Prisons and Probation

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

Sadly, I cannot support the motion on the Order Paper, but I agree with parts of it. As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) said, we have high rates of violence, self-harm and drug use in prisons, which I agree puts pressure on our NHS. I agree that no staff member should have to go to work to face threats to their safety. Who is not concerned with rehabilitation? The question concerns what we do about it.

I want to focus on prisons. Let me begin by reading a short passage to the House:

“The justice budget is far too high. Over the course of the last two decades, the vision for the justice system has been a maximalist one: expanding the reach of the system into people’s lives; expanding state interference through…legislation; expanding the numbers of people entering the courts and, ultimately, entering prison. The justice budget therefore could and should be cut substantially, but it must be cut in the right way.”

Hon. Members could be forgiven for thinking that that is a quote from a Conservative manifesto or a right-leaning think-tank, but they would be wrong. It is the opening paragraph from the 2015 spending review submission from the Howard League for Penal Reform.

I believe that we have a golden opportunity in this country. We have a new Government, a reforming Justice Secretary—my goodness, did he not prove that today?—a tough financial environment and a third sector crying out for a different approach. It is therefore good that the Prime Minister said the following in his party conference speech last autumn:

“We have got to get away from the sterile lock-em-up or let-em-out debate, and get smart about this”.

He was quite right.

Our aim has to be to reduce the incidence of crime and the factors that pull people into the criminal justice system in the first place. Is our reason for doing so money? Yes, it is about money and the need to find big savings in the Department, but it is also about effective government. I believe—this is not often said in the House—that it is also the Christian thing to do. Nearly half of all inmates go into prison with no qualifications. Many of them come out with none. All the problems that may have led them to that life remain unchanged, including, as the Secretary of State said, drug addiction, mental health problems and childhood abuse. Prison is literally locking poverty into our country and we as a society are paying the bills.

What is the intellectual basis for that? I have never been more sure that prison reform is compassionate Conservatism in action, both financial and social. That is why I would argue that criminal justice policy is not solely about the Ministry of Justice; it is as much about our education and welfare reforms. In my opinion, prison is the ultimate state failure, so a smaller secure estate is a smaller, cheaper and more effective state. That should be a cause that all Conservatives can rally around.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, if we are going to reduce the strain on our prisons, it is essential that we devise community penalties that are more robust and, frankly, more onerous, so that they can command the respect of the public, who rightly expect crime to be punished?

[Steve Brine]

I will come on to that. The community courts that I saw in the United States were a good step towards that. My hon. Friend will find that the Government are very interested in what is happening over there.

The Ministry of Justice is currently a demand-led Department—demand for prison places and probation services is fed by the criminal courts, which are in turn fed by the police and prosecution services, which are in turn fed by the incidence of crime. My view is that we should seek to place the penal system on a more sustainable footing by seeking to reduce demand on the system, particularly in respect of prison numbers, rather than pursuing the old, tired predict-and-provide policy.

If austerity did not force our hand, we should do it anyway. Austerity did not lead to the Right on Crime initiative in Texas, but we should look to it. The Justice Committee of the last Parliament, of which I was a member alongside the current Leader of the Opposition, visited Austin and Houston, where we met Republican state representative Jerry Madden, who is no fluffy liberal—he describes himself as a typical Texan Republican. He told us this:

“30% of the people in prison today we’re scared of - 70% we’re just mad at. We need to lock up the 30 and get a whole lot smarter about the 70.”

I think he is right. Let me be clear before anyone gets excited: this is not about throwing open the doors, but about slowing down the rate at which prisoners come in by providing less costly and more effective alternatives to sentences.

Custody should not be the only means through which society expresses its disapproval. Treatment should be a way of doing that, too. The Texan focus would therefore be to give judges options and to finally tackle the underlying causes of repeat offending. Madden made what must have been a welcome call on the Texas Governor of the time to recommend that he halve the budget earmarked for new prisoners and spend the rest on treatment instead. The drug courts that followed are one of his most striking creations. I spent an afternoon in Houston in Judge Denise Bradley’s STAR drug court in Harris County observing this new justice in action. Every one of the young people coming before it has been in prison before and is now a non-violent reoffender, which is why they are back.

Drug courts are a tough alternative. Offenders live in halfway house-style premises, but they hold jobs and maintain links with their families and, most importantly, their children. Every two weeks they come back to court for a kind of progress report. It is working. Recidivism rates in Texas are falling fast, so it is very welcome that the Government are exploring how we can bring these courts here to England and Wales.

There will always be serious offenders who need locking up and need to stay there. No one, neither here nor in Texas, is arguing any differently, but there are the others and we cannot afford the ongoing rate of state failure that they represent. I agree we should close the old Victorian prisons, but we should not just build more like-for-like. To be clear, I absolutely am saying we should reduce the prison population significantly. The Government should look again at older prisoners, the fastest-growing group in the estate, return to the 82 recommendations from Lord Bradley on the over-representation of people with mental health problems, and look again at Jean Corston’s work on women prisoners.

The Justice Secretary said, in his first major speech last summer, that there is

“treasure in the heart of man”.

I believe he is right. I believe that, like me, he is an optimist about the human condition. My right hon. Friend will know that Winston Churchill said:

“there is a treasure…in the heart of…man”—[Official Report, 20 July 1910; Vol. 19, c. 1354.]

at that Dispatch Box when he was Home Secretary with responsibility for police, prisons and prisoners. We have a much more fragmented system these days, but the basics have not changed. We can lock ’em up and spend a fortune biting off our nose to spite our face in the long run, but it is time to try something different.