§ 3.0 p.m.
§ LORD STONHAM rose to draw attention to the gross and increasing overcrowding in Her Majesty's Prisons, and to ask what steps Her Majesty's Government are taking to deal with this danger so as to avoid the consequent breakdown of the prison, probation and after-care services; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I draw attention to the fact that there are to-day more than 40,000 men, women and teenagers detained in Her Majesty's prisons—that is four times the pre-war population—and that the number is rising at an average of some 3,000 a year. Moreover, the overall figures do not convey an accurate impression of the real incidence of overcrowding. There is total accommodation in our establishments for 32,000; but out of that number some 12,500 are in women's prison, borstals, detention centres and open prisons which are not overcrowded—indeed, there are empty beds waiting to be filled in open prisons. The surplus bodies are all crammed into closed prisons, which have 27,500 men but only 19,500 places. So a few prisons in large cities have to bear the whole burden, and they do it by doubling up or trebling the occupation of cells intended for one man: 8,000 little "black holes of Calcutta"—that is what it amounts to. If the numbers are allowed to increase at the same rate there will be 12,000 such places in 12 months' time.
§ At weekends, as your Lordships will know, men are often "banged up" for 23 hours out of 24. There are men who do five years, the whole of their sentences, like that. Just imagine the lack of air, the lack of privacy, three chamber pots—all the unimaginable discomforts and sheer proximity imposed on men with but little hope and often badly disturbed. It must mean grave disturbances and I think an actual explosion, unless something is done about it soon. I believe it was the late Sir Winston Churchill who said that you can judge a country's civilisation by the way it treats its prisoners. By that standard we do not rate very high—one of the lowest in Europe.
§ I ventured to draw attention to these problems in the debate on the gracious 526 Speech, and the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, was kind enough to write to me subsequently. He said that he agreed with me that the only two solutions were to build the new prisons planned by the previous Government and to make available to the courts new forms of noncustodial sentences. Naturally, I welcome that assurance. But it is not enough. We want action now, if the Prison Service is to be saved from utter breakdown, and also if the Probation and After-Care Service is not to become overloaded to the point of collapse. If that should happen we should be throwing away all the improvements made in penal reform in the last fifty years.
§ Of course the Government have not been in office long enough to make an impact on this problem; but they have been there long enough to assess it and to decide policy; and I should like the noble Lord to say to-day whether he can now confirm that they are proceeding in full with the policy of new prison building which they inherited and, perhaps still more important, that they are continuing the five-year rolling building programme, so that we may one day have hopes that the oldest prisons will be demolished. This, of course, is for the future. It can give us no immediate help, but it would he a happy augury if the noble Lord was able to say "Yes" to those two questions.
§ Would the noble Lord also have a close leek at the fortnightly occupation returns, first to see that the open prisons are filled up by transfers from overcrowded local prisons. I know there are difficulties about the class of sentence in which you can send a man to an open prison; but the noble Lord will find that those difficulties will yield if he will have talks with local authorities serving adjacently. May we also have a reversal of the stupid and very costly security policy that the Home Office is pursuing, which has had such a disastrous effect on prison progress in the last year or two? The Class C social inadequates who form the bulk of our prison population, will be a great deal less trouble in open prisons than they are sleeping three to a cell in an overcrowded local gaol.
§ I think, too, that something can be gained by taking a close look at women's prisons. There are, all told, just over 527 1,000 women and girls in prisons. Some of the women's prisons could be closed now and used for men if we transferred the present occupants to empty places at Holloway and Styal. The remand services also want looking at, for a very different reason—because they are overcrowded and there are constant demands for more accommodation. I do not think that these should be complied with, for I am convinced that the present overcrowding is brought about because the courts are largely misinterpreting the mandatory bail provisions of the 1967 Act, although I thought those were clear enough when they left your Lordships' House.
