00:00We all want people who come out of prison to be reformed. We want them to take their
00:04place in the community, to get a job, to get a home, to get a life.
00:09Of course. And, you know, I think in order to address this, we obviously have the new
00:14Labour government carrying over the previous government's plan of reducing the limit to 40%
00:20per year term, so that it can be released or be considered to be.
00:24Yes, it's a temporary measure just for three months. It will need to be followed by a much
00:28more substantial long term reform. Just to give you two examples, because I spoke about
00:34them at the end of July in a very brief intervention, because we were only given five
00:38minutes each to speak. So many people wanted to contribute. This is staggering. There are
00:4417,000 people on remand in prison, on remand, who have not yet been tried or not been sentenced.
00:54Last year, there were 27,800 recalls. That are people who are recalled, most of them,
01:01under a provision which recalls them for 28 days, and then they asked to be a review,
01:05and most of them are let out. It's a crazy system, absolutely crazy. All of those have to be found
01:12a place, they have to be found a cell. And what you're doing is you're jamming it up,
01:16you're dislocating it when you need those cells for people who have been
01:20sentenced to serious times in jail. And well, I think, do you think for the
01:29the inmates that are going to be released, or have been released this month, and will be released
01:33again next month, as part of this process, we talked about probation service a little bit
01:36already, but how prepared do you think they are for that? Are they going to struggle?
01:40I think they're going to struggle for three reasons. One was that Christopher Grayling,
01:45when he was the Justice Secretary, absolutely messed up, and everybody's accepted,
01:50the previous government accepted in the end, that it was a total mess, and he tried to privatise it.
01:56They've just about put it together, but a lot of the probation officers are new,
02:00and that doesn't mean they're no good, it just means they're inexperienced.
02:05That makes it much more difficult for them to handle a sudden surge in the caseload,
02:12and therefore they're bound to be risk-averse, understandably, but they're also bound to be in
02:18a situation where they can't foresee what will happen. So I fear that we will get some incidents
02:25where people repeat offend. It happens anyway with people released, there's a very high level
02:32of re-offending, something like 50%, so you're going to get that whatever happens, and the
02:37question is, can we hold our nerve, and can we say, look, we've got to do it? I mean, everybody
02:42in the system acknowledges this, so nobody's actually saying there's another way at the moment,
02:48there's going to have to be another way within 18 months, two years.
02:52If you were still the Home Secretary, what would be your priorities in helping to sort this?
02:58I would say instead of building even more large prisons, which, difficult to get planning consent,
03:04difficult to go through all the building processes, difficult to recruit once you've
03:10built them within a specific radius, difficult in terms of where prisoners are coming from and
03:16whether they can keep with their family, why not build a large number of small remand centres
03:23right across Britain, and there'd be much less objection from the locality, because these people
03:28have not been found guilty, they're not sentenced, and you could do the job very quickly. I'm hoping
03:34to persuade ministers to do that, because there is money in the forward budget, and I don't think
03:40there's a chance of Rachel Reeves cutting that on the 30th of October when she has her first
03:46major announcement. So the money's there, so why not use it more smartly, more effectively,
03:53more quickly than trying to build bigger prisons, which take ages to build, and then you fill them
04:01way away from people's homes, including those on remand. So that's the first thing I'd do,
04:06and then the second thing I'd do is cancel this ridiculous 28-day recall, and I would also take a
04:14very strong look at the recall for the IPP, the imprisonment for public protection, and say only
04:21when someone has really committed another offence, as opposed to breaching their licence, should they
04:28be pulled back in, and instead we have a joined-up approach at local level. I've been talking to
04:33Oliver Coppard about this as the elected mayor of South Yorkshire. How can we pull in the police
04:41for whom he's responsible, with the probation service, with the court service, with other
04:47community actions, local government is one, voluntary sector are others, so that we try and
04:54get a joined-up system here locally, and that's taking place in Greater Manchester under
05:00Andy Burnham, and I think we can do a better job.
Comments