakening of his higher susceptibilities. I support that policy, and I hope that we all do. But the practice revealed in Inside Story is the complete reverse. A man is ill-fed, appallingly clothed, surrounded by every difficulty and incredible meanness, not only financially but spiritually, in his efforts to keep clean, and has his self-respect as a man torn to shreds.

I have an extensive correspondence from prisoners, amounting to about 3,000 letters a year. The other day I read a letter from a man doing seven years' preventive detention. He had been outside Nottingham prison recently working long days repairing pipes and other frost damage. One job took him to a prison officer's house. The officer's wife earned his undying gratitude by the simple remark: "You men are all alike; it's eleven o'clock, and I had the tea ready at ten." She had said he was a man, on a momentary equality with her own husband. You need no clearer picture of what the present system does to a man when a little thing like that nearly lifts him off his feet.

Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Foster, the two Vassall case journalists, are, unfortunately, in prison, but at least they are in reasonable comfort at Ford Open Prison. This is the former quarters of Royal Air Force officers on the rolling Sussex downs, four miles from the sea and in sight of Arundel Castle. In prison parlance, it is Britain's No. 1 open "nick"—"Paradise Prison"—where about 100 recidivists and 400 first offenders bask in sunshine, when there is any, eat like millionaires, live in modern service flatlets, with hot and cold water, luxurious showers and, above all, civilised lavatories. The food is excellent—often bacon and tomatoes for breakfast, a roast of beef, pork or lamb for lunch, with fresh vegetables from nearby farms, and every other Thursday a 6s. steak with chips. There are five billiards tables, snooker, bridge, chess and darts tournaments, and every summer evening a cricket match with a visiting eleven. The men are employed on outside farms and nurseries, and there is no shortage of cigarettes, beer or spirits. Some who have wives or sweethearts in the neighbourhood slip out after ten o'clock to enjoy their company. The only thing lacking—and it is a very important lack—is a training scheme to fit unskilled men for jobs when they are released. This is the story of prison life which Messrs. Mulholland and Foster will be able to tell the world, but it is utterly unrepresentative of prisons as a whole.

Let me tell your Lordships the true story of life in a closed prison in the words of one of their less fortunate colleagues, a well-known journalist who was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for being drunk in charge of a car. This is what he says: At Brixton I was in the medical wing, though I never saw a doctor there—surprisingly enough, the filthiest wing in the prison. Perhaps the doctors could not stand the smell, because every cell stank, and I vomited from the stench coming from the recesses where 2 lavatories served 80 men. My cell was a small filthy hole, with the plaster crumbling from the walls. The mattress on the iron bedstead stank. In this hovel I was held for the night and remember thinking how clean and hygienic were the compartments on a modern pig farm I toured a few weeks earlier. Some time after dawn our cells were unlocked, and for the first time I heard the call 'Slop out'. Stepping outside, I saw dozens of dirty-faced, shabby, unshaven men running down the wing floor carrying their pots. The smell was nauseating. They hurried into the recess, emptied the containers and gave them a quick rinse under a running cold tap. Looking back, I am still amazed that the pot is allowed in prison. When you are five in a cell, what it does to one's feelings and senses just cannot be described. Whatever crime a man has committed, it does not help society or rehabilitate him to degrade him in this way. If one day the Home Secretary thinks sensibly for two minutes about the prison pot, I am sure he will banish it for ever. Unfortunately, my Lords, on March 20 the Home Secretary justified the decision not to provide lavatories in the cells of new prisons with the utterly astounding argument that the cells had to be used as bedrooms, and nobody wants to sleep in a water closet". But under the present pot system men have to sleep in the equivalent of an open sewer.

It is beyond belief that the same man who thus condemned the inmates of a new prison to another 100 years of "slopping out" can go on to talk about the higher susceptibilities, especially when he knows full well that at Ford the bedrooms are not locked and a full range of lavatories is freely available and never abused; and the men there are the same types who make up the great majority of our prison population. Surely this is one of the most stupid and cruel decisions that even this Government have taken. It is also an example of the rigid attitude with which we are faced whenever we raise a question about prisoners. It seems to me incredible that in a matter of this kind the Government should not have decided to make a change where such a thing is universally condemned. I submit that it is an intolerable decision which must be reversed.

