Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is humbling to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. I welcome this important debate, so I have a special thank you for the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and for his thought-provoking speech. There is so much to say on the topic. I am glad that many have referred to IPPs and that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, will continue to try to do something about this ongoing blight on the criminal justice system. I hope that imprisonment for public protection sentences will, one day, for ever be gone.

Showing such regard for these or any prisoners can grate with the public. Too often, attempts to raise issues of prison reform can be met with an angry rolling of the eyes. “What about the victims of crime?”, people say. At present, I note that this goes far wider than the hard-line trope to lock them up and throw away the key or a repetition of the myth that prisons are cushy holiday camps. It reflects a larger problem of public despair at the state of criminal justice and the crisis of trust in the UK, in particular with policing.

On the one hand, many citizens feel that the criminal justice system is becoming oppressive and inconsistent in the application of laws over policing and penalising what were erstwhile non-criminal activities—whether that is a protest from the one-man foghorn Steve Bray or those at the Sarah Everard vigil, or the seeming obsession of some police forces with trawling through social media and threatening those who tweet offensive or hateful comments, in their opinion, with criminal sanction.

I also look at the squandering of resources spent on investigating tens of thousands of non-crime hate incidents, despite the fact that these NCHIs have never been voted for by Parliament and have even been declared unlawful by the courts in the Harry Miller case. In 2018, Sara Thornton, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, stated that the police should

“solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes.”

Yet the investigation of these NCHIs continues, while burglaries and violent crime are neglected, and the public feel that they are being ignored. So many feel underprotected by agencies charged with their safety.

As an example, you need look only at the story in the news this week about the release of the report on the Oldham grooming gangs. It is shocking reading and many still feel it is too evasive and a whitewash. Vulnerable young girls, who no one in authority would listen to, were drugged, raped and sexually abused with seeming impunity, as the police and local authorities looked the other way, refusing to investigate for fear of providing

“an opportunity for far-right racist elements to capitalise politically”.

This politicisation of policing adds to a sense of grievance, especially as similar stories have emerged from Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. This set of failures of the criminal justice agencies to live up to the public’s expectations can breed a wider cynicism about the importance of focusing on the plight of criminals and rehabilitation initiatives. We must not be deterred, but we cannot ignore that either.

I have some points on how we can improve prison life—a vital tool in deterring reoffending, as many have said. I recently visited the new early days centre at HMP Bronzefield, a Sodexo-managed women’s prison for the MoJ. It made a real impact on me: it is a hugely impressive initiative, enthusiastically backed by management and staff, which allows a smooth settlement into custody. This has been shown to have a positive reduction on self-harm, violence and suicide, as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, explained that these initiatives do. These early days centres really work to cut down the volatility that new prisoners feel when entering the prison estate, allowing them to reach out for help without fear of repercussion, providing access to practical rules and being taught all the ropes of the prison regime by peer mentors.

I met three peer mentors—or young women residents as they were known then, or prisoners now; I cannot keep up—whose dedication to their role was meticulous. Their attention to detail was so impressive and they were organisationally competent. That not only contributed to their accumulation of skills for their own rehabilitation—I hope they might get a job at the MoJ when they are released—but helped to take some of the time burden from hard-pressed officers.

I make special mention here of Michael Campbell-Brown, who arranged over 160 of these specifically trained peer mentors. There are 15 of these early days centres; a new one opened earlier this week at HMP Addiewell, and HMP Peterborough is launching one in its female prison this week. I hope the Minister will back rolling out these programmes far more widely and look at these kinds of innovative new initiatives.

We now understand that setting the right tone at the start of the prison sentence is important, creating a positive contract between prison and prisoner, ensuring that incarceration is not just an extension of a turbulent, fearful and violent life outside. But this can all be undone by the circumstances of release, which so often set people up to fail. All that good work is ruined when prisoners are just dumped into the outside world. Often, those released are given unachievable tasks by probation officers; many are not given travel warrants or means to attend probation meetings and they end up being recalled to prison.

Often the focus of post-prison rehabilitation is on helping prisoners to gain employment, which is a good thing, but there is less focus on leaving jail without accommodation. Tens of thousands leave prison without anywhere to live. Not everyone has a family home to go to. This is crucial, and we know that there is a clear link—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Baroness of the six-minute limit.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I apologise. There is a link between homelessness and reoffending. I hope the new Minister, whom I welcome heartily, will look at it too.