PRISON AFTER-CARE AND PROBATION

§ THE EARL OF LISTOWEL

My Lords, I feel especially fortunate this afternoon to be the first speaker to be able, on behalf of your Lordships, to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Swan-borough, on her equally practical and constructive speech. Her suggestions were based, as we all realise, on her immense knowledge of voluntary work all over the country and her very great administrative skill. I feel certain that 1027 the Government will give these suggestions very careful thought. We are also grateful to the noble Baroness for giving us a chance of discussing this matter now. We are glad that she revived her Motion, and she could not have revived it at a more opportune moment, when we have just had the publication of the ACTO Report and the Government's initial reaction to that Report. The fact that the names of so many of your Lordships are on the list of speakers shows how much interest has been aroused in the House by the noble Baroness's Motion.

Let me make a personal confession first. I am speaking this afternoon not for my Party which, so far as I know, has no official view about the work of after-care. After-care has never been a Party political issue and I hope that it never will be, even during an Election year. I think that noble Lords on both sides of the House would agree that that is a desirable state of affairs and one that we should like to continue. This is, in fact, one of those pleasant occasions when those of us—with the exception of my noble relative who will reply to this debate—who are not burdened with ministerial responsibility can say exactly what we think, and can do so at a moment when the Government's mind is still open about a wide range of matters in connection with after-care, so that they may have some chance of influencing the decisions that will have to be taken.

I think that I ought perhaps to add that I am not speaking here on behalf of the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies, though I have the honour to be Chairman of their Council. I take full and sole responsibility for everything I say. I should like to say a few words of thanks to the sub-committee of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders, under their Chairman, Mr. B. J. Hartwell, for the Report they have produced on the future of after-care. It has taken them about two years to prepare it—a very long time and a very long effort for the members of the Council; but in producing it they have certainly rendered a valuable public service. I believe that in time this Report will be regarded as a historic document, because it will have laid the 1028 foundations, at any rate, of a new social service, an after-care service, which will take its place in due course beside the older social services as part of a system of which our country is justly proud.

There are certain matters about which I think there would be very general agreement. I will start with what I regard as the most important. I think it will be generally agreed that the time has now come for the State to accept full responsibility for the provision of after-care. The organisation of aftercare by voluntary societies is rapidly running down, and they have neither the money nor the personnel to meet the needs of the 50,000 persons (I am giving round figures) released from local prisons every year. In passing, may I remind your Lordships that there are exactly 23 whole-time after-care officers working for the local discharged prisoners' aid societies? I think that all your Lordships would also take the view, which was expressed by the noble Lady, that there should be a single after-care service, instead of the two separate services we have at the moment, which have grown up as a result of historical accident, one for compulsory and one for voluntary after-care.

The third matter about which I believe there will be general agreement is that this new service requires trained professional skill, like the probation service, and that this professional skill should be available throughout the country, wherever a man may settle after he leaves prison. At the moment, as the noble Lady pointed out, the quality of the aid and advice that a man receives is a matter of chance. It depends entirely on the type of sentence he has served and on the place in which he finds a job after leaving prison. If he is especially unlucky he goes to a county where the local society has no after-care officer, and he gets no advice at all and no assistance in the difficult job in settling down after prison.

I think that the Report does well to emphasise, as our common end, that the type of after-care service we should like to see is a single public service, in this respect (but only in this respect) like the probation or prison service, staffed by men and women—because your Lordships are aware of the excellent 1029 work that women are doing both inside and outside prisons at the moment—with the highest professional qualifications. I think that we all agree about this as the goal towards which we are working. But there are many different views all of which deserve careful consideration, about how this public aftercare service should be organised and about what qualifications after-care officers will require. These, I believe, are differences about machinery and not about the purpose which the machinery is intended to serve.

The noble Lady, for example, wants a public board instead of a Government Department to manage the national after-care service and, of course, we all know that there is a very strong case for public corporations or boards, which have played an important part in work of national importance in time past. There is one difficulty about this which occurs to me and it is this: that it would still divide after-care. There would be a division between institutional aftercare and after-care given outside prison through trained social workers. What I think we want is the direction of aftercare by a single authority responsible for everything that is done for the prisoner, both inside prison and after he is released. It is most interesting to note that the Prison Officers' Association has just shown itself strongly in favour in taking an active part in rehabilitation. This is an extremely positive sign of the times, because it means that this idea of rehabilitation is becoming the most important principle in the minds of everyone who is occupied with prisoners, whether inside or outside prison. That is why I think it is particularly important that all those who are concerned in the same sort of work should be under the same sort of authority.

The other main difference of opinion about the recommendations in the Report is on the recommendation in favour of a combined Probation and After-Care Service. The noble Lady is in favour of this combined service; but others take a different view. I think it is certainly true to say that, as a general rule, a specialist is better than a general practitioner, and if we could recruit immediately a nationwide service of specialists in after-care they 1030 would do a better job than the hard-pressed probation officers, whose main interest, after all, is probation.

It is also true that sometimes the better is the enemy of the good, and I am satisfied—I agree in this respect with the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough—that if we want to have any nationwide after-care service in the near future and do not want to run the risk of a complete breakdown in the voluntary system, then this new national service must be grafted on to the existing probation service. But I hope that, whatever Government may be in power after the next Election, they will review the position carefully, and as soon as may be, at an appropriate moment, decide whether it is desirable and practicable to insist on a greater degree of specialisation in after-care work.

§ THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD DERWENT)

We will.

§ THE EARL OF LISTOWEL

I am glad to hear that, at any rate. It is most refreshing to find not only an Election pledge but a pledge to do something afterwards. I should like to ask my noble relative one question which is of great concern to prison welfare officers, and it is this: will they really be interchangeable with officers working outside prisons? Will there be interchangeability between social workers inside and outside prisons? That is a matter of great concern at the moment, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Swan-borough, pointed out, will be of great importance to the future of this new service. There are obviously administrative difficulties, which I will not go into now, but I am certain that administrative difficulties are never insuperable if the Government are determined that something should be done.

