My Lords, my contribution can be brief. Having heard the speeches of noble Lords who spoke before me, and anticipating who will speak after me, I am not sure that I have a huge amount to add.
I begin by declaring my interest as a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust. I thank it for providing me with the same briefing that assisted the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, in his remarks. There is much to be gained from what it has told us, much of which the noble Lord faithfully recited. I also put in a preliminary plea to the Government—with some diffidence, seeing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, in his place—to bring in swiftly the sentencing consolidation measures of the Joint Committee which the noble and learned Lord chaired at the end of the last Session.
I say that not only because what we achieved in that committee is worth getting on with but because, as a former Crown Court recorder—that is, a part-time judge—I know that sentencing is probably the most complicated thing that a Crown Court judge has to cope with. It is all very well if you are a High Court judge dealing predominantly with life sentences, but if you are a more junior member of the judiciary you deal with far more complicated sentencing arrangements. Therefore, the sooner we get what I call the “Judge Bill” into law, the better.
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I largely agree—in fact, I think I wholly agree—with all that has been said so far, but there are a number of things that I want to point out, based on what I see in the papers introduced into this debate by the Government through the impact assessment for this statutory instrument. The first point I want to query is to be found towards the end of the document when it sets out only two policy options. Option Zero is do nothing—that is, make no changes to the release point for serious offenders. Option 1 is:
“Legislate to move the automatic release point for serious offenders from halfway to two-thirds of the custodial period.”
That is a well-known Civil Service trick. You present the Minister with two options. Sometimes, if you are generous, you present him with three, two of which are useless. In this case, one is completely unacceptable, so—guess what?—the Minister chooses the option that is required of him.
That is fair enough. I have no constitutional objection to Governments altering, through Parliament, the way in which the law on sentencing is achieved. That is the point of Parliament—it can change the law on this, that and the other, and if the Government have a majority for what they intend to do, that is fair enough. That begs the question: is it wise to do what a Government propose to do? All the policy objectives set out in this document are, of themselves, either uncontroversial or unobjectionable for some other reason. For example, it says that requiring offenders in this category—that is, the more serious offenders—sentenced to seven years or more to be released after serving two-thirds of their sentence more closely aligns the release provisions with those of similarly serious offenders who receive an extended determinate sentence. Well, yes it does—but so what?
More important is what we do with the prisoners while they are in prison. If a prisoner is given a 15-year sentence and serves 10 years, as opposed to six and a half or seven, and you do nothing with him while he is in a prison, either for the halfway or the two-thirds period of the sentence, and you release him illiterate, still a drug addict and still suffering from mental health problems, and he is wholly unfit for employment and incapable of looking after himself or his dependants, we have achieved nothing. Although the public might initially have been persuaded that tougher and longer sentences will make them feel safer—although I query whether they actually think that—once the unrepaired prisoner is released, he may well be as much of a danger to the public as he was when he committed his first offence.
Nothing that I say is original to me. I first studied prisons policy at the feet of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, when I became the shadow Prisons Minister under David Cameron’s leadership of the Opposition. I confess that I became somewhat evangelical about the subject of prison reform. As I said in my speech to this House on 8 January during the Queen’s Speech debate, I visited well over half of the adult prisons, young offender institutions and secure training units in England and Wales during that period. I repeat that I saw pockets of excellent work by really dedicated and excellent public servants, be they prison officers, prison governors, teachers, medical staff or experts in other forms of drug and alcohol addiction.
However, there was a lack of consistency. There was such a massive difference between the regimes in prison A and prison B, and a huge amount of churn of prisoners. You could be sent to Maidstone and then, within weeks, to Lewes; then to Exeter; then to somewhere in the north of England, and so on. So, the prison system had no ability to train, rehabilitate or mend these largely damaged and—yes—dangerous and criminal people; it had no ability to make them better. If we put junk in and take junk out, what have we achieved apart from spending an awful lot of public money to no effect, having misled the public that what we were doing with prisoners was in their best interests?
When I was a Member of Parliament, I once explained to a local journalist that I thought all prisons should have walls—of course they should—both to keep the prisoners in and to protect the public from those in prison; possibly also to protect the prisoners from the public. I also said that the prisons with walls should have windows in those walls, so that the public could see in and know what was being done in the prisons on their behalf; and the prisoners could see out and know there was a world out there that would welcome them back if they made the effort to come off drugs, come to terms with whatever addictions and mental problems they might have, learn how to earn a real living and look after themselves and their families, and understand that work for reward was a better alternative than reoffending.
The journalist sucked his pencil for a bit and said, “That’s all very well, but have you thought of the public expenditure that would be involved in putting all those windows into walls?” It is possible to lose the will to live; I did not, quite, at that stage. I have become a cracked record on this subject over the last few years. My noble and learned friend the Minister is an advanced thinker in these matters, not a dyed-in-the-wool, “chuck away the key” person. If the Government want to, and Parliament permits them to do so, they can extend sentences in this way, that way and the other. But, while they have their captive audience—literally—I urge them to do something with these people that makes them better citizens on their inevitable release.