Let me give your Lordships another extract from this journalist first offender's story. He says: I stood in line among these wild-eyed scarecrows and received breakfast: thick, coarse, unsweetened porridge, hard bread and a knob of margarine. Did anyone eat this, I wondered. But the pint of tea was good. We exercised twice a day, walking in a ring round a soot-drenched yard. I never before saw men who looked so much less than human, still wearing their own clothes, but dirty and some ragged; their faces expressionless; few talked. On the third day I was taken from my cell and ordered to clean out the recess. The hand basin was full of excreta. I told the 'screw' I could not clean it. He replied, with obscenities, that I had to clean it. I had visitors, though I wished otherwise, because I felt, and probably looked, like an animal. I was in a sort of hen-coop and stared at my visitors through dirty wire-meshed glass. It was smeared with lipstick by wives who had got as near as they could to kissing their menfolk. Conversation was shouted through a dust-choked iron grid. This was so very different from the three-hour sessions I later enjoyed with visitors on the sun-baked lawns at Ford, where I was so grateful for being able to wash, bathe and shave in privacy and comfort. At Brixton we shaved twice a week with a communal razor blade. I could have managed as well with a butcher's knife. We all cut our faces to ribbons. That, my Lords, is Brixton, so far as my knowledge and experience goes, the worst Hell-hole in Britain. It is a small prison, grossly overcrowded, with a daily unlocking of 775 men. Last year it had a flow of 21,105 prisoners, 2,500 more than in 1961.

For perhaps the majority of these men it was their first introduction to prison. Under such conditions, it is surprising that, according to the annual report, there were only two suicides and seven attempted suicides last year. But there were also 48 prisoners in straitjackets—an abominable iniquity surviving in prison from the eighteenth century. In 1952, when I was Chairman of the Mental Health Committee of the South West Regional Hospital Board, I succeeded in taking action which virtually abolished the use of straitjackets in mental hospitals throughout the country. I would ask the noble Earl: when will this practice be ended? When will such mental cases—for mental cases they must be—be sent to mental hospitals, and when will Brixton be closed? In my view, in many respects it is far worse than Dartmoor.

I mention these things because eminent people make speeches and write articles in the Press telling us that we are too soft with our prisoners. The other day Mr. A. J. P. Taylor, the eminent historian, in a letter to the Press, said precisely that. It staggers me that a man with such great knowledge, who knows all about the conditions at the time of Henry VIII, does not have a clue about what is happening under his own nose. The noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, said in a speech the other day that prisoners should find things a lot less comfortable—a lot less comfortable than I have described! He thought we should bring back the treadmill. I do not pretend that that view would be echoed by anyone in this House.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (EARL JELLICOE)

Hear, hear!

LORD STONHAM

It is certainly not the view of Her Majesty's Government and, as the noble Earl has made clear, it is not his view. But anyone who has any experience or knowledge of prison conditions at all knows that to go back to the days when it was right to hang a child for stealing 5s. is not the way to cure recidivism; it is utterly wrong. But these speeches are made by eminent people, and they are reported in the newspapers. They give a distorted view of life in our prisons, and that is why it is necessary to say these hateful things.

After two weeks, this journalist of whom I spoke was moved to Wormwood Scrubs, which he described as: a drab, ancient, gaol which any slum clearance committee would condemn and where at night a prisoner can hear the rats feeding under the floor. But it was ten times better than Brixton. The prisoners all wore uniforms which, though badly fitting, were clean and untorn. He could keep himself clean; he was trusted with a razor, and could get a cold-water shave. He was "banged up" five to a cell. His companions were two sex cases, one epileptic, and a man serving a long sentence for manslaughter. And, of course, there were five pots. They had to take turns to stand on a chair and breathe through a 6 ins. by 4 ins. window for the fresh air of Shepherd's Bush. Although it was ten times better than Brixton he says: It is safer to have a heart attack in the Sahara than to be taken seriously ill in the night in Wormwood Scrubs. There is a bell in each cell 7 ft. from the floor, but if you are fit enough to ring it, you are fit enough to be cursed for doing so. Cursed and ignored. If you have a flesh wound or broken bone, the prison doctor will treat you, but if your illness cannot be seen the prison medical screws will curse you as a malingerer and try to keep you from the doctor. Many genuinely ill people are too terrified to report sick. I am bound to say that, with the honourable exception of the prison hospital at Parkhurst, condemnation of the prison medical service is universal. I know that a sub-committee is considering it, but with the best will in the world it is impossible for them to get the true state of affairs. The prison medical service just cannot be reorganised effectively; it can only be abolished. It is absurdly expensive—one doctor to 250 prisons. And it is surely not the business of the Home Office to run a medical service at all. I hope, therefore, that the noble Earl who is to reply will confirm that it is within the committee's terms of reference to recommend the abolition of the prison medical service. It will be a great step forward in prisons if sick prisoners can be treated as patients within the National Health Services by G.P.s and consultants who, because they remain in contact with the outside world, can retain a proper sense of human values.