I am glad that the Report paid a handsome tribute to the work of the voluntary societies, who, as it pointed out, have shouldered the main responsibility for after-care for the last hundred years. I am even more pleased that it foresees a partnership between professional and voluntary workers in the future in which the voluntary worker will continue to make an indispensable contribution to after-care. It has been the concern—using that word in the Quaker sense—of ordinary men and 1031 women about prisoners that has resulted in the building up of our present system of after-care. We still need the spirit that prompted this work, as well as the devoted people who will continue it, in association with the professional workers: because until the public really cares—and I cannot help feeling that this has been one of the greatest difficulties in the past—we shall not get the reforms in our prison system which are no less necessary than after-care if rehabilitation is really to succeed.

I am sure the Government will agree with the Report that a long-term partnership between the State and voluntary effort is essential to the future of after-care. But in the meantime—that is to say, for the next two or three years, before this new scheme comes into operation—the voluntary societies will have to continue to shoulder a large part of the work. We need the assistance of the Government if we are to be able to carry on through this interim period. I should like to ask the Government now (perhaps my noble relative will reply to this question at the end of this debate) if they will consider carefully two ways in which their help is required. First of all, as a result of the Report and of the Government's decision to accept it, in principle, our funds are rapidly drying up. It is quite natural, when people see that a concern is being taken over by the State, that they should not continue to contribute to its maintenance. We shall not be able to cover our expenses without a substantial increase in our present 50 per cent. grant.

Our other difficulty, again naturally arising out of what has happened recently, is loss of staff; because, of course, our officers have no sense of security. The one way in which we could really be sure of keeping our staff would be for the Government to say that our whole-time after-care officers will be absorbed in the new service. There are only 23 of these officers. The new service will be a much expanded probation service, because clearly probation officers are going to be asked to take on an enormous amount of extra work, and I cannot believe that 23 officers who have had a lot of practical experience would not be useful as members of this new service. But I must 1032 point out to the Government that this should be a public undertaking if these officers are to feel a sufficient sense of security.

My final plea to the Government is simply a plea for immediate action. I feel that what we all need is a firm decision to put the new scheme into operation at the earliest possible moment. If this new scheme is practicable and workable, I can assure my noble relative that it will have the utmost co-operation of the voluntary societies.

§ LORD AMULREE

My Lords, we must all feel pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough, has put down this Motion on the Order Paper. The large number of noble Lords down to speak shows that the questions of after-care and probation, too, are matters which are of great interest to your Lordships. I think one can assume, at the same time, that the principle is now fairly widely accepted that such services should be encouraged and expanded. It is, of course, difficult to give real proof of the effectiveness of such work, and one does not want to make too much of the statistical evidence available, but, so far as one can see, the effect of probation and after-care has been substantial and far more than one could have expected.

I should like to say a few words about the type of people who really require after-care, because the figures quoted by the noble Lady, that only about one-eighth of prisoners who are discharged each year receive compulsory after-care, are, I am bound to say, rather worrying. One can see that a certain number of prisoners do not require much after-care. They may want a certain amount of help in the first two weeks or so after their discharge; but they go back to homes and families, and some of them do not have much difficulty in finding a job to do. But there are a number whose rehabilitation and re-entry into society is going to be a long job and who will need a great deal of skilled help.

At the present time, quite a lot is done, but I am sure that a great deal more could be done to bring more people who have been in prison back to normal life again. Some, for example, may have complicated and difficult family problems which can be dealt with only by a 1033 skilled social worker. But, here again, one must be careful not to exaggerate the amount that is required in psychiatric and psychological treatment. Although there are certain people who require skilled medical treatment, I am not sure that this is not thought rather too much of now, and that maybe a certain amount of not very good psychiatry and psychology is applied to them which could be better supplied by more skilled people elsewhere. I am not sure that I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, that you want a team entirely of specialists and not general practitioners. There is a great deal to be said for the general practitioner around the corner. I feel that sometimes a good deal of general knowledge, without specialist knowledge, is a good thing to have. That is one of the points which the Report we are discussing mentions in paragraph 132, where it says that the care of these people must be administered with a warm heart, a clear head and insight, lack of illusion and preparedness for disappointment. That, to my mind, comes down to the fact that a good deal of common sense is required in dealing with the type of people we are now talking about.

One of the questions one has to consider if one talks on this subject is what are the real requirements of the person coming from prison. Surely, they can be very simply put. He wants money, work and some kind of security. There was another thing which I was pleased to read in this Report, and that is that a Committee of the United Nations on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders said roughly the same thing as I have been saying to-day. It says that the prisoners want clothing, lodging, means of travel to a place of employment and means of maintenance while obtaining employment. They want some kind of documents, and they want to get a job as quickly as they can. We talked a good deal last Session about the question of the National Insurance card. I think the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, brought that subject up on more than one occasion. I was pleased to read in paragraph 187 of this Report that the Committee said: We look forward to the time when prison industries can be so improved that increased 1034 earnings can be paid to prisoners and so enable them, among other things, to maintain their insurance contributions. I quite agree that it is not solely the ex-prisoner who gets an insurance card with no stamps on it, but it is a great drawback to him.

