MINISTRY OF JUSTICE — House of Commons, 2018-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Edmund Francis Hughes (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) said it was the duty of a Government to protect their people, and obviously that is the case with prison, which ultimately serves two purposes: to remove freedom from criminals and therefore their opportunity to reoffend, and then to work with them so that they do not reoffend after they leave I spent the first 35 years of my life at one end of the spectrum, firmly believing that prison worked simply by removing criminals from circulation, and I thought it the best place for them. Immediately before becoming an MP, I went to work for YMCA Birmingham, which has accommodation for 300 formerly young homeless people and a 72-bed hostel in Northfield that typically serves as a place for people leaving prison to stay. We always ensured that senior members of staff were based at our various accommodation sites across the city, where we had an opportunity to meet residents every day, speak to them and understand their stories From that experience, it became much clearer to me that this was a more complex problem. My boss decided it would be appropriate for me to attend the Meridian course with an organisation called Common Purpose, and that gave us the opportunity to go into prisons and see the problem at first hand. We visited Featherstone Prison and Leicester Prison. It was at Leicester Prison in particular that I became aware of the challenge. Ralph Lubkowksi, one of the deputy governors at the time, took us round the prison and explained some of the challenges—for example, preparing the menu for Christmas day: if it sounds too indulgent, the press say, "These dreadful prisoners are being looked after too luxuriously", and on a budget of about £2.20 per inmate per day for three meals Not only does the governor have the complex task of managing behaviour and rehabilitation, but he has to run a small town on a very tight budget. Leicester Prison, which was opened in 1828, has 300 inmates—a very small village, shall we say; it is clearly a restricted site in the middle of Leicester. What are the challenges facing the governor? I understand that about 24% of the prison population has been in the care system, compared with a figure of 2% nationally, and that the typical reading age of a prisoner is 11. Clearly, this is very challenging stuff What are the Government going to do about it? For one, they are investing in the unlocked graduate programme, which is trying to entice the brightest and best graduates into the prison service to work as prison wardens and with prisoners to understand how they might break that cycle of reoffending. The idea is that they study for a two-year masters degree, fully funded, so that they might apply their thinking to a problem that has caused some difficulty. The reoffending rates of 44%, rising to 56% for those with less than a 12-month sentence, are not new; historically, they have remained largely unchanged The other thing we can do to check reoffending is to support the "Manifesto to Strengthen Families", which has a specific item in it about how prisons should put families at the heart of breaking the reoffending cycle. We know that those who leave prison with families to go back to are much less likely to reoffend. I completely understand the maxim "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", but let us understand that the causes of crime can go back some 20 years before an offence is committed.