The account from which I have quoted extracts includes detailed allegations of brutal conduct by prison officers similar to a great many others which I have received. I shall not repeat them. I have never repeated them, because they can almost never be proved; and although some, unfortunately, may be true, they would create a false impression of prison officers as a whole. I feel very strongly, however, that the Home Office should not be party to what I regard as a conspiracy of silence which surrounds this subject, and they should give more positive guidance to prison governors. Every prison takes its character from the governor. If he wants a "tight" prison, with strict discipline, plenty of charges, and the prisoners treated as numbers, the staff will see that he gets it. On the other hand, if he wants the prisoners treated as men, they will be spoken to as men. There will be an absence of trivial charges, and an excellent prisoner—staff relationship.

I suggest to the noble Earl that the table of offences and punishment is a fair guide to the character of a particular prison. For example, hotly denied allegations have been made about Durham Gaol. The Home Secretary, in announcing his decision to have an inquiry, said: There is no reason to think Durham has a bad record of any sort. Obviously, he has not looked at his own figures. They reveal that in Durham Gaol in 1961, out of 935 prisoners, 543 were punished by solitary confinement, and 540 by bread and water. The Bastille could not beat that. I submit that it is prima facie evidence of a badly run and desperately unhappy prison.

I know, of course, that they have there one whole wing of difficult prisoners, but any prison which has recourse on such a scale to these brutalising and senseless punishments cries out for investigation—and truly independent investigation at that. How can the Home Secretary possibly regard a committee of visiting magistrates as the right people to conduct the inquiry, when they are already aware of the punishment rate, and have apparently done nothing about it? They are virtually being asked to condemn their own inefficiency. I hope that the Home Secretary will consider banishing altogether for good solitary-confinement and bread and water punishments. They only make bad men worse, and foolish men despair. The most effective punishment, the one that hurts most—and my correspondence proves this over and over again—is loss of remission. I would suggest that this is particularly appropriate to violent criminals, whom it is in the interests of society to keep in confinement as long as their sentence allows.

Taking all things into consideration, prisons and prisoners are costing the nation £60 million a year. Cost and numbers are constantly rising, largely because prison conditions create recidivists. The Home Secretary rightly sets great store by a full week's work. He can get the work, but he has not the room for prisoners to work in because they are so overcrowded. A truly vicious circle! His answer is to build more prisons. Certainly we need new modern prisons to replace the grim Victorian slums, but they will not provide the answer. The answer is that, if prisons are to be places of rehabilitation, we must stop sending to gaol people who should not be there.

Our most urgent need is for a thorough review of sentencing policy. Just consider the composition of our 30,000-plus prison population. First, the alcoholics. In 1961, 3,600 men and women were sent to prison for drunkenness. At any given moment 10 per cent. of the population of many local prisons (I emphasise that I am speaking about local prisons) are drunks held in maximum security. They are cleaned up, and after a few weeks sent out with a few shillings in their pockets. Many of them make a beeline for the pub, and before long are back again in prison. Some have been in as many as 50 times. My Lords, this is financial and social madness. No one pretends that it does the slightest good to them, or to us, to send such people to prison. We are merely evading the issue, and so clogging the prisons that they cannot be used for their intended purpose.

Until we have establishments where alcoholics can be given the treatment they need, it as surely imperative for the Law Officers to instruct magistrates not to send these people to prison. And when proper treatment is available I hope that it will be planned to provide also for the treatment of certain types of sex offenders and certain types of traffic offenders. In my view it is a double crime for magistrates and judges to send such people to prison, knowing that they cannot be treated—a crime against the offenders and a crime against the other inmates.

Secondly, I should like the Law Officers who are responsible for instructing magistrates to consider the whole position of remands in custody, which are a terrible affliction to those concerned, and particularly remands to prisons dike Brixton. In 1961 the courts poured into local prisons 33,545 untried prisoners. Of these, many were acquitted; and no fewer than 14,213 were not sent to prison on conviction. In fact, the majority of remanded prisoners are set free, but all have been first sent to prison and had to endure the worst conditions in Europe and make matters worse for other inmates. Some magistrates openly remand a man because they say that a whiff of prison will do him good. Unfortunately, that whiff makes him and his family stink in the nostrils of society for the rest of his life.

Let me give a typical example. A man aged 52 got drunk last Christmas Day and smashed a plate-glass window—most reprehensible. But as it was his first offence ever, it was not something for which a magistrate would send him to prison. Yet he spent a week in a cell at Slough and was then remanded for a week to Brixton. As he was wearing a Royal Navy blazer he was denied his own clothes and was given a buttonless jacket and buttonless trousers, which he had to clutch round him when he walked in the snow-covered exercise yard. As a result, he had severe bronchitis. He had two more weeks in Brixton, making a total of a month in prison; and he was handcuffed every time he went from Brixton to Burnham. Finally, he was put on probation. But, meanwhile, he has been suspended from a voluntary job which he greatly prized in charge of a local unit of one of our great, honoured national institutions. I am trying to get him reinstated, but that whiff of prison will cling to him for the rest of his life. Surely it would be common humanity and bare justice to instruct magistrates not to remand in custody accused persons whom they do not intend to send to prison, even if they are convicted. There are at least 15,000 such cases every year, and with many it means that a man can never again work in the business or profession to which he has devoted his life.