There is nothing very new in the idea of prisoners being paid a certain amount of money for the work they do. I think I have mentioned this to your Lordships once before, and if you do not mind I will repeat it. When I visited Shanghai in the year 1947 as a Member of your Lordships' House upon, I regret to say, a Parliamentary visit to General Chiang Kai-shek, there was a good and energetic Mayor there at the time called, as I remember, Mr. K. C. Wu. He had a brand new prison building in Shanghai where the prisoners were employed on work. The work they were doing was printing for the local Shanghai Government—forms and all that kind of thing—for which they were paid a standard rate of pay. A certain amount was kept for their keep, but it meant that when they were discharged they were not completely dependent, as people tend to be at the present time. They did not need to go to a National Assistance Board; they had money in their pocket and, according to Mr. K. C. Wu, that had done a great deal to stop people reverting to crime as soon as they were released. If that can be done in China in the bad old days of Chiang Kai-shek, why cannot it be done in Britain, in the more reasonable times in which we are told we are living at the present time?

The idea which the noble Baroness has put forward about a new central board is certainly a striking one which requires a great deal of consideration and thought. Certainly the suggestion that it should be based on the probation service seems to me to be a very good one indeed, because the probation service is a well-established, well-recognised and respected service. Such a board would be able to employ all the various people employed by the various authorities, both statutory and voluntary, at the present time. There would be good scope for voluntary workers, because I think—and I hope the noble Baroness will agree with me—that voluntary workers enjoy working under trained, skilled people, provided they are given a definite job to do. So I 1035 do not think there would in arranging for people this new board, if such to be set up.

Another point which I think is most important is that the same people should do what might be called after-care when the prisoner is in prison and when he comes out. It need be done not by the same individual maybe, but by people on the same staff. It would be an advantage if people who were working inside prison could sometimes work outside, so that they could interchange and learn about conditions in prison and conditions in the world outside at the same time. I do not think there would be any trouble about that. It is said, of course, that it is going to be difficult to recruit the right number of social workers to carry out this work. I think there is a good deal of truth in that, but that problem could be solved—if I may digress for a moment—by a more rational means of training social workers. At present they are trained in all sorts of ways by all sorts of bodies, and there is a good deal of overlapping. It seems to me to be a sensible thing that there should be one basic training given by one particular type of body in the country, and when these workers pass that they could move on to specialise as probation officers, almoners, child welfare officers, and that sort of thing. That, again, is going rather far from what we are talking about, but I mention it in passing as one means by which the number of people available might be increased.

I should like to say a final word about the probation officers, because although I agree that any new scheme should be based on the work of the probation officers, I think your Lordships will bear in mind that they are extremely hard-worked at the present time. Their numbers are extremely small, although they have gone up. In 1950, there were about 1,000, and in 1960 there were about 1,700. Their work has increased far more than that proportion. They have an enormous caseload on their shoulders, almost more than they can possibly do. I have seen it stated in the Report that the men each have a caseload of about 61 on their shoulders and the women about 40. That is a great deal for a single individual to carry. 1036 What is more, they have a tremendous amount of other work to do. I do not want to go into the matter in great detail, but they have to deal with the supervision of children; money payments; matrimonial proceedings; inquiries for the courts; matrimonial conciliation, and all that sort of thing. So I beseech the Government, if we are going to adopt this idea, not to put more work on the probation service, because at the present time they are really carrying as much as they possibly can and one wonders whether they are not even carrying too much. Certainly they are so pushed with work that one feels sometimes that they cannot give as full and detailed reports to the courts as they would like to do and as the courts would like to receive.

Finally, I would ask the Government to give careful consideration to what the noble Baroness has said about a central board and to consider whether such a central board could be established. It need not be put up as a permanent thing but as a temporary experiment, to be changed or modified if something goes wrong. I think there is a great deal in what the noble Baroness has said, and I should like to support her a very long way, with a certain reservation, in the plea she has made to Her Majesty's Government.

§ THE LORD BISHOP OF BRISTOL

My Lords, I should not have dared to speak so early in my membership of this House had it not been that the right reverend Prelate, my friend the Bishop of Coventry, had hoped to speak to-day but has been prevented from attending. When he asked me to take his place I was glad to do so, because this is a subject with which I am deeply concerned. I have been in close touch with two local prisons and, like most members of my calling, I usually have one or two people in tow who are in need of after-care. This is also a matter in which the Church has pioneered, having one of the voluntary associations, and remains concerned.

There are just three points which I should like your Lordships' permission to make. First of all, I am sure that the Church and all voluntary agencies will warmly welcome the proposal in 1037 this Report that there should be a comprehensive, nation-wide and properly trained after-care service. I do not feel that I have the confidence to express an opinion as to the relative merits of the majority view in this Report and the Memorandum of Dissent, nor to weigh the arguments so cogently presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough; but it is clear that all are agreed on this need for a comprehensive and competent service. Whether it would be best achieved by this or that arrangement or enlargement of the probation service, I do not feel I am competent to say. But I am quite sure that the Churches can only rejoice when voluntary and pioneer work, as in education or in health, becomes increasingly the accepted national responsibility, with larger resources and with a better trained personnel; and I believe that the Churches would be eager to cooperate with any such comprehensive, more competent service, both at the national and local level.

But, clearly, there will still be a need, as has been emphasised more than once, for a vast army of voluntary helpers and for a large reservoir of informed good will. However the new service is organised, there will still be plenty of room for local initiative and local responsibility; otherwise I fear there may be some danger that the voluntary organisations will feel somewhat crowded out and may have the impression that now somebody else is taking care of it. Therefore, whatever pattern of organisation is followed, I would plead that there should still be plenty of room for local initiative and responsibility.

This bears directly on my second point. Work on the scale envisaged will call for a large number of devoted, dedicated people working as what this Report calls "auxiliaries" and prepared to work on the level of personal friendship and commitment, with all the disappointments and discouragements that that can so easily entail. I believe that this kind of personal work is uniquely done through living with the men you are trying to help and caring for individuals, one by one. Your Lordships will be aware of the kind of work which is so splendidly done through the Norman House Committee and the Langley House Trust, and I know of three separate enterprises which it is desired to set on foot in 1038 Bristol for voluntary hostels in which discharged prisoners can be helped on a basis of personal friendship.

