That this House has considered the cost and effectiveness of sentences under 12 months and consequences for the prison population.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate, which follows several others with a similar theme in the past few weeks, including a debate on the effectiveness of short sentences led by my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), and one on the recall of women prisoners led by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). That shows the appetite across the House for discussing these important issues.
As a member of the Select Committee on Justice, I am proud of our “Transforming Rehabilitation” report, which was published last summer and included a recommendation that the Government should introduce a presumption against short sentences. I welcome the recent news that the Secretary of State wishes the emphasis to move away from the short sentencing model, but although the policy direction of the Ministry of Justice seems centred on sentences of six months or less, I believe we should consider the costs and consequences of sentences of up to 12 months, and enshrine a presumption against them in law.
In 2017, more than 37,000 people entered prison to serve a sentence of less than 12 months. The short time available often means there is little opportunity adequately to address the needs of that population, with limited access to offending behaviour programmes, education and work. Research by the Revolving Doors Agency showed that nearly half of all people sent to prison are sent there for less than six months, and that the overwhelming majority are imprisoned for non-violent offences.
I do not dispute that offenders who have committed serious or violent crimes, or those who pose a risk to society, should often be given a custodial sentence, but four out of every five people sent to prison last year had committed a non-violent crime. Most reasonable people expect jail terms to deliver rehabilitation for offenders and a clear means to reduce reoffending, as well as punishment.
I thank my hon. Friend for securing this significant debate and making such a powerful speech. I have information that replacing custodial sentences of less than six months for theft and non-violent drug offences with effective community sentences could save the public millions of pounds.
I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. She is absolutely right that handing out short sentences is a false economy. I will say more about that later, but as she rightly identifies, it is clear that the current system of short sentences is failing with respect to rehabilitation and reoffending.
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. One thing that troubles me is the use of short custodial sentences after a pattern of repeat offending, where people go from fines straight to custody, with little evidence that community penalties, and particularly supervision orders, have been tried along the way. Does she agree that it would be useful if the Government had a particularly careful look at why that is happening and whether there is a lack of confidence in community penalties among sentencers?
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about escalation to prison sentences instead of increased use of community sentences. Community sentences have halved in the past decade. Again, I will talk a little more about that, because it is really important that we have robust and effective community sentences, and that sentencers have the confidence to hand those sentences out.
The Secretary of State has admitted that shorter sentences do not work. The Ministry’s data shows that adults released from custodial sentences of less than 12 months had a proven reoffending rate of 64%, compared with the overall rate of 29%, yet it has been shown that offenders serving a community sentence typically have a reoffending rate seven percentage points lower than similar people serving prison sentences of less than a year. Those with suspended sentence orders have a reoffending rate nine percentage points lower. The emphasis needs to be on better rehabilitation in the community.
It is clear from the issuing of four urgent notifications on squalid prisons and countless news reports about falling standards that the prison system is failing offenders and the public. It is uncomfortably apparent that committing offenders to custody can cause further issues, which may arise only during an offender’s stay in prison. Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons recently published a report on standards at HMP Durham. Nearly a third of prisoners surveyed said they had developed a drug problem while in prison, 66% of prisoners said they had mental health problems, and many more said they felt depressed or suicidal on arrival in custody. Some 70% of prisoners at HMP Durham were in custody on remand or following recall, and three quarters of the population had been at the prison for less than six months. Those are precisely the kinds of prisoner so disproportionately and negatively impacted by the current model of short sentencing.
Like a lot of the prison estate, HMP Durham is a Victorian building in need of repair, where prisoners are kept in rooms that are falling apart, and often unclean, and are provided with little stimulating activity or purposeful rehabilitation. Sadly, HMP Durham is not alone. A year ago, I visited HMP Rochester with the Justice Committee. That Victorian prison is not fit for purpose, so it was issued with a closure notice, which was later rescinded due to MOJ cuts. When we visited, we were told that lessons had to be cancelled when it rained because there was a leak in the classroom roof, and the drug rehab programme had stopped because the prison thought it was closing down.
Will my hon. Friend therefore join me in welcoming the inquiry being undertaken by the Joint Committee on Human Rights? The Committee is looking specifically at the impact on children of their mother’s imprisonment, whether the law should be changed or strengthened to protect children, and whether sentencers should have a different presumption in those circumstances.
