§ Mr. HarrisTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps his Department is taking to promote prison inmates' family ties.
§ Mr. Douglas HoggWe have taken a number of steps in recent years to help prisoners in maintaining contact with their families, in particular through increased opportunities for home leave, the introduction of payphones in open prisons and the abolition and relaxation of routine censorship of inmates correspondence in open and category C establishments.
From April the prison department will for the first time be able to make grants towards the costs of running visitors' centres outside prisons. Such grants may be made either to help start up new centres or to help existing ones in financial difficulty. In some cases these grants are likely to be crucial to the survival of the centres concerned. The department is also encouraging the establishment of creches within prison visiting rooms wherever practicable, to improve the quality of visits for small children and for their parents alike. The assisted prison visits scheme, under which close relatives on low incomes may have the costs of their visits to prisoners paid by the Government, is to be extended so that assisted visits to sentenced prisoners may take place straight after reception. Cardphones for inmates' use are to be installed in all category C prisons and their equivalents in the female and young offender systems later this year. Revised prison standing orders which come into force on 1 April will abolish long-standing restrictions on the purchase of stamps by inmates from their own money and relax restrictions on the purchase of phonecards. All these measures will help prisoners to keep in touch with their families while in custody and, we hope, help them to stay clear of crime after their release.