Obviously, projects of this kind need scrutiny and co-ordination; but, even so, it is very difficult for the voluntary associations to find the resources, especially capital resources, to start enterprises of this sort. I would venture to urge that public funds should be available to assist voluntary enterprises of this kind. It may be a valid analogy to remind your Lordships of the arrangement not so long ago made whereby £3 million of Government money was made available, through the British Council, for the setting up of hostels for overseas students. We were enabled in the Bristol Diocese, through this kind of help, which first offered £500 (later raised to £750) per student place to begin a small hostel for overseas students, of which there is growing need, in a way in which would never have been possible without public help of this kind.

Without using this analogy as one which too closely bears on this situation I would ask: would it not be possible for the Home Office to give some relevant authority in the localities discretion to set up voluntary associations of this kind; centres where personal and pastoral work can be done by those who are prepared to help these men, day in and day out? I do not believe that it would be possible for most voluntary associations to bring about centres of that sort without help, and help of a generous nature.

My Lords, my third point is rather more intangible, though perhaps from these Benches most important. Obviously the aim of after-care is to ensure that no one who has suffered a penal sentence should ever deserve to suffer another: that he should be fully rehabilitated. But such words reveal, or perhaps conceal, a widespread uncertainty and confusion in our minds. What do we mean by "penal"? In what sense is it deserved? What is "rehabilitation"? We speak of the discharged prisoner as having "expiated his crime"; as having "paid the price" of his misdeeds, and so on. But it is, I believe, at this point that society may well be in need of clearer standards. For the whole notion of punishment is a complex one, in the discussion of which the noble Earl, Lord Longford 1039 has contributed, notably in his book, The Idea of Punishment. There is also an extremely interesting pamphlet issued by a working party of the Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, which seeks to analyse what is implicit in the notion of punishment.

Briefly, there are three elements in the traditional conception of punishment, though they are subtly interrelated and vary according to presuppositions. But, generally, we recognise that punishment needs to be deterrent, reformative and retributive. Deterrent in the sense that it protects society, both by the restraint of a particular offender and by the discouragement of others; reformative, in the sense that it so treats an offender that he will not desire to repeat his offence. But retributive? It is on this point that we are least certain; for the idea of retribution is too readily confused with quite indefensible notions of rationalised revenge. But surely the essence of retribution is desert.

It is at this point that the effect of psychiatry, neurology, social science, and so on, has undermined to a large extent our conception of the reality of responsibility, and, therefore, of blame. Yet desert is the moral connection between crime and punishment. It determines the justice of a sentence. We do not ask whether a deterrent is just, but simply whether it deters. We do not ask whether a reformation is just, but only whether it is effective. But for a sentence to be just it must be deserved. If a man cannot be blamed, he is less than a man. It is part of his human dignity to be taken seriously in his responsibility.

Perhaps your Lordships would allow an illustration from the striking last page of a novel by John Braine, Room At the Top. I think it illustrates a widespread human tragedy. Joe Lampton, after a series of sordid tangles which issued in driving his mistress to kill herself in a horrible motor smash, is being consoled by another of his friends—"Nobody blames you, Joe, nobody blames you"—and he recoiled sharply and said, "Oh, God! that is just the trouble." And I believe that this depth of human personality which requires to be held responsible is some- 1040 thing of which every conception of justice that is to go deep enough must take account. Only a man who recognises that he deserves to be punished can be fully restored. Rehabilitation at its best is the social working out of forgiveness.

Of course, these considerations apply far more widely than to the matter immediately under discussion. But I do beg to raise them before your Lordships now because I do not believe that our immediate concern for after-care can be effectively considered without bearing them in mind. I stress it in this context because I believe that the Churches have a distinctive and unique obligation to contribute, as they can, to that whole social process in which psychiatrists, trained social workers, expert penologists, lawyers and so forth, must work together to arrive at a sense of responsibility for those whom society itself has felt obliged to penalise. Only so, I would suggest, can we have an organisation of after-care which not only is comprehensive, nationwide and competently trained, but also does justice to the whole complexity of human nature by treating those who are committed to its care not primarily as cases but as our fellow men.

§ BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD

My Lords, I am sure I shall be expressing the views and wishes of this House in conveying our very real congratulations to the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Bristol for a most remarkable maiden speech. I have listened with the greatest possible interest to all that he had to say, and above all to the last words of his speech when he spoke about rehabilitation being the social working out of forgiveness. That, surely, is a very important and interesting way of putting it, and must give us all much food for thought. And I was also interested in the fact that he himself is in touch, as he says, with two very big prisons. We know the prison in Bristol is one of the largest local prisons, and I am quite sure that his interest in, and the influence he must have on those who are associated with, the prisons must be very great indeed. How fortunate they are to have a Bishop of that calibre to help them in that work! I hope the right reverend Prelate 1041 will speak to us many times on subjects of this kind.

I rise to take part in this debate and am very delighted that my noble friend Lady Swanborough has put this Motion on the Order Paper, because I think it is of vital importance at the present time. I am, as your Lordships know, a member of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders. I have one other colleague who is going to speak after me, the Lord Bishop of Exeter, and I hope between us we can cover many of the points which the committee of the Advisory Council set up to study this matter Lave put down in their Report. I was not a member of the committee, but I took part in all the discussions which took place in the full Council after the Report had been brought before us.

