Coroners and Justice Bill

We on these Benches, of course, support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Goodhart. The initial concept of crime and punishment was that people should be punished for what they had done, that they should be locked up for a period of time and that they should learn a lesson. Then it occurred to everyone that the sensible thing to do when they were locked up was to try to rehabilitate them so that, when they came out, they were not just given a postal order and let loose on the world without any resources at all, but that they had something behind them. Attempts have been made to rehabilitate. We have moved on and this Government have introduced the concept of managing risk. Whereas managing risk is quite acceptable intellectually, if you start managing the risk of people who have not committed anything particularly serious, you need to provide the resources to do it and the Government have failed in that. It is impossible to see where they could ever get the resources to carry out such an ambitious programme. We are left with an intellectual construct that it would be a good idea to manage risk and not to let people out until we are quite sure they have ticked the boxes and gone through the necessary courses. I have experience of prisoners as people and I think it would be difficult to see some of them sitting in a cognitive improvement course, or whatever the name of the course is. I cannot see that that would do them a great deal of good. It would be far better to teach them to read, to write, to count and to give them some skills, rather than put them in front of a psychologist and tell them to behave themselves in future. I understand how ambitious the scheme was, but the resources have simply not gone into it. It is a failure, and the Government should recognise that, unless they are prepared to make that investment and put in the resources that such an ambitious programme requires. As a result of it, an awful lot of people are now locked up, frustrated because the courses are not provided, frustrated because the boxes cannot be ticked and staying in prison long beyond the period that the judge who sentenced them thought was reasonable. We are building up a cauldron inside those prisons with these IPPs—5,000, at the moment. If the trend continues, it will get worse. The Government should go back to basics and get back to the concept of a sentence that lasts for a finite time, so that people know when they are coming out and they can be provided with the necessary courses and skills. That is how prison resources should be spent.