Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, this Bill comes before the House at a time when the public mood about youth offending is both volatile and vengeful. The killings of both Rhys Jones and Garry Newlove have taken place in parishes within my diocese, in Liverpool and in Warrington. We have been deeply touched by the dignity of Stephen and Melanie Jones and properly challenged by the analysis of our social malaise offered by Garry Newlove’s young widow. The mood of the public is that the perpetrators of such crimes should be punished, but when such murderers are young people, we need also to understand how we, as a society, have failed them. Without diminishing their responsibility for what they have done, we share in the culpability of creating a society in which lawless young people can hold such devastating sway. I remind your Lordships that these two murders did not happen in areas of multiple deprivation but in leafy suburbs of owner-occupiers. It is evidence that it is not easy to contain such violence by disturbed young people. We on these Benches welcome the Bill’s recognition of the youth offender teams and the youth rehabilitation orders, although we share some of the critical observations offered by the Prison Reform Trust, and by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. When it comes to youth crime, we need to probe and examine the history of the offender. We need to understand their character and how it was formed. We need to investigate the circumstances of their life and analyse the culture that has desensitised the conscience and stultified the imagination so that the offender is unable to feel the pain they are inflicting on their victim. If society is to a degree responsible for the moral deficiency of these young people it begets, then society—namely ourselves—must also bear the cost of the remedy. The diversionary processes are labour-intensive, necessarily expensive and require commensurate expenditure. I welcome the Bill’s provision for assessing the offender’s needs concerning mental health, drug abuse and education, but I am alarmed that, according to the Bill, these orders can be issued only where such a provision is already in place. What happens when they are not available locally? Youth offending teams are under huge pressure today. We should not lay upon them such a burden of caring for juvenile offenders in society if we are not prepared to support them adequately. It is of the utmost importance that when youth rehabilitation orders are issued they are properly tailored to the capacity of the young person. If they contain unrealistic expectations then, as has already been said, these young people are being set up to fail. There needs to be a proper assessment of the maturity of the young offender, their emotional age and circumstances, so that they stand a chance of succeeding. The young person and society are the losers if they fail and the young offender ends up with a custodial sentence which could have been avoided by proper assessment. The purpose of the orders must be the rehabilitation of the young offender and the welfare of the young person. All this takes time and, inevitably, money and resources. I know that the Government hear the cry that they should spend more money from all quarters all the time. This must be uncomfortable when, at the same time, they are asking for cuts across the whole Prison Service. My concern is that some of the cuts being proposed will prove to be false economies. For example, the core day, soon to be implemented in all prisons in England and Wales, will have a direct impact on the work done by chaplains of all the faith communities who engage volunteers to come into prison in the evening and at the weekends. The Government rightly welcome the faith alliance as a key partner in rehabilitating prisoners back into society, but then pulls the rug from beneath its feet by making prisoners unavailable at a time when the volunteers can come. The Bill brings into sharp focus the purpose of prison. Is it a means of social control of a criminal underclass, or is it to be a place of redemption, restoration and rehabilitation? Plans for super prisons that incarcerate large numbers, with less staff per prisoner, less contact with families and less opportunity for social contact, feed the notion that prison is simply there to control the criminal underclass. Plans that offer courses for education, training and restorative justice emphasise rehabilitation. They ensure that prisons are not just warehouses for criminals, but greenhouses where the prisoner can breathe and grow and live and prepare for planting back into the wider community. We on these Benches would like to see a nationally costed commitment to programmes of restorative justice and to programmes of education and training, such as drug awareness, healthy relationships and anger management. Only with these in place, costed and budgeted nationally, do we have any chance of the offender management scheme working in the way that we all hope that it will. We look forward to scrutinising the Bill in its passage through the House and to amending it appropriately.