I was under the impression during those discussions that even those who signed the Minority Report were in the main prepared to accept the committee's findings, and it was only, I think, at the very last that Professor Radzinowitz put forward the proposal for a large new central service controlled nationally. I said at the time, and I repeat it now, that a new nationalised and centralised force for dealing with an essentially localised and individual service is not, in my opinion, the way to go about it. The right reverend Prelate has emphasised, too, the importance of the local aspect of after-care work, and I am sure that is something we must never lose sight of.

If you were to embark on what Professor Radzinowitz suggests, in the first instance you would have to recruit people for such a service in a market which we all know is very short of professional and trained people, and that recruitment would be in direct competition with other professional services, and I believe this might do quite a lot of harm. Secondly, after-care is essentially to look after individual people, some of whom, we know, are very difficult and all of whom are scattered all over the country. They may well have been in central prisons, but they will have their homes all over the place. Some may have no homes at all, and we have to help them to find somewhere to live. It is, therefore, in my opinion, essential to put responsibility for caring for these people in the localities where they are 1042 discharged. The great percentage of prisoners will return to their homes, and, given some help and care, may never reappear in court or prison again. Where is one to find the most widespread service to care for them? Only, I think, in the probation service and in the child care service expanded as we recommend.

In Scotland both these services are organised in local authority areas. I know that in England and Wales the organisation of probation is slightly different, but to all intents and purposes it is a local service, and there is probably no person who on returning to his home after a prison sentence will not find either a probation officer or, if he is a juvenile, a child care officer in that locality.

§ THE EARL OF LONGFORD

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Baroness simply on a point of information. She can tell us, of course, about Scotland far more than anybody else can. But surely in Scotland a report has recently suggested quite a different solution from the one suggested for England.

§ BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD

The noble Earl, Lord Longford, is quite right. We have had a report from a committee presided over by Sheriff Leslie, but it has received a very unfavourable response throughout the country, and all the probation committees—I am chairman of a probation committee in Scotland—and a great many other of the interested parties are very strongly against the recommendation of the Leslie Committee. We have not yet heard from the Secretary of State whether or not he is accepting the recommendations, but it is interesting that the Council on which I sit, the Advisory Council for Child Care for England and Wales, has recommended exactly the opposite of what the Leslie Committee recommended for Scotland. And in the probation committee of which I am chairman we discussed the Leslie Committee and everybody was very much opposed to their particular proposal—there are other things in the committee's proposals which are good, but they are opposed to this particular proposal on which Sherh7 Leslie's Committee reported. So I personally am not in favour of the Leslie Committee report and the implication which it would 1043 have in Scotland, but we do not yet know whether the Secretary of State is going to accept it. He has not made a statement as the Home Secretary made in the House of Commons yesterday, I believe, accepting in principle the proposals of our Advisory Council.

§ THE EARL OF LONGFORD

I thank the noble Baroness very much.

§ BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD

Why I am so keen that the probation officers and probation committees should be the agency for after-care is not only because they are so widespread as to cover almost every locality, but also because they have other groups of people, probation committees and children's committees, who support these officers and help with the work to be undertaken. All of them are or should be cognizant of local conditions. They are part and parcel of the community; they know the area; they know its needs, its industry or agriculture, and what is the set-up in the county or the city. To me, this is far more valuable to the discharged prisoner or to the approved school boy than a centralised service which would have to fit in to the local conditions and to learn about them, and, in the matter of recruitment, be competing with them.

Of course, I realise—I think it was the right reverend Prelate or the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, who referred to this—how important it is that we should not put upon the probation officers more than they can carry; and I realise, too, that in this work we shall have to have a recruiting drive for probation officers and for those who would help in this aftercare service. Nevertheless, I think that that could be achieved much better as a single recruiting campaign than as one that was, as it were, in competition with the recruitment for both children's services and probation services.

What I think we visualised in the committee was the building up of a combined service in which we would employ professional workers, professional probation officers, and in addition—and I say that this is most important—all kinds of voluntary workers and helpers who are interested in this work, who have done it in a voluntary society such as Lord Listowel presides over. There would be room in an enlarged service for 1044 all those people, and they would be working side by side with experienced and trained people, and they would learn enormously from that experience. I should like to see the voluntary societies working side by side with, but in this case incorporated into, the enlarged probation service.

We speak in paragraphs 120 to 124 of our Report of the auxiliary after-care officer. In our discussions about this we were visualising using the W.V.S. in every way that we could; the after-care and prisoner's aid organisations—people who perhaps are not at the moment associated with these services, but who are interested in it, and could take part in it; married women, whose children have grown up leaving them freer to do this work; widowed people who have perhaps no home to keep up and are therefore much freer. All those people could come into this enlarged service, but it would be, in part, the after-care and probation service, and it would be a joint service. In my opinion it is not really so novel a suggestion because in some scattered rural areas a considerable amount of after-care is done at present by the probation officers, and has been done for a long time. In my own area, for instance, we have two probation officers who do after-care and concern themselves with discharged prisoners when they are asked to do so. If they did not, it would be difficult for anybody to come down and do it because we are miles away from anywhere. That would happen in many rural areas.

There is another reservation by Alderman Robinson, a member of our Council, on the after-care of approved school children. Here, again, I disagree profoundly with this view. Approved school children are also a part of the community in which they live. The one truly family service that local authorities have is the child-care service. The children's officers know all the children in a problem family, and many who go to approved schools are from problem homes. Often they have been looking after that family or caring for them for many years before a child is actually sent to an approved school. It is only natural that the children's officer should take a continuing interest in the child before and after it is sent to an approved school. I should like to see children's officers encouraged to keep in touch with 1045 and visit a child when it goes to an approved school and when it comes out of an approved school, and the children's officer who already knows the child, who is its friend, should undertake the aftercare.

