Clause 25
Offender Management Bill
11:15 am
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Harborough, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman may be reassured that the measure is not being put in place to relieve overcrowding in the young offender detention system by placing such offenders in the adult prison system, because the adult prison system is itself overcrowded. One does not cure one bit of overcrowding by further overcrowding an already overcrowded adult prison estate.
There is a young offender institution and an adult prison in my constituency, and I have visited several young offender institutions and adult prisons in the past 18 months or so. Young offender institutions take people up to the age of 21, and there are often people of 19 or 20 in those institutions who look about 13 or 14, yet some people aged 16 or 17 in custody look 25. Some foreign nationals in young offender institutions do not have accurate records of when they were born, so they may be over 21. However, I am told by people who work in young offender institutions that such detainees often say that they are under 21 in order to be imprisoned in the young offender institution rather than the adult prison. There is a huge problem of actual age as compared to maturity, and the slightly lesser problem of older foreign prisoners being housed in the young offender estate.
I am concerned about what considerations the Secretary of State takes into account in deciding whether a person who is 18 but not yet 21 is to be considered for detention in a prison as opposed to a YOI. Clearly the Secretary of State will not personally make that decision. I do not imagine that even the Minister with responsibility for prisons will make that decision; it will be delegated to people within the Prison Service or in the private prison estate. We need to be extremely careful that prisoners who are vulnerable young people in some respects—yes, they have committed serious crimes, otherwise they would not be in custody; I do not shed a tear about that—are not pushed into the adult estate when they are not suitable and could not cope either physically or mentally with the conditions of an adult prison.
Prison is not a nice place to be. Young offender institutions are not nice places to be. I am afraid that sometimes people have to be sent to them because they have committed serious crimes, but we need to be careful about treating people badly within the prison system by sending unsuitable youngsters into the adult system, for example, because it could lead to more damage than the Minister would want.