I absolutely agree. We know that parental imprisonment is considered an adverse childhood experience, which we hear so much about at the moment. That inquiry is really timely. It is important that we look at this issue very carefully and question whether prison is the right place for women to be much of the time. Women released from prison are likely to reoffend, and reoffend more quickly, than those serving community sentences. Some 48% of women are reconvicted within one year of leaving prison, which rises to 61% for sentences of less than 12 months.
Reducing reoffending has a clear cost benefit not only to Ministry of Justice budgets, but to police budgets, local services and beyond. The failures in our prison system, not least due to the 40% real-terms cut forced on the Ministry’s budgets and the profound problems with the privatisation of the probation service, have left that system in disarray.
Last Friday, the National Audit Office published yet another critical report on the Government’s transforming rehabilitation programme. It stated that not only has the Ministry of Justice failed to achieve the wider objectives of its original reforms, but that those failures were leading to significant numbers of prisoner recalls and that through-the-gate was wholly ineffective. The NAO report suggests that the Ministry of Justice will pay at least £467 million more than was required under the original community rehabilitation company contracts in completely avoidable bailouts. Worryingly, the full costs will not be known until at least December 2020. It is clear that the current model does not work for taxpayers or offenders.
We need meaningful community sentences, far more robust than the CRC-monitored rehabilitation that we have at the moment where offenders too often just have supervision on the telephone rather than face to face, and missed appointments go unchecked. The Government make the right noises, but clear action is required. As the Prison Reform Trust’s latest Bromley briefing succinctly states:
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing the debate, and I extend my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee. She also had the support of the Justice Committee. The debate stems from our “Prison Population 2022” inquiry, which looks at the make-up of the current prison population and how it might develop in future. We also produced a report on transforming rehabilitation. I am glad to see the Minister in his place. I appreciate his evidence in relation to our two inquiries. It is also good to see the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain).
I very much agree with the thrust of what the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge said. Our reports were cross-party and both were unanimous. There is a growing recognition in the House that we need to revise our approach to some aspects of sentencing policy and the way in which we use imprisonment. I am fortified by the nearly 30 years I spent in the criminal justice system as a practising barrister before coming here. I prosecuted as much as I defended. I therefore had a hand in convicting people who sometimes went to prison for long periods of time—deservedly so—and sometimes people who went to prison for short periods. I also defended people who sometimes went to prison for long periods, having been convicted after due process, and deservedly so, and also people who sometimes went to prison for short periods.
I defended and prosecuted people who were sometimes fundamentally dangerous, and in a few instances really quite evil, but in very many instances people who were foolish and had made a series of chaotic and disastrous mistakes in their lives. Some were greedy, some were naive and some were easily led. There was a mixture of reasons. Some needed to be kept out of circulation for some time, but they were a minority. The vast majority were going to have to return to society at some point once they had served their sentence. Regrettably, we have a system that does not do all that it could to make sure that those people change their lives when they get back into the community.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing the debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). I wholeheartedly agree with much of what he said.
In England and Wales, roughly 83,000 people are presently in prison, and the majority are there for sentences six months or less. In 2017 almost 50,000 offenders were sentenced to custody for six months or less. In England and Wales, we incarcerate 139 people per 100,000 of the population. That is the highest number in Europe. The Netherlands, for example, incarcerates 61 people per 100,000. In Denmark it is 63 people; in Germany it is 76; in Italy it is 99; and in France it is 104. We therefore incarcerate far more people proportionate to the population than those countries.
In the past five years, more than 250,000 custodial sentences of six months or less have been given to offenders. More than 300,000 sentences were for 12 months or less. However, nearly two thirds of those offenders go on to commit a further crime within a year of being released. Clearly, custody is not working for those people. They are the ones whose situation we need to address so that, as well as punishment, there can be rehabilitation that stops them reoffending.
Some 27% of all reoffending is committed by those who have served 12 months or less, and the most common offence for which a sentence is given is shoplifting. More often than not, offenders who shoplift have a drug or alcohol problem, and almost half of the sentences in question are given to women; 60% of female offenders who are convicted of shoplifting are victims themselves—many have been victims of domestic violence and have mental health issues. Part of the problem, therefore, is that we are not addressing those issues. We need to tackle them in order to get to the root of why the offending occurs in the first place.