§ Despite the fact that I am inviting a flood of angry letters, I say that this matter has to be faced. It is really a grave scandal when you think that last year 19,000 offenders who were sent to prison on remand—that is to say, sent to prison innocent and unconvicted—were not imprisoned subsequently on conviction. That means that in the courts' own judgment they did not deserve imprisonment; their offence was of a nature which did not call for imprisonment. But many of those people had actually been four or five months in prison, some of them six months, and they came back before the court and were discharged. This is a scandal, and whatever the cause it has to be settled. Not only is this a case of overcrowding; it means utter ruin for ordinary decent people, thousands of them every year. Your Lordships will not, I hope, think that an injustice of this kind can be tolerated.
§ Fortunately, other provisions of the 1967 Act have been well used and have kept a number of people out of prison. In the first year, 30,000 prison sentences were suspended and only a small proportion of those concerned committed another offence in the first year. Then again, parole has been remarkably successful. Indeed, the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, last week indicates that in his view the field should be extended. Well it might be, although the size of the parole field will have to be most carefully studied. Unquestionably, it has been overwhelmingly successful, and its importance lies in the fact not that many thousands of men have been released early, but that 528 so few of them have had to be recalled. This is due, I think, to the care which the local review committees have devoted to every case and to the high skill and discernment of Lord Hunt and his Committee in making their final decision.
§ I do not think it is sufficiently realised that the men who are considered are "pretty bad lots", because they cannot be considered until they have served one-third, or twelve months, of their service. This means that they have probably committed a serious crime which has called for a sentence of three years or more. So these are the men, the bad lots, whom, if their prognosis is satisfactory, the Board have had the courage and wisdom to release. They have been abundantly justified, and this justification is the main hope for the future of the Prison Service. I say it is the main hope because it is the offenders, the men themselves, who, given the chance, have justified it; and that is very important.
§ We owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for the calm, steadfast and unswerving courage he has shown in carrying out the decisions of Parliament, and for sailing so surely uncharted seas. Every prisoner now knows he has a chance, and if he fails once, he has a second chance. More important still, the release is carefully prepared, and the Probation Service is giving full and extremely successful after-care. This is but one of the many tasks the Service is shouldering. I should like to know the extent to which the Government are prepared to back the expansion of the Service. The previous Administration recognised that, of all the ways of treating offenders, the use of the Probation Service was, from every point of view, the best. Special and successful efforts were made to expand it. Starting with a force of 2,000, recruitment brought us to a strength of 3,300. But I believe that to do the tasks which will now fall upon them the Probation Service will need to be 7,000 strong. It is for the Government to say whether they are prepared to reallocate the necessary resources. I say "reallocate", because it would not be an extra expense, since it costs ten times as much to keep an offender in prison as it costs to keep him in the community. It is the soundest of good sense. We shall be interested to know whether the Government will follow it.
529§ I say that 7,000 officers will be required because we must reduce the average case load to 35. With the present level of case books offenders cannot be effectively supervised. That change alone will call for a thousand more officers. I believe that this ties in with the Government view, because in his statement the Under-Secretary mentioned going to a figure of 4,400 merely to give the Service the chance to do its present jobs properly. We need that amount of increase before considering any further tasks. Then the number seconded as prison welfare officers needs to be increased from the present figure of 200 to 500. Only by staffing of that order shall we make a reality of the claim that rehabilitation of offenders begins on the day that sentence starts.
§ Then there is the very large question of non-custodial care. The proposals of the sub-committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, were published on September 8, but we do not yet know the Government's decision about them. What we do know is that the Probation Service will be very much involved. The National Association of Probation Officers recently published an invaluable statement of policy on the future development of the Probation and After-Care Service. It is a firm and enlightened expression of opinion on the place of the Service in a society faced with increasing problems in the control of crime.
§
After discussing the many new burdens thrust on to them in recent years they say:
A certain defensiveness has developed in the attitude of many officers who are working all the time at full stretch and cannot easily contemplate being asked to do any more. And if there were any suggestion of asking the Service now to add the supervision of noncustodial treatment to its ever-growing range of duties without the very great increase in staff which would be required, it must be clear that the Service would be united in its resistance to such a development.
