Prisons and Probation — Statement

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:35 pm on 27 April 2009.

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Photo of Lord Lester of Herne Hill Lord Lester of Herne Hill Spokesperson for Women and Equality 4:35, 27 April 2009

My Lords, the Minister has not answered the question posed by my noble friend Lord Thomas about why this country has the most punitive policy towards the incarceration of prisoners in the democratic European context. Will he reflect on what it is about this country that causes our prison population to be completely out of kilter with that of comparable democracies in Europe?

I served Roy Jenkins when he was Home Secretary in the second Wilson Government in the mid-1970s, when we had half the prison population that there is now. I remember at the time that Roy Jenkins considered that the right approach was to ask what the maximum number of prisoners we could keep within the prison establishment was and how to reduce the prison population rather than have an ever increasing, demand-led building of prisons. Is the Minister aware that as part of that philosophy, which seems to have been wholly abandoned by this Labour Government, John Harris—the then Minster of State, later Lord Harris of Greenwich—spent a great deal of his time in the Home Office building more and more bail and probation hostels and finding alternatives to custody as a main priority? What is it about the present Labour Government that has caused them apparently to abandon that philosophy of keeping the prison population within the existing framework as far as possible and improving stock but not expanding it? Rather like public expenditure, we should be working within a certain proportion rather than have it ever increasing. The same should be for prisons so that we do not have a demand-led system. Am I right in saying that there has been a complete volte-face in the philosophy of the Home Office and the Government?