Coroners and Justice Bill

I, too, very much support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. Indeterminacy is a particularly difficult sentence for a person to deal with. You do not know what will happen to you, you do not know when anything will happen to you, and you do not know how you can act to influence what might happen to you. The official answer to indeterminate-sentence prisoners is, "You will be released when you have served your punishment and when you can show us that you have changed and are not likely to do whatever it was you did that got you the sentence in the first place". A number of people serving such sentences, or their relatives, write to me, as I am sure they write to other noble Lords. None of them argues about serving a punishment for the crime, whatever the crime was. All the letters are about the second proviso: you cannot get out until you show us you have changed and you are no longer likely to do it again. How are they to do that? Our method is to require prisoners to attend certain psychologically based courses. I make no comment at all on the method that we have chosen but the courses are not available in the numbers required and for them to be available would require considerable resources. The courts have found that unacceptable. It is also unacceptable as a way of administering justice to individuals who are told that their length of time in prison will be decided by certain methods but that those methods are not available to them. The effect of such sentences on the prison system has also been highly undesirable. As time is short, I shall quote only two inspectorate reports. The effect on women should be mentioned. The latest inspectorate report on Downview prison says that there were five such prisoners there and each had met her offender supervisor but little else had happened. None of the offender supervisors had received any training about the sentence. At Gartree prison, prisoners given indeterminate sentences were now competing with ordinary lifers for scarce rehabilitative resources, leaving both populations frustrated. The problems with lack of programmes meant that the waiting list for enhanced thinking skills was up to a year, for healthy relationships was between one and two years, for cognitive self-change was for up to two years, and for CALM was between two and three years. The programmes could not be expanded because they had neither the staff nor the accommodation. Prisoners, particularly IPP prisoners, frequently described to the inspectors frustration levels so high that they felt that the only way to be heard or to get a move was to resort to violence. Such findings are very common in inspectorate reports. These sentences have been very destabilising on the prisons which are already the most difficult prisons to run and they are very expensive. I wholeheartedly support the amendment.