Offender Management Bill

I entirely agree, and if time permitted I was going to draw those sorts of conclusions in relation to proposed paragraph (e). It is rather like taking people up in an aeroplane, then throwing them out without a parachute and expecting them to land safely. That is what we do in our prison system. We do not rehabilitate people in prison, or not enough of them; we do not reform them; we do not enable them to come to terms with their offender behaviour, and at the end of their period in prison we say, ““Here’s the door—out you go,”” and expect them to behave. They cannot. Offenders may be irresponsible people, but we must bear it in mind that they are in many respects damaged people, albeit ones who have done extreme damage to other people. They cannot behave unless we take care of them as they come out of prison and make sure that they have employment and housing opportunities and are enabled to restore links with their families—all the sorts of things that the Minister and I have discussed over the last 15 months. Without all that it is highly unlikely that we will achieve what we want with the prison system. I accept that we are talking about irresponsible and, in many respects, very criminally minded people, but they are redeemable. However, they will not be redeemed unless we provide, through the offender management system, adequate rehabilitation systems. One of the most frightening things for a prisoner is those moments before release. I say this because of Jonathan Aitken. He was highly educated and had a family and a home to go to, but he said that the most frightening time for him after his period in custody was waiting to go out because he did not know what would be out there. Before his release, he was sitting in an anteroom next door to an old lag—he did not use those words—who had been round and round the system. He said, ““The most terrifying time is now. In prison, you are cocooned. In prison, you do not have to make decisions for yourself. In prison, you are told when to get up, when to eat, when to sit and so on. But I am about to be thrust out the back door into the streets.”” I suspect that he felt like the man being thrown out of the back of the aeroplane without a parachute. The hon. Member for Eccles (Ian Stewart) is entirely right: the rehabilitation of offenders must include some form of resettlement and aftercare; otherwise, we will again lose people back into the criminal justice system. I have spoken for far too long, so I shall not deal with paragraph (d),"““ensuring offenders’ awareness of the effects of crime on the victims of crimes and the public””," save to say that the ripple effect of one man’s crime—it normally is a man—goes beyond the individual victim. It can extend to the victim’s family, to the victim’s workplace, to the victim’s street, and to the wider community. That is something that the Sycamore Trust restorative justice course teaches offenders. Unless we have more of that work and greater strategic will on the part of the Government to ensure that all of the things listed in paragraphs (a) to (e) are provided within our criminal justice system, however well minded we are, we are wasting our time. I shall conclude my remarks here. I hope that I have dealt with the various amendments and new clauses, and if I have not, it does not matter. What is important is that we get this part right—[Interruption.] It genuinely does not matter. I can tell the Whip, the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr. Roy), that the issue is so important and we have had so little time to discuss it that we are letting down the public, we are letting down the taxpayer and we are letting down our fellow citizens if we do not get this part of the Bill right. I have fundamental complaints about the Bill, and the House might hear more about that later, but in this discrete area, the Government are to be applauded for having got it right. It is just a pity that the provision fits within a mesh of legislation that does not get it right. None the less, in respect of the amendment, I applaud the Minister and wish him well in that part of his work.