My Lords, this has been a very reassuring debate because the experience and wisdom that have been brought to bear are a wonderful antidote to much of the ill-informed commentary in the popular press.
I want to make a couple of brief points. First, a lot of imaginative, dedicated work goes on within the Prison Service, but the pressures, accentuated by repeated cuts over recent years, have made that work difficult to pursue, not least in the sphere of education. Do we see as fundamental to our penal system the challenge of rehabilitation or do we not? In my view, rehabilitation makes utter sense economically because it is the only way of ensuring that the amount of reoffending is reduced; but, of course, in a civilised society it makes sense in terms of winning people back to a decent role in society and an ability to contribute to its well-being. This suggests that a priority in the penal system must be for the whole culture and purpose of prison officers and prison staff to be ultimately and directly the challenge of rehabilitation. It is not a warehouse function; it is about enabling people to become better people, positive people.
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My second point is more personal. My wife served for 10 years as a prison visitor at an advanced prison that was more or less exclusively for people on life sentences. We have heard good sense in this debate about the importance of prisoners being able to see the outside world as somewhere to which they can return, and of the outside world seeing what is going on inside prisons. Crucially, there must be a date: there must be a purpose in people’s behaviour in prison whereby they can see the target for which they are aiming. That is terribly important. What my wife and her colleagues always found most challenging and difficult was that for a number of prisoners, there was no date. The work with them was particularly difficult and exacting.
It is very good that we have a House of Lords that is able to provide this kind of insight on a crucial matter of this kind. I just hope that the Government listen to the wisdom that is put forward here, and do not just play to the chorus of the popular press.