Clause 3 - Drug offence searches: England and Wales
Drugs Bill
9:10 am
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Chesham and Amersham, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 35, in clause 3, page 4, line 22, at end insert—
'(d) a prison officer'.
This is a probing amendment. Subsection (6) defines ''appropriate officer'' as:
''a constable, . . . a person who is designated as a detention officer in pursuance of section 38 of the Police Reform Act 2002 if his designation applies paragraph 33D of Schedule 4 to that Act, or . . . a person who is designated as a staff custody officer in pursuance of section 38 of that Act if his designation applies paragraph 35B of Schedule 4 to that Act,''.
Clause 38(2) in part 4 of the Police Reform Act 2002 defines ''officers'' as
''community support officer; . . . investigating officer; . . . detention officer; . . . escort officer.''
The amendment is a request for clarification because the clause does not mention prison officer. I would like the Minister to define clearly the appropriate officer, and to include prison officer under the definition in the Bill if she believes that the term should be included.
We all know that there is an enormous problem with drugs in our prisons. The number of people in prison for drug offences alone is very high and is growing. The last figures that I have for 2002 show that 16 per cent. of sentenced male prisoners were convicted of drug offences, whereas in 1993, only 7 per cent. of our sentenced male prisoners were convicted for drug offences. There has been a similar enormous increase in the number of sentenced female prisoners convicted of drugs offences. Back in 1993, some 27 per cent. of the sentenced female prison population had been convicted of drugs offences, but in 2002, that figure had risen alarmingly to about 40 per cent.
The Home Office has undertaken several studies on the problem. A recent Home Office study found that 47 per cent. of recently sentenced male prisoners had used heroin, crack or cocaine in the 12 months before imprisonment, and that heroin was the drug most likely to be used daily. Overall, 73 per cent. of all respondents from the sentenced male prison population had taken an illegal drug before entering prison. In some inner city local prisons, as many as eight out of 10 men are found to have class A drugs in their system on reception. In Styal, the women's prison, the same number of new arrivals are thought to have a drugs problem.
The problem is highlighted by Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, in her latest annual report, which came out in the past week or so. As page 36 makes clear, there are huge drugs issues in prisons, and supply reduction and monitoring is an issue in all of them. Apparently, there were gaps in mandatory drug testing in many prisons, with little or no weekend testing and inconsistent target testing. The majority of the mandatory drug-testing positives related to cannabis, but the key performance target did not distinguish between cannabis and class A drugs, so it provided a limited measure of the scale of the problem. Interestingly, there were also issues in some establishments about the reliability of particular drug dogs, which are used extensively in prisons. Establishments that integrated supply and demand reduction were likely to be far more successful in reducing the availability of illegal drugs.
Although the term ''a prison officer'' is not included in the Bill, we need to know what the situation in our prisons is. We cannot have hard evidence, but it seems likely that people who are going into prison are not being cured of their drug problem and that others may, indeed, even acquire a drug habit while they are in prison. I therefore tabled the amendment so that the Minister can tell us what is happening in our prisons, what statistics are being kept in prisons and how she will prevent prisoners from acquiring drug habits and from leaving prison in a worse condition than when they went in.