I am opposed to this chopping and changing of people in the life of what is often a most disturbed child. It is a great mistake. What children want is continuity—a background which they understand and know, and not people who are with them at one moment and vanish the next, only to be replaced by another stranger. Alderman Robinson in his Minute of Dissent was afraid that the after-care officers and approved school officers would lose their jobs and that they might not be able to find work in this field. But, again, I think that is wrong because those people can easily be absorbed into this larger joint aftercare and probation service. We should want all of them.

The right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter is going to speak after me, and I hope that he will pick up the point of the suggestion that has been made about the Home Office being the single organisation to supervise and advise on this service. I do not want to go over everything because it takes much too long, but I want to stress most sincerely the importance of the wide spread which is required of this combined service which we are recommending, and also the co-operation which would be developed with the other social services in any locality. If any of your Lordships serve on committees of county councils—like children's or education or health and welfare committees—you will know how disheartening it is to have to refer difficult cases to two or three different departments, which, in turn, means two or three different sets of people. Sometimes I feel quite despairing about this, and the man or woman, boy or girl, suffers delays in decisions and other complications result. Provided that it is organised many of our welfare services would be coming into a combined service in which the person best qualified to help a particular case would be available without the awful business of passing on a case from one committee to another.

1046 We have an opportunity in this proposal of the Advisory Council of setting up a new and far-reaching, widespread and comprehensive after-care service; to make it a unified service based on the existing personnel of the probation and child-care services with the voluntary agencies incorporated. I think it would be a thousand pities if we did not use this opportunity for this particular object: to co-ordinate and to bring into effect a unified service—not to try to start something quite different, an organised service from the centre which would cut across all the arrangements which are already there, which really would break up the whole of the local authority services in this country. To try to set up anything else would be immensely lengthy, and time is of the greatest importance. Our personnel is limited and time is most important. We have to get going straight away.

I hope that the Home Secretary will accept the views of the Advisory Council, that he will set about a single recruiting campaign for increasing the probation and after-care officers, and enlist the support of the voluntary organisations and auxiliary services as quickly as possible. To abandon all this, and to seek to start a great nationally and centrally controlled service of aftercare with no integration with the existing services would, in my opinion, be a great mistake. I hope that the Home Secretary will go ahead with our recommendations as soon as possible, and that the Minister in winding up will be able to give us that good news.

§ THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER

My Lords, I shall not detain your Lordships above a few minutes, for I have really nothing to say which is not already contained in the Report which is under discussion. I rise only in order to take the opportunity of expressing again my own personal conviction of the utmost urgency and importance of this subject and to draw your Lordships' attention to four important points.

The first of those points is this. We consider that it is of the first importance that everyone should recognise that the after-care of a person starts, or should start, from the moment that he passes through the prison gate at the beginning of his sentence. We regard it as of immense importance that social workers 1047 should be appointed to every prison, not only locally but also centrally, and that there should be easy and recognised means of communication between the social workers in the prison and the probation officers and after-care workers, whatever they are called, who are working outside in the areas where the prisoner and his family normally live. It is a prisoner's anxiety about his family or his ignorance about the conditions of his family which very often constitutes the greatest single obstacle to securing the co-operation of the prisoner in his own reform, without which co-operation no reform is possible at all. Therefore, my first point is that we regard it as of immense importance that the social workers should be appointed as soon as possible and machinery set up and instructions given by which they can easily make contact, and remain in contact, with the probation officers outside.

My second point is this. If the recommendations of this Report are adopted—and the Home Secretary has said that he accepts them in principle; so we may assume that in outline they will be adopted—obviously there will have to be a very considerable enlargement of the existing probation services. That means that there must be an energetic and well-conceived recruitment campaign. I am of the opinion that if such a campaign were launched it would be successful. I think that among the rising generation there are large numbers of young men and women who would be glad of an opportunity to devote their lives to service of this kind. Only one thing is necessary: the public must be convinced of the worthwhileness of the probation service and must be prepared willingly to accord to the probation service that respect and that status which is appropriate to a skilled vocational profession. Once that happens, I have no doubt whatever that all the recruits we need will come forward.

My third point is that we attach great importance indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, has said, to the co-operation of volunteer auxiliaries with the trained and skilled professional officer, but these auxiliaries must themselves in their turn receive some degree of training. This is immensely important. I am quite sure that there is an enormous reservoir of people of good 1048 will anxious to help in the after-care of prisoners but failing to offer themselves now because they simply feel that they do not know how to do it as they are not equipped to do it. The moment you offer them some simple training and guarantee that they will be under the supervision of a skilled profession, I believe such people will come forward in numbers. I am sure that all the churches in England will present to their congregations this piece of voluntary work as one of the most important ways in which they can discharge their duties to the community.

My fourth and last point is to remind Her Majesty's Government of the vital importance of founding many more hostels for the reception of discharged prisoners. These hostels serve two purposes. The first purpose is to act as an inn, so to speak, through which a man passes from prison back to his normal life—a place where he may rest for a few clays or a few weeks while he finds his feet, get employment and go back into life once again. This, too, is extremely important. But there is another function which these hostels serve, or some of them may serve, and that is as permanent residences for those unfortunate people whom our penal system has rendered quite incapable of living in the world entirely on their own. For such people you need a permanent house where they will permanently reside under a mild and gentle discipline, with all the major decisions in life made for them and only the minor ones left to them. This is what they need; this is how they are made happy. Only there are not enough of these hostels.

I am entirely behind the right reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Bristol, when he pleads for some kind of Government help for voluntary societies which are seeking to open hostels such as these. No doubt there is also need for some body to survey the country because the siting of these hostels in relation to employment, movement of population and that kind of thing is extremely important. If there be in any provincial town a voluntary association with knowledge of local need which has decided that a hostel is required in that place, then I would plead with the Government for money to be made available to that local association for it to get on with the job.