However, we think it crucial to add that these remarks are concerned only with the inadequacy of present resources: they are not in any way to be construed as criticism of the idea of new experiments in non-custodial treatment. On the contrary, we think such experiments are vita], and that the Probation Service must inevitably be deeply involved in them. We suggest, indeed, that the Probation Service is uniquely placed to make a positive, constructive contribution to the urgent problem of containing crime, but on one condition—and that is that the authorities are willing to finance
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an expansion of it commensurate with the magnitude of the task. This means finding money to pay a vastly increased number of officers; money also to increase salaries very considerably in order to make it possible to obtain sufficient recruits; and money for all kinds of other services "—
which they detail.
§
They conclude with these words:
It appears to us that the time has come when a new approach to the problem of controlling crime is being forced upon the community. We do not claim that the idea is original but we do think that it is of great importance. It is impossible to contemplate an indefinite expansion of the prison population when everybody knows that, generally speaking, prison sentences neither deter nor reform those who receive them. The only alternative which we can envisage is the rapid building up of a strong Service committed to rehabilitating criminals in a non-custodial setting—a Service large enough to make a real impact on the situation. And meeting both humanely and effectively the understandable public demand for law and order'; and the Probation Service is peculiarly fitted to meet this need because of its independent role.
§
That is a clear and realistic assessment of the situation, and I support it. It is an assessment by people who know their business, and who are confident in their ability to tackle it, given the means. As recently as November 25 there was a Times leader on this subject, which was a remarkable article for its small compass. It set out all the essential facts in the argument objectively and drew its conclusions cogently, and I think, unanswerably. The article ended with these words when it urged the Government:
to pay the necessary price for a policy that is in fact cheaper than any other that stands a chance of success.
So the Government have "got it made"; all they have to do is to say "Yes" and find the wherewithal.
§
It may be a shock to some noble Lords to hear the almost casual statement by this highly responsible body that everyone knows that
prison sentences neither deter nor reform those who receive them.
But it is true and the facts are inescapable. We have to accept that fact as basic and start thinking and working again from there. Prison is evil, and despite the skill and devoted efforts of prison staffs the most they can hope for is to prevent some of the evil from rubbing off on to the best prospects. Prison can make criminals of offenders; it cannot make them decent citizens. As an
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instrument of rehabilitation it has failed. That is why the proposal for a new type of hostel order with after-care is so extremely promising. There are many offenders who, though they must be sentenced as a deterrent, do not need to be sent to prison. There are inadequates, and others who show a sense of guilt, who want help, and who are not identified with the criminal community. They need to be removed to some extent from society, but they need not be subjected to the contagion of prison; and they are desperately in need of support in a casework setting. This would mean setting up hostels throughout the country, with seconded probation officers in charge. The offenders could keep in touch with their families, but they would be receiving support; and as a result of their working in the locality their entry into society on leaving prison would be much easier. This transformation could soon be done and the cost would not be large, because the machinery for it is already there.
§ One of the more successful ventures of the last Government was the setting up of a voluntary body—the Bridgehead Housing Association—which was charged with the duty of organizing houses for homeless ex-offenders wherever there was a proved need. Its cost to public funds was only £5,000 a year for administrative expenses, with a modest capital allowance to cover the difference between the cost of a house and the amount the local authority would lend on it. No proposal is approved until the need is acknowledged by the regional committee, and until a suitably qualified committee has been formed to run the hostel. That committee accepts responsibility for repayment of the cost of the property and eventually we shall get our hostels at no public cost.
§ Unfortunately, Bridgehead is the victim of its own success. Having secured houses and obtained planning consent, despite bitter and unscrupulous public opposition, they are unable to go ahead because the Treasury have not come up with a capital grant. At present there are six proposals, providing 66 places, which are held up in this way; and again I say that this is money that will in any case be repaid. I would ask the Government to reverse this 532 inexcusable decision immediately, and to let this very useful organisation get on with its job untrammelled by these senseless restrictions.
§ Will they also consider using Bridgehead to locate, to assess and to obtain the properties needed for the new adult hostels, because one or more of these should be available to every court throughout the country? Nothing elaborate is needed—just a comfortable home, with a man and wife team and some ancillary help for cleaning and cooking, and in every case a seconded probation officer to act as warden. I would point out that the courts will make hostel orders only in respect of the very people whom they are now sending to prison. On every hostel order which they make out, the Home Office will be saving £15 a week in keeping the prisoner, plus £5,000 per person, the capital cost of providing a new prison place. When that is multiplied by only the projected increase in the prison population, it makes a very favourable proposition for the Home Secretary to submit to his colleagues.