My hon. Friend is right about the high incidence of short custodial sentences imposed on women for shoplifting. Is he aware of the initiative in Greater Manchester that the police have taken up with some large stores? When a woman is found shoplifting in one of those shops, they can immediately refer her not to the police—and into the criminal justice system—but to our women’s centres. Does he agree that that would be a really positive model for the Government to encourage across the whole country?
I am aware of that initiative. More investment in women’s centres would be a great thing that would help to stop reoffending, particularly by female offenders. I support women’s centres in their plight; we should provide them with as much funding as we can.
All the evidence shows that there is a strong case for abolishing sentences of six months or less, but we also need to have a robust community order regime. The Revolving Doors Agency made a freedom of information request and found that, of those people sentenced to six months in custody, three in five reported a drug or alcohol problem on arrival in prison, one in four were released homeless, and seven in 10 reoffend within a year of release. Clearly short sentences are not working. In his speech on 18 February, the Secretary of State for Justice said:
“Why would we spend taxpayers’ money doing what we know doesn’t work, and indeed, makes us less safe?”
I entirely agree with him about that.
I have touched on some of the issues where our investment could help. Accommodation is a big factor. When people leave prison and they are homeless, they are more prone to reoffend. Clearly, the through-the-gate resettlement service has not been working with the probation service, which needs to be looked at. Making sure that prisoners are housed and have accommodation when they leave prison would help prevent reoffending.
Many of the support services that prisoners need when they are released relate to benefits applications. They also need to be looked at, as well as the mental health support that they need. Sometimes people leave prison having had some treatment, but they do not get treatment further on. Finally—I meant to mention this earlier—when they are in prison people can receive treatment for some of their addictions, but six months is too short a time for them to have the full support they need. All these areas need investment.
One of the greatest changes in my lifetime, and indeed my time in Parliament, has been the growing gulf between the preoccupations of the liberal establishment, and the hopes and fears of the people who have to live with the effects of their doubt-filled and guilt-fuelled erosion of the collective wisdom of ages.
That collective wisdom is given shape by institutions, small and large. There are large institutions, such as the law, Parliament, the Church and the monarchy, and small institutions, such as civil society, families and Burke’s “little platoons”. Sadly, what Burke said about order being the foundation of the good life and a working civil society—
“Good order is the foundation of all things.”—
is a far cry from where Britain is now, as a result of the work of that liberal establishment over the decades.
Too much of urban Britain, in particular, is either brutish or brutalised. When good order and the rule of law is eroded, it is the vulnerable who suffer most, for they, unlike those bourgeois liberals who live gated lives, survive on the frontline of crime. Those vulnerable people are suffering at the hands of violent criminals who are punishing them every day, through the fear they cause and the hurt they do.
Yet we are very sheepish now about punishing the culprits. We have learned so little from the time when I studied criminology, almost 40 years ago. We have continued down the road of seeing crime as an illness to be treated, rather than a malevolent choice to be dealt with.
I will make this point, and then happily give way. The effect of that is to put great emphasis on the culprit and, by nature, less emphasis on the event and the victims of crime. That is precisely what has happened, and I know the hon. Lady could not possibly want to agree with that.
I do not disagree at all that people’s lives are made a misery by violent and persistent criminals in their community, but I cannot really agree that we have become less willing to take action against criminals, when the prison population has gone from between 42,000 and 43,000 in the mid-1990s to more than 80,000 today.
20 of 47 shown
More recently, we visited HMP Birmingham—a prison so bad that the private contractor, G4S, had to hand back control to Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. The recent inspections at HMPs Nottingham, Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Bedford all showed that problems with safety and overcrowding are particularly acute at local prisons, where large numbers of people are often held for short periods. A reduction in the use of short prison sentences could significantly reduce overcrowding, particularly in local prisons, which in turn might help restore the standards of decency that the Minister has called for.
In monetary terms, it costs nearly £40,000 a year to keep someone in prison. The point at which prisoners enter the prison system is often the most costly and labour intensive and, given recent falls in prison officer numbers, it can often divert resources from where they might be needed elsewhere on the prison estate.
On the day before International Women’s Day, it is important to recognise that restricting the use of short custodial sentences is particularly important to achieve a reduction in the female prison population. In 2017, some 7,185 women in England and Wales were sentenced to immediate custody. Of those women, 68% were sentenced to less than six months and 26% to less than one month. Women’s offending is often linked to underlying mental health needs, drug and alcohol addiction, and domestic abuse. Many have caring responsibilities, and at least 17,000 children are affected by maternal imprisonment each year. Despite those children having committed no crime, their lives are often uprooted. They end up in care, having to lose their home, their school and their family. The human and emotional cost is immeasurable.
