Prisons and Probation — House of Commons, 2016-01-27
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Francis Slaughter (Labour, Centre-left): The cuts in staff lie at the root of many of the problems I am identifying. The fact that in many cases prisoners now spend 22 or 23 hours in their cell, and have restrictions on work, education and association, is leading to increased violence and poor behaviour in prisons. That is a very short-sighted development. I think the Government realise that, but perhaps too late Turning to probation and reoffending, figures I obtained last month revealed that almost one in 10 offenders are convicted of an offence within 18 days of release. HM inspectorate of probation’s fourth report on the implementation of transforming rehabilitation was published on 15 January. It highlighted the disparity in performance between the national probation service, which is still part of the National Offender Management Service, and the 21 community rehabilitation companies managed by private providers. For CRCs, one quarter of the offenders sampled had been convicted of a further offence, whereas for the NPS the figure was less than one fifth. On child protection and safeguarding on home visits, the NPS again outperformed CRCs. Earlier this month, the Lord Chancellor’s Department stopped publishing figures relating to staffing figures at CRCs. Why was this, except to conceal the hundreds of experienced probation staff being laid off across the country to promote the bottom line for the CRCs’ owners Let me turn to the youth estate, and in particular the role of G4S. We welcome the measures announced yesterday by the Lord Chancellor to effectively put Medway secure training centre into special measures. This is unsurprising, as they are exactly what I called for in an urgent question two weeks ago. I also welcome the decision by the director of Medway to stand down. However, individuals should not bear the entirety of the blame for what looks like corporate failure by G4S. I have now written to the Serious Fraud Office to ask that it investigates the allegations, made in the BBC "Panorama" programme on Medway, that instances of disorder were concealed to avoid G4S incurring fines under its contract. This is in addition to the ongoing SFO investigation into G4S and Serco’s manipulation of the tagging contracts for financial gain G4S has a truly dismal record of managing public contracts here and abroad. At Rainsbrook STC, six staff were dismissed and the contract was terminated last September, following an inspection report that said some staff were on drugs while on duty, colluded with detainees and behaved extremely inappropriately with young people. The company taking over the contract is MTCnovo. It is a name not well known in this country because, in origin, it is a US prison firm. As such, it presided over a riot in an Arizona state prison and ran a youth facility in Mississippi that a judge described as "struggling with disorder, periodic mayhem, and staff ineptitude which leads to perpetual danger to the inmates and staff." It probably left that reference out of its application, along with the fact that its directors helped to set up Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad The problems of the youth estate go way beyond G4S, however, which is why the chief inspector of prisons has called for an inquiry into the failings at Medway and the implications for the wider youth justice system.