Team Player

Sir David, what do you see as the major issues and concerns of prisons today?

Well I think there are issues on three levels. The first one is the problem of over-crowding. The second is the issue of security; there are two parts to the Prison Service Mission Statement: one is about keeping people secure for the period of their sentence, and the second is about tackling their reoffending so that they can be resettled and rehabilitated into the community. Over the last four years there has been an almost total concentration on security and what now needs to happen is that the same degree of attention is given to what we are actually doing with them. There are 63,800 people in prison today and all except 26 are going to come out into the community, and the question must be “In what state of mind are they going to come out?”.

That leads on to the third issue. For far too long too many people have thought of prison in isolation. Prison must be seen as a member of the criminal justice team. I don’t call it a criminal justice system because I don’t think it is a system. It's a structure with a number of different agencies going their own way and the one thing that seems to be lacking is coordination and partnership. The other day I went into Cardiff and found a young offender on the same wing as somebody who had abused him as a child  because the Prison Service didn’t know, although Social Services knew, that those two should not be put together. Prison needs to be brought into the system as a member of the “team”.

You said that you don't think there is a system.

I don't think prisons are actually being directed from the top down as to what is expected of them, particularly those dealing with women and young offenders, because the whole of the Prison Service seems geared to the needs of the adult male. Around the country I’m finding some marvellous things that have been developed but, frankly, they’re being done because people see the need rather than them being directed. I think the sex offender treatment programme that has been introduced is probably a good one. I think the cognitive skills programme which is being “borrowed” from Canada is an extremely good one. I think that the attempts to tackle anger management are good but, again, what I don’t see is somebody saying “Now look, OK, somebody needs sex offender treatment; there’s the programme; put  him on it”. There is no-one directing what should happen. I think we must split up the responsibility for delivering what goes on for women, for young offenders, for people in training prisons, for people in resettlement prisons, for people in local prisons, who all have different needs.

You mentioned the specific needs of women prisoners which you addressed in the Thematic Review on Women. What’s happened, what will happen, to the recommendations that you have made?

As I understand it the Director General has taken them extremely seriously and he’s about to announce the result of an internal review of the Prison Service, from which somebody’s going to be appointed to be responsible for women’s regimes. They will be responsible for responding to the recommendations in our report and I shall be asking questions about it. And the other thing that’s happened which I’m very pleased about, is that the Prison Reform Trust has commissioned somebody to do a follow up to our report and ask questions about it publicly in a year’s time. Before we did that report we discussed what we were doing with all the organisations who had an interest in women in prisons, not just the Prison Service. The partnership dealing with women in prison is everyone who has an interest in the offender before, during and after sentence. All have got something to contribute. The other thing which I think is very important is that Joyce Quin, the Minister, has told me that she intends to take a keen personal interest in the issue of women in prison, not just because she’s a women but because she realises that it’s important that as Prisons Minister she understands the issues that are particular to women and, incidentally, the issues that are particular to young offenders.

You’ve mentioned the young offenders. Would it be appropriate to say something about the Thematic Review? What are its major findings?

Firstly, I’m calling for the appointment of a Director of Young Offenders to make certain that there is consistency of delivery of regimes for young offenders wherever they happen to be, and with responsibility for designing the programmes to tackle offending behaviour, to make certain that education is appropriate, to try and introduce a full, purposeful and active day. You need somebody to do all that! It goes back to the well tried command principles that you must be accountable upwards and responsible downwards and that everyone knows where they are down to the officer on the landing. That’s all been skewed recently by the idea that you can separate policy and operations. You can’t.

The second thing that we think is that very serious consideration should be given to forming a young people's justice or youth justice system and removing all under 18s from prison, except those who are involved in either long sentences or sexual offences which require separate treatment.