“Short prison sentences are less effective than community sentences at reducing reoffending Yet, the use of community sentences has more than halved in only a decade”,
falling from 193,000 to 91,000 over a decade.
The Ministry of Justice’s own research has shown that community sentences are particularly effective for people who have committed a large number of previous offences and for those with mental health problems. For those with more than 50 previous offences, the odds of reoffending are more than a third higher when a short prison sentence is used rather than a community sentence. Another piece of research by the Ministry of Justice, published in 2017, found that providing treatment for drug and alcohol addictions in the community has also been shown to reduce reoffending. More than two fifths did not reoffend and there was a 33% reduction in the number of offences committed in the two years following treatment. As much as the instinct is to think that repeat offending must mean harsher sentences, that is not what the evidence suggests we should do. Policy must be evidence-led if we are to expect results, and the current approach is too costly and too ineffective to continue following the short sentencing model.
There is the question of the cost of the failures around short custodial sentences not only to prisons and wider Ministry of Justice budgets, but to other Departments and society as a whole. Short sentences can see prisoners lose their homes, their jobs and their family ties. Combined with the failure of the through-the-gate initiative, the impact and effect of prison last much longer than any original custodial sentence.
To be given a custodial sentence is one thing, but to have all the means to reduce the propensity to reoffend and to get back on with life removed in the short time that someone is in prison is quite another, and it has far longer and wider-ranging consequences than the original sentence. One of the most fundamental issues is that of housing. The link between rough sleeping and prison leavers is deeply concerning, and short sentencing does nothing but exacerbate the issue. The latest figures from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network show that 36% of rough sleepers in London have been in prison—up 3% on last year.
Colleagues have also repeatedly raised concerns and frustrations with Friday releases from prisons as prisoners are unable to contact housing providers until Monday morning or get a prescription to deal with an addiction. If someone does not have a place to stay, it is far harder to register with the council or a jobcentre, and offenders are more likely to end up sleeping rough. The most vulnerable might simply immediately return to crime.
The issue is summarised perfectly by a case study from the social justice charity, Nacro:
“C was released on a Friday after serving a 4 week sentence with a history of homelessness. Given the short amount of time spent in custody, it was not enough time for us to source stable housing for him on release. C had to present at the local authority to make a homelessness application and was told to come back the next week for an appointment. C slept rough that weekend.”
Short sentences do not work. They very often increase rather than decrease reoffending rates. They can tear families apart and put pressure on a crumbling prison system with very little benefit. They have failed. The Government have been making the right noises, but I hope they will now follow in the direction of Scotland and seek to enshrine in law a presumption against short sentences of 12 months or less, backed up with robust, effective and properly funded community sentences.
I see our proposals and those put forward by the Secretary of State, which I warmly support, to look again at the way in which we use shorter custodial sentences as absolutely not going soft on crime—quite the reverse. Preventing reoffending is the best possible way of reducing the number of victims. The less reoffending, the fewer victims there are likely to be. That is a desirable state of affairs.
There is a place for punishment in our justice system. People who break the rules against society have to be brought up sharp and must recognise that it is not acceptable. However, the punishment has to be constructive as well as condign. That is why we need to make sure there is room in our prisons for those who have committed serious offences for which prison is the only appropriate penalty. That will always be the case, but there are many for whom that is not the most appropriate and constructive way forward. We need to be more up front about recognising that.
The debate has a focus on cost-effectiveness. That is worth mentioning because, as well as having a background as a criminal justice practitioner, I am also influenced by being a Conservative and believing in the good use of taxpayers’ money. The way we currently deal with people going through the prison system, particularly in relation to shorter sentences, is not a good use of taxpayers’ money, for the reasons that have been set out.
It is exceedingly expensive to keep people in custody. Sometimes it must happen, with the public policy justification of protection of the public and prevention of crime. However, there are other proper purposes of imprisonment; not just punishment, deterrence and public protection. A recognised purpose of sentencing—I hope that in due course it will be enshrined in statute as a purpose of imprisonment—is reform and rehabilitation. The vast majority of people whom I dealt with were not beyond reformation or rehabilitation, and I think that is true of human society as a whole. However, we do not carry it out effectively, for the reasons that have been set out, and we spend significant amounts of public money. The consequence is high rates of reoffending, which hurts the economy.