§ I hope that he will also consider the suggestion in the Report by my noble friend Lady Wootton of Abinger, that suitable offenders should be sentenced to a period of work in and for the community. The more I look at this proposal the more I see the difficulties, but the more I am convinced that it is the most satisfactory way to place a duty on offenders so that they will have to work, and in jobs which are of benefit to the community as a whole. In this way, those who feel that offenders should work in such a way that they can make reparation will be satisfied.
§ Those are the main proposals, my Lords, but there are other very worthwhile ones, such as remedial day centres for young people, direction to youth centres offering courses of the Outward Bound variety, and week-end centres for adults, including such offenders as delinquent drivers. Members of your Lordships' House may be interested in the last one. They are all worth consideration. But this new concept which I am proposing to-day, whatever the details, really means prison for the few, not the many; prison for the professional criminals—those who commit violent crimes or who are thought to be a threat 533 to society. If I am asked, "Why send those to prison? What good does it do them?", I say that it will not do them any good, but there are some who for the protection of society must be kept within. You have to cage a wild animal before you can tame him.
§ The fact is that most offenders are already very quiet, even harmless. They may also he—indeed, I think they are—hopeless and stupid, but we do not need costly prisons, 18 ft. fences and guard dogs to contain them. By the methods I suggest, we could help them in a constructive way and save upwards of £30 million into the bargain. I hope your Lordships will feel that this is something which you could and should support.
§ Also, may we know what the Home Secretary is doing about drunken offenders, of whom about a thousand are serving short prison sentences to-day? For the last three years Bridgehead has been going ahead providing hostels for alcoholic offenders. They are sited adjacent to the National Health special treatment centres, so that the best of medical skill is always available. Will the Home Secretary therefore now activate Section 91 of the Act, and relieve the Prison Service of a thousand prisoners who cause prison staffs more than their share of trouble and effort?
§ Speaking of alcoholics, I must pay a grateful tribute to Lady Reading and her special after-care committee for the really marvellous work they have done. It is briefly and modestly described in the pamphlet, Homeless from Prison, which I hope your Lordships will read. With a grant of money from the Carnegie Trust, the Committee set up and maintained five hostels, all with a different purpose, as the pamphlet indicates. They were not all equally successful, for reasons which I need not go into, but the one which is transcendentally, marvellously, unbelievably successful is Rathcoole, the hostel for alcoholics. They did not pick their men, except that they chose the worst. They took them right from "Skid Row"—men who had sunk to the lowest depths of degradation that it is possible for a human being to reach.
§ I had supper with those chaps after they had been there a few months. They were eight men who had more than 200 prison convictions between them. One or two were past middle age, and they 534 had never been employed before. They were all now employed. But, what is more, they were all rational. They were not sorry for themselves, or anything of the kind: they were people you could talk to. They were also capable of being in charge, and had shown it by running their hostel. Indeed, they were allowed to do so, and they ran it so well that eventually the warden was able to go to another place. In the end, three of those men were considered fit and able themselves to serve as wardens in hostels. As I say, my Lords, these chaps were the "Skid Row" types; the meths drinkers. It is the most marvellous work that could possibly be imagined. I would assure the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, who is Chairman of the Carnegie Trust, that in my view no money was ever spent to better advantage, because it has served as a pattern for all future ventures of this kind and, of course, has been of enormous help to Bridgehead. We are tremendously grateful to Lady Reading for what she has done, and I hope that we shall hear more about these hostels when she comes to speak.
§ My Lords, 15 National Health Service hospitals have now established intensive care units for alcoholics, and there are 12 after-care hostels which are adjacent to 12 of those 15 hospitals. I hope that the Home Secretary will agree that the necessary facilities are available and that he would be justified in abolishing imprisonment for drunkenness in those areas.