Under 18s are children within the meaning of the Children Act 1989 and I would like to feel that they were removed from the corruption that is present in prison, allowing prisons to concentrate on adults. I call them (all those over 18) adults but in fact the more I think about it the more I think it might be appropriate if prisons were of one kind up to the age of 25 and one kind for the over 25s because you’re still able to do something with the under 25s who have got a life ahead of them. Many of the others, have embarked on this life of crime and you really should treat them separately. We recommend that the young offender regimes should be built around a full, purposeful and active day. Staff are absolutely key to all this and must be selected and trained. They must also want to work with adolescents because you're dealing with an adolescent who happens to be behaving like an adolescent, some of which behaviour is criminal. You're not dealing with a criminal first. We must take the adolescence first.

The other thing is that it is terribly important, particularly with young offenders, that all those working with them should work together; probation, social services, all the education authorities, all the voluntary agencies. Now, looking at it, one realises that the key to success really is a job and of course the climate outside is not kind to job seekers, let alone people who have got a criminal background. Prison can’t do anything about that. That is what the outside community has got to do, which is why there's got to be partnership. Also it’s no good training people to go into an area where there isn't work. For instance you don't train a shipwright to go to Bradford any more than you'd train a cow hand to go to Brixton.

You talked about staff training, Sir David. Do you have any ideas on particular characteristics that one would look for in staff working with young offenders?

Oh, yes. The first thing is they’ve got to want to work with them. That is critical. If you don't like them and you’re not happy working with them, don’t go near them because you’ll damage them. Secondly, I think it’s absolutely essential that in every young offender institution there is a sensible mix of gender amongst staff because there is no doubt that some offenders in that very fragile period of their lives benefit from the presence of a woman in an establishment. Similarly, it’s very important, I think, for some of the young female offenders to have responsible males around, particularly if they come from a background of abuse. This can show them that not all males are going to abuse them.

The second thing is that they’ve got to understand the nature of adolescence. There are some very good training courses now, designed by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, to make you understand the nature of the young person and to examine your own reaction to them.

You’ve talked about special provision for women and special provision for the young offenders.

Yes. The same applies to staff working with women. The other day I was appalled to find a female prison, Brockhill, where 80% of the staff were male. Now that is silly. It’s been a women’s prison for more than a year and, to my mind, there's no excuse for that extraordinary shortage of women to work with women. Quite apart from the fact that there are many activities that males should not conduct, like searches and so on, how can such a women’s establishment, full of abused people, function? That shows me that management didn’t understand the nature of what they were doing.

I think that one underlying problem with imprisonment is that nobody knows how much it actually costs. The only place I can find where you can start a costing exercise is the 12 priorities that were listed in the 1991 White Paper Custody, Care and Justice which was the last time that Parliament came together to agree on a programme for prisons. The Home Secretary said that this was a programme to take them into the next century. Fine, but nobody did anything about it. I would have expected action plans to be produced from those 12 priorities which were then costed so that when the Prison Service look at what they need when they’re presenting to Ministers, they know the cost of what has been asked of them. Armed with accurate figures Ministers can then go and engage with the Treasury to try and obtain resources. If they don’t get them the Prison Service should sit down and work out what options there are for how to take those cuts, so that they can go back to the Minister and say “Look, because we haven’t got enough money, these priorities are affected. Now, Minister, which one of them are you prepared to sacrifice or go and fight for more?”. That hasn’t happened. What’s happened is that a sum of money has been presented in the form of a pot of gold. It’s been split up by the Prison Service and allocated to Governors and Governors have been told to make cuts. This is not a very wise process because a  Governor can only do what he can with the resources he has been given. If he’s got tremendous staffing problems already he can’t cut more staff, so he cuts education, or he cuts work, or he cuts probation, or
he cuts psychology, and that process, of course, merely increases the inconsistency of delivery and increases the lottery that I was talking about. That, to my mind, is nonsense. Governors should not be put in that position. Decisions on cuts should rest fairly and squarely with the Prisons Board and they should be applied equally across each part of the Prison Service.

You’ve looked at women and you’ve looked at youth in prisons. What will your next focus be for a thematic review?

I've got a number in mind. The first one I’m looking at is lifers. There are over 3,700 lifers in prison at the moment and a number of sentences are now likely to have mandatory life attached to them. As I go around the Prison Service I find that lifers are regarded in a whole variety of ways.