As to the social and economic cost of crime, the total cost is about £59 billion. I think that, broadly, the cost attributed specifically to reoffending is about £15 billion to £18 billion. That is the economic cost. There is also a social cost to the victims of reoffending. Both those costs should be treated as important, but at the moment we are not getting there. Were we to make more effective use of our resources, by concentrating on those who need to be inside for a period of time, we could do the proper rehabilitative work that is needed in many cases. There may be some who it will be impossible to turn around, or who it will never be safe to release.
However, such people are a small minority of the population. In the vast majority of cases, if there is sufficient time, there can be rehabilitative work. That can involve education and training—getting people literate so that they can hold down a job—and dealing with what are sometimes significant addiction problems of one kind or another. That weaning-off cannot be done in a short period, and neither can the acquiring of skills to get back into society. Frequently there are underlying mental health or personality issues that need treatment, and those cannot be dealt with in a short period either.
Short sentences do not permit any of those things to be done, and they often disrupt such ties as the offenders have in the community, as the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge pointed out. The Minister and others have rightly observed that the best way to keep people out of trouble and out of offending is a home, a family and a job. The things we equip people with should mean that when they come out they are better placed to achieve those things, but if they already have them, a short sentence is more likely than not to disrupt them.
To do as I have described, we must have credible alternatives. One of my concerns is the decline in sentencer confidence in community sentences that has been noted, which has been well referenced by many who have given evidence to the Select Committee and, recently, by the former chairman of the Sentencing Council, Lord Justice Treacy, an immensely experienced criminal justice practitioner and judge. That means that there must be a punitive element to community sentences. There has to be some bite to them for sentencers and the public to have faith in them. I do not see the move to community sentences for less serious offences—I do not say non-serious, because I mean those of perhaps lesser gravity—as a soft option. That is not how the approach should be perceived.
The challenge, at the same time as we make better use of prison space, is to come up with tough and viable alternatives that bring home to the offender the fact that they have done wrong and broken their contract with society, but that do so constructively, in a way that enables them to turn their life around. I should have thought that a move in that direction, which I know the Secretary of State and the Minister seek, is to be welcomed and supported. It would be a better use of public resource and, above all, it would produce better social outcomes.
I have said that there is a social reform case for the change in question. Social reform does not belong to one party. There is also a case on the basis of good economics and use of taxpayers’ money, which does not belong to one party either. It is interesting to note that an approach that is closer to what we propose, and closer to the direction in which the Minister and Secretary of State wish to go, has been successful under Governments of various political complexions elsewhere in the world. Right-of-centre Governments have adopted the same approach in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and the same thing has been done by some Republican governors and state legislatures in parts of the United States. It does not belong to one political side. That point is worth emphasising, because we need a more informed debate about the most cost-effective and socially effective way to use prison. That requires a degree of recognition of the evidence base, which I hope is well set out in the Committee’s two reports, across political opinion. I hope that the debate will contribute to that process.
The Secretary of State also said in his speech that he supported “smart” justice. I agree with the gist of what he said, but much more needs to be done. There is a place for punishing people. We need prison for serious offenders and it should also be there as a deterrent. There may be an issue with why prison is not working as well as it should do; the reoffending rate is high, and there may be issues about what goes on in prison, the prison estate itself, the fact that there are insufficient prison officers, the prevalence of drugs in prison and various other factors. Clearly, prison is not working for some people.
I suggest that community orders are the best way forward for short sentences. There should be an element of rehabilitation but community orders should be tough, should not be treated as a soft touch, should be fully enforced, and people should be made to fulfil them. Serving them over a longer period of time could also help offenders change their ways.
Community orders would also save us money. The Revolving Doors Agency estimates that community sentences would save £9,237 per prisoner. I am often staggered by the fact that it costs roughly the same amount to send somebody to Eton as to send them to prison. I say let us send them to Eton—that is instead of prison, not as well as prison. These areas need to be looked at. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I broadly support what the Secretary of State has set out and I hope he has the courage of his convictions to follow through. We could be in a position where these measures save us money in the long run and we are able to rehabilitate offenders, which has long-term benefits for us all.