1049 Finally, it is the conviction of ACTO that this more comprehensive national scheme of after-care should be based, set-up and directed by the Home Office. We are happy about that because we believe that the Home Office is profoundly aware of the importance of this matter and will give to this work the utmost drive and enthusiasm. I like to believe that the Home Secretary is already thinking of whom he is going to ask to serve on the central council or the central board, whichever it turns out to be. I should like to think that it is almost ready to meet to begin to take some of these policy-making decisions. I hope he is also busy in his own mind selecting the persons to be asked to serve on the other council, the Probation and After-Care Training Board. I do not think there is any time to lose before that begins, so that it may be given the kind of syllabus of study, the kind of course of instruction which probation officers and auxiliaries should be asked to go through. Lastly, I hope that the Home Office is already considering its plans for this great recruitment campaign.

§ LORD STONHAM

My Lords, I am greatly encouraged by what the right reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Exeter, has just said about the urgency and drive with which the Home Office are going to attack this particular subject. However, having been long in this field, I am a little sceptical, because it seems to me that the truest statement in the Report which is now under consideration is that in the Memorandum of Dissent, which concludes with these words: There has been enough tampering with after-care over the past fifty years. Next to the local prisons it is the weakest link in our system for dealing with offenders. Throughout those fifty years we have had committees sitting; we have had determination of respective Home Secretaries to carry out the recommendations that have been made, yet to-day, in my experience, our after-care system, so far as it exists, is a shambles. So that I accept with some reserve the promising and encouraging statement which the right reverend Prelate has made.

My Lords, I join most sincerely with all those who have spoken in thanking 1050 my noble friend Lady Swanborough for giving us the chance to debate this subject, and also for her opening speech in which she painted such a broad canvas and gave us the benefit of her very great experience in this field. I am very grateful that it falls to my lot to be the first from these Benches to congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Bristol on a truly remarkable maiden speech, which was at the same time moving, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and which I am sure will be read again and again. We hope that we shall have on other occasions the benefit of his deep insight into this and related problems.

I hope that I do not appear too cynical, but in reading the Report we are now considering, and again in rereading it, I felt that the most remarkable thing about it was a major omission. The Committee appeared to think—or at least they gave us no reason for not assuming that they appeared to think—that the condition of our prison system and of our prisons had nothing whatever to do with after-care; almost considering the question of after-care, as it were, in a vacuum. I thought that the most tragic statement in the whole Report was this statement: We think that the system should be made more elastic, more capable of being adapted to the special cases of individual prisoners; that prison discipline and treatment should be more effectively designed to maintain, stimulate or awaken, the higher susceptibilities of prisoners, to develop their moral instincts, to train them in orderly and industrial habits, and, wherever possible, to turn them out of prison better men and women, physically and morally, than when they came in. The tragic part about that statement, my Lords, is that it was made not by the present Committee but by the Gladstone Committee of 1894. This Committee has merely reprinted it. But in many respects the prison system to-day is further from the achievement of those ideals than it was 70 years ago.

The right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Bristol, in a truly remarkable sentence, said: Rehabilitation at its best is the social working out of forgiveness. My Lords, I think that the forgiveness should begin, and be seen to begin, in a real and practical way on the day a man begins his sentence. It does not make any sense whatsoever to subject 1051 a man to every hardship and every possible humiliation, and then begin his rehabilitation, his after-care, on the day that he is released from the prison gates. It is true that we no longer flog prisoners; and we have abolished penal servitude and hard labour. But in local prisons conditions are worse to-day than they were 70 years ago, because those same prisons are now 70 years older and we are crowding into them twice the number of men they housed in 1894; and in real terms we are spending less on their maintenance than we did in Gladstone's day.

Last year, the total gross Treasury-borne expenditure in prisons exceeded £23 million, but out of this total only £1,311,000—less than 6 per cent.—was spent on maintaining 31,063 men and women for a whole year. That means 16s. 3d. per week for everything—food and drink, clothing, bedding, furniture, equipment and medicine. Of that 16s. 3d. per week, 12s. 6d. went on food and drink. That is the equivalent of less than 2s. 6d. a week in Glad-stone's day, so they were better fed then than they are now. Yet in his Report for 1962, the Director of Medical Services blandly assures us that, The dietary takes an important place in prison administration"— and the aim is— the provision of adequate meals served as appetisingly as possible in the circumstances. We also learned that there were no actual dietary changes in 1962, although for a period the potato ration was cut by 50 per cent. My Lords, the operative words are "in the circumstances"—the circumstances of providing an adequate meal for 6d. And it cannot be done.

The noble Lord, Lord Derwent—who for a moment has left his place—knows that two or three weeks ago I drew his attention to the conditions about food in Her Majesty's prison at Nottingham, and he agreed that the complaints were justified. Two weeks ago I learned from a prison chaplain of trouble at Wormwood Scrubs, because of worms in the food. I do not know what kind of worms they were, or whether they were served dead or alive. But if you put three men in a cell which in 1894 was considered fit for only one man; if you spend only 16s. 3d. a week on the man's 1052 entire subsistence, and then pretend that with all else that goes on in prison you are awakening his higher susceptibilities and turning him out of prison a better man physically and morally than when he went in, I say that that is cruel hypocrisy. It is small wonder, my Lords, that last year 29,000 offences were punished in our prisons, and more than half of the inmates were punished for at least one offence during the year. If we treat them as sub-humans, then that is what many of them will become, and, unfortunately, remain when they are released.

It is virtually useless, therefore, to talk of building up an effective aftercare system, unless at the same time we subject our prison system to an enlightened revolution; and I am astounded that this Committee did not say so. They rightly placed the greatest possible emphasis on the need for starting after-care when a man begins his sentence, but is this all to be left to the welfare officer—the social case worker, as they prefer to call him—working as a member of a prison team? How can any prison team buck the present system, and what chance has the welfare officer to do any real good, when in a single year 4,215 cases have to be dealt with at one local prison?