I find no evidence that there is structured sentence planning so that a lifer moves through the system – that each part of the system is geared to receive him and do something with him at the time that he’s in it. We have reported recently on the inspection of Garth, a Category B prison with a large number of prisoners there for a long period of time in the middle of their sentence where enormous amounts of good work are done to challenge them and make them ready to move on. The problem is that there’s not nearly enough in the Category C estate ready for them, nor is the Category D estate geared to take them at the end of their sentences and help them back into their community. We went to one Category D prison on the Isle of Sheppey and found it was half full of people from Manchester. How on earth do you resettle people from Manchester on the Isle of Sheppey?

Last year I went up to Scotland and I saw the National Induction Centre where anyone with a sentence of 10 years or more goes for an induction period, preparing them for their sentence. I believe that this ought to happen to all people with that length of sentence in England, but particularly lifers. I’m also working with an inspector from the Inspectorate of Probation because, of course, life includes both custody and licence. We’re working closely with the National Audit Office because they are examining the Parole Board. It seems to me it makes sense if their work and ours are dovetailed. We’re also working together with the Chief Inspector of the Constabulary because they’re looking at aspects of the handling of this type of prisoner from the police angle. So what we’ll be publishing is perhaps a new type of thematic review in which many agencies are coming together although the theme is “How do you handle Lifers in Prison”.

Then I want to look at suicide awareness because the report that was done by my predecessor in 1990 needs revisiting. There are far too many suicides and I want to go into the reasons why, including the amount of self harm, and also to look at the type of people involved – many, for example, are remand prisoners, a lot of them on drug withdrawal. I want to look at through care – what is actually done in prison. I want to do that jointly with the probation service again, but I don’t want to do it until the  outcome of the Prison/Probation Review is known.

I want to look at local prisons because I am extremely concerned at the way remand prisoners are treated, particularly in view of the very long delays that some of them have before coming to trial. I found man in Leeds who had been on remand for 3 years. No doubt he’d been stringing the system along to an extent, but that is inexcusable, as it is to find juveniles who have been on remand for over a year.

Do you think we should have a limit, as they do in Scotland?

Oh I do, totally. I’ve argued this many times. If we had the 110 day rule, some 5,000 prisoners would be out today, and wouldn’t that ease some of the over-crowding problem? I’m very concerned also about health care and particularly the mentally disordered offender. I launched a document last November called Patient or Prisoner? I want the NHS to assume responsibility overall on a purchaser/provider relationship because it seems to me a complete anomaly that any sentenced prisoners in the United Kingdom should be outside the NHS, and then only from the period they are sentenced.

The numbers of the mentally disordered are increasing enormously, particularly those with a latent mental disorder which is being advanced by substance misuse. We’ve got to do something to stop this because prison is wholly the wrong place for them.

Yes, I can see there is a lot there. You’re optimistic, or you sound to me optimistic.

I am optimistic and there are two reasons why I’m optimistic. The first is because of the quality of so many of the staff whom I found around the Prison Service and their obvious understanding of what they could do if they were given the tools. I find that what motivates an enormous number of them is that they want to work with prisoners. Some very talented and very highly qualified people, from very varied  backgrounds, have joined the service recently.

Secondly, to be quite honest, I detect a very genuine interest by the new Government in the sort of issues I have mentioned. They have studied them, they listen and take a lead, which is enormously encouraging. The fact that the Prisons Minister has agreed to chair quarterly meetings of the Prisons Board, and give teeth to the policy, is symptomatic of this.

The only raw material that any country shares is its people, and woe betide you if you don’t do everything you can to identify and nurture the talents that are there and repair any damage that they may have suffered, whether self-inflicted or otherwise. If, as a nation, you ignore your people, frankly, you pay the price. When I look round and see what’s happened to many people in prison, I have to ask myself how our society has allowed this to happen. Frankly, I don’t like it, and I look forward to helping the Prison Service improve its contribution to putting some of this deprivation to rights.