§ Finally, I want to refer to the one division of the Prison Service which offers the hope of rehabilitation. I refer to prison industries, to which the previous Government paid particular attention. When we started in 1964 prison industries were not taken seriously. They were regarded as something to keep men from getting into further mischief. There was no question of running them on proper business lines. The right encouragement and the efforts of our dedicated staff changed all that. To-day, all real prison industries—that is, all except social services—are showing a profit, and not a heavy loss. There are now nearly 3,000 prisoners on higher earnings up to a top limit of 33s. a week compared with the average prison pay of about 6s. These 3,000 men now earn enough profit to be paid £5 to £10 a week, which is the rate for the job. 535 That is equal to the record of outside industry considering that the prison population changes completely four times a year and considering that these men work only 28 to 30 hours a week.
§ My Lords, I hope that this is the present position. But we do not seem to be making any progress, and I should like to know what the present position is, because that 3,000 can be increased to 14,000, provided there is enough vision at the top and enough faith. First, we have to be sure that the objective of the staff of the prisons is not merely to maintain the prisons per se, but to concentrate on certain objectives for the prisoners and for the community as a whole. It is fair to ask, and I do ask: Why is it that only some prisoners are now earning profits equivalent to the rate for the job? Why not all physically fit prisoners instead of just a few? Why do some prisoners produce goods worth £1,400 a year and others only £200 a year? Why can some work for 40 hours a week and others only 14? My Lords, these questions have been asked before, and the answers normally given are not satisfactory. We are usually told that it is the obsolescence of buildings, workshops and machinery, and the shortage of discipline staff. With sufficient determination the workshops and the machinery can be provided. As for the discipline staff, I hope that the noble Lord will assure himself that they are being used efficiently. I could mention quite a few prison workshops where there is no discipline staff, where they manage without.
§ It requires Home Office support in the selection of staff, in building maintenance, penal planning and so on. It is all too common in prison workshops for the key workers—and there are key workers in every factory—to be transferred to another prison without the governor informing the industrial manager. Imagine being the manager of a workshop and coming along in the morning to find nothing being done, nobody on the job. You ask the reason for this, and you are told, "The foreman"—that is the chief prison worker—"is not here". "Why is he not here?"—"Oh, he has been transfered. Didn't you know?" It is an indication of the esteem, or lack of esteem, in which industries are held in 536 the hierarchy, and it has got to be altered.
§ The Anson Committee said that we must be brave enough to aim for outside conditions in prison industries. In six years we did this, and we proved that most prisoners will respond to these conditions if they can be made similar to outside industry. Our plans were wholeheartedly approved by the T.U.C. and not so wholeheartedly by the C.B.I. We made arrangements with five of the largest trade unions—and, incidentally, they were the ones we were always told were the most awkward—for them to send their regional officers into the prisons to examine the work of the chaps there. If the work is good enough they see that when they come out the prisoners get a union card and are settled into a worthwhile job. They are then halfway back to a decent life—and this could be so in the case of the 3,000 men that I was speaking about.
§ My Lords, we want a good deal more of that kind of arrangement. I say that this is the way to reduce the army of criminals. Bring those who run prison industries into closer contact with the community at large; bring them into contact with the employment agencies, with the employers and the probation services, with the providers of homes for men who need them. Having trained the men in prison they should be allowed to smooth their paths into the world outside. At present our prisons are a prime example of costly waste and scandalous misuse of public money. Overcrowding is crippling the services and bringing ever-escalating calls for more money. And so it will continue unless we realise that half our criminals need organised support into freedom, with integrated and powerful means of providing them with the boost to industrial achievement. We need to give them, in other words, a pride in their work, adequate contingency funds, a home, some basic social skills and an appropriate job.
§ We should realise also, as Lady Wootton's Committee has realised, that this half of our prison population can be more effectively and more cheaply provided with these skills in the community than in prison. We have to divide our prisoners up. It is being done elsewhere, my Lords, and it can be done here. It will be done, I believe, provided that the 537 community puts its foot down and says, "We are not going on paying through the nose for nothing. We want something for our money. There is a better way of doing things and all those things can come to pass." In the last six years the previous Government made a beginning. It is now for this Government to say whether it is all to be thrown away or whether they will be bold and will build wisely on the foundations that we laid. I beg to move for Papers.