Thirdly, surely those with the power of sentencing must be instructed to make proper use of their statutory instruction under the First Offenders Act, which requires them not to imprison persons who can be dealt with in any other way. When, years ago in another place, I moved the Third Reading of that Bill I thought that it was a great step forward. But now I am not so sure. Some magistrates seem never to have heard of this Act, because in 1961 a total of 6,128 persons were sent to prison on their first offence. To-day, of all prison receptions one in six is a first offender. With women, the proportion is one in three. It would, I presume, be impossible to prosecute magistrates and judges for breaking the law in this way; but surely they could be removed from the magisterial and judicial benches to places where they would be unable to inflict such damage on society.

With success rates in the Probation Service approaching 75 per cent., and likely to improve still further as we recruit more officers, there can be no possible justification for imprisoning first offenders, other than those who have committed major crimes. Indeed, since rehabilitation is the declared objective of our penal policy it is beyond dispute that the short sentences which a magistrate can give are useless; because, without achieving any social or national purpose, they inflict crippling harm on the prisoner and his family. I am fully aware that this calls into question the whole range of prison sentences open to magistrates, as indeed I do, except that they could, where appropriate, impose suspended sentences. To most offenders the social and other consequences of trial and conviction in court are enough to deter them from committing a second offence. But if they do offend a second time the previous suspended sentence would ensure a period in prison sufficient not only for punishment but for training and rehabilitation.

I hope that no one will say that these are not matters for the Home Secretary. They are matters for the Government and it is idle to pretend that we can have prison reform without legal reform, and that means a review of our sentencing policy so that we send to prison only those who may benefit from it. If these suggestions are adopted—and they appear to me to be unanswerable—we should halve our prison population and be left mainly with recidivists, for whom there would be room and time to get to work. And it would be possible to make a complete change in the prison régime and the rôle of most prison officers. At present, despite our good experience with open prisons to the contrary, we act in the nonsensical belief that all inmates of local prisons must be under maximum security and equal guard. This is not so. At Wandsworth there are 1,600 recidivists, Any officer will tell you that only a hard-case core of, say, 70 need maximum security; and the authorities know who they are. Let that 60 or 70 have their own private Hell under a double guard of those officers who are content with the rôle of turnkey; and let the other 1,500 live under open prison conditions. There would be room for workshops, even lavatories, and an ample supply of officers who, no longer burdened with the half-day work of locking doors and counting heads, would have time to be social workers. The leader in The Times to which I referred earlier stressed this particular point, and it is one of great importance.

The prison officer is the only person who has real and constant contact with the prisoner. He sees him at his work, in his cell and at recreation. Among such officers there is a large, but as yet untapped, resource of experience and knowledge. They, and not outside experts, are the logical people to be concerned with rehabilitation and training, both inside and, to some extent, outside the prison. They should be given the chance to be trained for this work, the chance to make it their job to see a man's wife when he enters prison, keep him in touch with his family and help to raise his morale and self-respect, and gear his whole prison training to the job and the life to which he will go on release.

With this fundamental change must come a complete change in our attitude towards employment in prisons. There is no problem about getting the work—after all, employable prisoners are fewer than I in a 1,000 of our working population. We must make the room in our prisons; get in the machines and the instructors; start producing and paying prisoners the rate for the job; make them earn their own and their family's keep; stamp their cards; and let them see that they are as other men. Then, when they step beyond the wall, most of them will act like men. There will still remain the problem of after-care. I propose to say nothing to-day about that important subject, because it will be discussed in much greater detail by my noble friends, particularly by my noble friend Lady Swanborough, who asked me to apologise for the fact that she was unavoidably late in arriving here this afternoon but who will be speaking later and dealing with this subject. I am aware of her plans and wholeheartedly support them.

My Lords, in my view, the conditions to-day in our largest prisons are such that they call for the brain and pen of a Charles Dickens to expose and condemn them. Lacking such talent, I can only state the facts, and express my anger and my contempt for those who would obscure or deny the truth. I have tried to outline a plan which, implemented and carried through with faith and vigour, would provide the road back to decency for the shiftless, lazy, stupid and the unfortunate who occupy most of our prison cells. And I am certain that if, instead of brutalising, degrading and humiliating them, we help them firmly, sensibly and decently most of them will become decent citizens, and a; we empty the cells and reduce our costs we shall wipe out the shame of one of Britain's greatest social scandals. I beg to move for Papers.