Prisons — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Michael Andrew Gove (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint). She is a highly effective advocate for the causes in which she believes, and she was an outstanding Minister. I hope that when the Labour party comes to its senses, she will be restored to the Front-Bench position that she deserves. Congratulations are also in order to the shadow Justice Secretary, the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon). It is important for us to have an opportunity to reflect on what is happening in our prisons. The hon. Gentleman has devoted his life to justice, as a distinguished trade union lawyer, and I am grateful to him for securing the debate. It was a pity, however, that while he understandably drew attention to concerns about what is happening on our prison estate, he did not put forward a single positive alternative proposition. The contrast between his speech and that of my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary was striking My right hon. Friend has been in office for less than 12 months, but during that time she has unveiled and advanced a series of reforms that I believe have the potential to transform our justice system more powerfully, for the good, than those of any of her predecessors for a generation. The fact that she dealt so skilfully with interventions, and also outlined—not just in policy detail, but with authority and humanity—what needs to be done, underlines how fortunate we are to have a genuine, passionate and humane reformer in such an important role It is right to pay tribute to those who work in our prisons, and I expect that nearly every speaker in the debate will do so. I always remember a visit that I made to HMP Manchester, formerly Strangeways prison, during which I talked to a prison officer who was working with the most refractory and difficult prisoners. I asked him why he had chosen deliberately to work with some of the offenders whose cases were the most complex and whose behaviour was the most threatening. He explained that he had been brought up in a part of Manchester that was afflicted by crime, with unique challenges, and that one of the things that he wanted to do was put something back by working with offenders to ensure that their lives were changed and that, as a result, people who had been nothing but trouble—people who had been liabilities to society, people who had brought misery and pain into the lives of others, people who were wasting their own lives—could be turned into assets, and we as a society could ensure that whatever talents they had, long buried in many cases, could at last be put to the service of the community I remember being inspired by the fact that this young man from a working-class background had decided that the greatest service he could give to the community that had raised him was to try to turn around the lives of others, and it is that spirit that animates nearly everyone who works in our prison system. Despite the occasional frustrations that I experienced in dealing with members of the Prison Officers Association when I was Justice Secretary, I was never for a moment anything other than grateful for their service, their commitment and their dedication. That is why I am particularly grateful to my right hon. Friend for the steps that she has taken to enhance the way in which the professionals who work in our prisons can do the right thing—not just the reform governors who are changing the way in which prisons work by exercising a greater degree of control and autonomy over the individual prisons that are their responsibility, but those who work on the front line in our wings, particularly, but not only, in our reform prisons, and who are being empowered to play a much more positive role in encouraging and securing rehabilitation. I pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friend for an initiative that she has unveiled, Unlocked for graduates. As she pointed out, more than 350 undergraduates from some of our very best universities have now applied explicitly to work in prisons. Just as Teach First played a part in transforming the reputation of teaching, so this initiative is helping to recruit more people to our prisons. Alongside the work of Unlocked, the implementation of Sally Coates’s review of prison education is ensuring that those who are in custody finally receive a higher quality of education and the chance to transform their lives for the better. Moreover, the work of Charlie Taylor in reviewing youth justice is being followed up and implemented by my right hon. Friend. In so doing, they are making sure that those whose contact with the criminal justice system occurs relatively early in their lives, and who would otherwise be set on a course of criminality, are diverted from crime and assured of a productive future at the earliest possible stage I think we can all draw an important lesson from the experience of the youth justice system over recent years. It is the case that youth crime has fallen dramatically in the last few years, and that at the same time the number of young offenders in custody has fallen as well. It is not the case that in order to be tough on crime, we need to maintain the same number of individuals in custody as the number we currently have. There are smarter alternatives to incarceration that we need to contemplate. Let me be clear, however: there will always be some criminals for whom custody is the only appropriate answer, given the seriousness of their crimes and their capacity to reoffend. Sometimes society will be so outraged by particular crimes that incarceration is the only answer.