My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for that response. As is often the case with his contributions, it contains a great deal with which I agree. I am also grateful to him for putting on the record statistics about the nature of people who come into our criminal justice system.
I am pleased that the noble Lord emphasised the prize of rehabilitation. I have never hidden the fact that I am not pleased with a 50% reoffending rate in mainstream prisons and a 75% reoffending rate among youth offenders. Fortunately, a very small core of youth offenders are now in custody. Even the most hard-nosed of criminal justice practitioners must see the common sense of cutting into reoffending rates which has the threefold benefit of saving the taxpayer the £40,000 or so a year it costs to keep the reoffender in prison, saving victims the trauma of future crimes and giving society a law-abiding member. So the prize for getting rehabilitation onto the agenda is extremely important. I am very grateful for some of the comments —here we had recently a Conservative Prime Minister talking positively about a rehabilitation revolution. That is very welcome and is something to build on.
I wish to comment on two of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. I would like us to achieve with women offenders some of the success that we have had with young offenders. As the noble Lord rightly said, you do not have to look in too many women’s prisons to see those who have no place there. I am glad to say that my colleague in the other place, Helen Grant, has taken responsibility for our women’s strategy and will be publishing shortly an update of that strategy, which I freely admit will build on the pioneering work of the Corston report in relation to women prisoners. The noble Lord is also right about the 18 to 25 age group where criminality becomes embedded. We should be looking at how we try to identify some of the specific issues there.
As always with debates in your Lordships’ House, I am left with a pile of notes that either I have made myself or the Box has supplied, which would keep me here until well after the dinner hour. I would therefore ask that I and noble Lords are spared a response to every question, and I hope that we can raise them again in Committee.
Of course I do not see restorative justice being simply about saying sorry, although, interestingly, it is sometimes the most difficult thing to say. However, restorative justice also forces the offender to face the
consequences of their actions and the impact that they have had upon others. In this way, it can help rehabilitate offenders and enable them to stop offending. It can help motivate them to change and become responsible, law-abiding and productive members of society.
In the examples of restorative justice that I have seen, its importance for victims should not be underestimated. The victims said on many occasions, “That enabled me to have closure” on what had been a very traumatic experience. I was therefore grateful for the comments made about our proposals on restorative justice, although I should say to all my colleagues who said that it is a big commitment that I do not underestimate the fact that it will have to be prepared with the proper training and rollout. I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, because it was his constant harrying on restorative justice that made it a priority for me. While I take on board the fact that it is a tough ask, perhaps I may quote Mao Tse-Tung, who said,
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.
I hope that this is the single step that takes us towards restorative justice.
I was slightly disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Reid, did not ride to my rescue because, again, I agreed with much of what he said. I agree that there are people in our prisons who should not be there. One of the things that I hope we are developing in this policy is the twin track, which will make sure that the people who should be in prison are put there because of the nature of their offences or for public protection, but those who should not be in prison are managed safely out of the system.
I was glad of the references to one of my other standby quotations—Jimmy Maxton’s comment about riding two horses at once. That is precisely and unashamedly what we are trying to do. We are trying to make sure that the public have a confidence in community sentencing that will allow us to implant rehabilitation into the community sentencing process, which we hope will provide the impact on reoffending that I have said is so desirable. I agree that there is a certain element of riding two horses at once. We need public confidence in community sentencing if we are going to give it the traffic that we want it to bear.