Offender Management Bill

My Lords, your Lordships will forgive me for joining in the debate at this very late stage. The noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Ramsbotham, who did a very good job of bringing forward the amendment, have a very good point here. The prison population has a high number of disabled people, who are mainly unidentified. My interest in dyslexia is probably fairly well established in this House. The number of undiagnosed dyslexics in the prison population is unacceptably high; the only question is how high. I have seen work recently that identifies them as being roughly 50 per cent of the prison population. The same study, at Chelmsford prison, which did a good job of identifying people who were avoiding education and thus not taking themselves forward, was also identifying a lot of people with similar types of problems due to head injury. The biggest problem they had was short-term memory loss, which tends to lead to language function loss and so on, which means bad organisation. Where that was identified and dealt with, the knock-on effects were surprising. One of them, I was told by a prison officer I spoke to, was that the number of assaults had decreased dramatically, because the amount of defensiveness among a large part of the prison population had dropped. Consequently, so had the touchiness and the number of flare-ups. I asked the prison governor how many people it took to deal with one assault. He said it took about nine people for half a day. The cost implications of getting a duty that allows you to take action, and which is suited to the environment, have to be massive. Why are we not introducing such a duty here? When I have represented disability interests I have not been above saying, ““Poor people, we are all nice””, and so on. But disability runs across all sections of society. Unfortunately, certain groups in society have a slightly higher propensity to commit crime, according to the statistics. If you can identify them you stand a chance of breaking the offender cycle, before middle age basically knocks it out of them and you are left with an almost unemployable person. This type of duty stands a chance of being able to deal with the situation. It is absurd, given the amount of time and effort we have put into getting legislation, that groups with more obvious disabilities, such as being in a wheelchair, should be excluded from the equality duty. We are not saying that they should be allowed out of prison earlier or that they should not be sent there in the first place, but merely that, once they are there, reasonable adjustment should be made for their situation. Surely the Government should embrace that. They have resisted it in the past, but I hope they are starting to think more coherently about the problem.