The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, spoke of the case list of probation officers—some 40-odd for women and some 60-odd for men probation officers; and we know that some probation officers have 100 cases. But there were 4,215 cases in a single prison, and the largest number of welfare officers in any prison is 3, so that works out at 1,405 cases per officer. How can one man deal with 1,405 cases and do anything effective about them? At this particular prison the Commissioners report that 2,093 prisoners were discharged, all of whom had been seen and helped by a welfare officer with arrangements for their after-care, and in addition 2,295 other prisoners applied for welfare services. It is not surprising that the Commissioners report that the volume of work was so great, with so much "first aid" to do, that there was a danger that the vital work of planning after-care would be neglected.

My Lords, this is not a criticism of the staff—indeed, there is one governor of an unnamed prison who makes sure 1053 that no man leaves his prison without lodgings to go to, and also he tries to see that he has a job. But the pitiful inadequacy of the resources in relation to the need is a grave criticism of the administration, and this pitiful inadequacy applies to every single aspect of the present prison system, whichever way we look. For this reason, although I support the overwhelming majority of the Committee's recommendations—indeed, I am very glad to see in their Report so many of the things which, in evidence, I urged them to accept—I am utterly opposed to their confused and contradictory proposal for a decentralised aftercare service. I am at a loss to understand the kind of discussion which has been going on. I regret that the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, is out of her place for the moment; but to suggest that, if we have central direction of an after-care service, we shall lose something of local value, I just do not understand. We have the National Health Service, which is a centrally directed service; but no one says that you cannot go to your G.P. and have local care. We have the National Assistance Board, which is another independent corporation, or semi-independent corporation; but, again, no one says that, in any local village or in any town, you cannot get attended to.

I think the distinguished dissenters, although perhaps too scathing in their criticism, are absolutely right. There must be a Director of After-care, with the necessary status and power. The dissenters rightly say that the committee's scheme ignores the broader questions of community provision and gives no worthwhile centre of direction at any level". What this service needs now is real dynamism, belief, energy, determination that it is going to be put over—and that can never be done by a sub-department of a sub-department of the Home Office, or, indeed, any other Government Department. I was delighted to hear the right reverend Prelate say how utterly convinced everybody at the Home Office is that this must be done. But I am bound to ask myself, having worked and fought in this field almost without avail for twenty years: if they have thought about it for so long, why have they not 1054 done something? Why are we met all the time by this wall of obstruction, of evasions, of excuses and of half-truths'? Indeed, again the dissenters are right. Only if there is, as they put, "centralised initiative and effort" shall we "evolve a policy of after-care in relation to the social and economic structure of the country". As long ago as 1894 the Gladstone Committee called for "central organisation and supervision". I wonder how much longer we must wait before someone sees the light.

My Lords, I am also with the dissenters in rejecting the suggestion that aftercare should be tacked on to the duties of the already overburdened probation service. It is scarcely necessary for me to say in this House that I give place to no one in my admiration of the great work which is done by the members of the probation service; and certainly, of course, they can, and they must, play a useful part—an essential part—in the after-care service as agents. But they should not have this task piled on to them, so that they will have to do a bit of after-care when they have finished their other back-breaking tasks. I object, too, to after-care becoming, or remaining, a sub-department of the Home Office; and that is why I most warmly support the suggestion made by my noble friend Lady Reading, that there should be a separate, independent corporation. We have had this century of talk—literally, since 1862, when the Home Office first started to make statutory contributions to after-care—and almost no "do". It is time that we began to give an independent corporation full responsibility for aftercare, so that it would co-operate with the Prison Department of the Home Office in exactly the same way as the National Assistance Board co-operates with the Ministry of National Insurance and the Ministry of Labour.

I am fully aware that such a major change must await a General Election and a new Government; but since the Government have accepted the Report in principle, I urge upon the noble Lord, Lord Derwent, who is to reply for the Government, to let us know whether the Government will now start doing some of the things which can be done now and which are recommended by the Committee. First of all, can we know whether the Home 1055 Office proposes now to increase the grossly inadequate financial provision for after-care? At present, the annual total from both public and private sources spent on material aid to ex-prisoners is £58,000. My Lords, £58,000 for a year for well over 50,000 prisoners! Can we seriously begin to talk about after-care at the rate of £1 per head per year? I am fully aware, of course, that ex-prisoners have recourse to the National Assistance Board, but there are all sorts of genuine needs outside the remit which the experienced welfare officers of NADPAS should be in a position to satisfy but which, through lack of funds, they are not. That lack of resources at the moment of need is one of the major causes of recidivism in the social inadequates who form a large part of our prison population. I think it should be attended to now, and it would be an economy, not an expense.

The second step which should be taken at once is the implementation of the Committee's recommendation that National Assistance, where due, should be paid to a prisoner before he is discharged. It is grossly unfair to release a man, as men are being released every day, with 10s. and a railway warrant in his pocket. Four out of ten long-sentence men have no homes to go to, and it means that the day they are released they have to find a bed for the night, go to the National Assistance Board, then to the Ministry of Labour and then back to the National Assistance Board again before they can get the money to pay for their bed. It is useless to deny that the lack of an address does, in fact, deprive many a man of the basic initial financial help he must have unless he is to start working his way back to prison. I have, in your Lordships' House, given irrefutable proof from Ministers' letters of the difficulties which can and do arise. Some of these, and much bitterness and frustration, can be avoided if whatever is due to a man is paid when he leaves prison. It does not cost any more if he gets the money at Parkhurst at 8 o'clock in the morning instead of at 5 o'clock at night in London, but it will make a lot of difference to his feeling of security, and I hope the change will be made.

1056 Another vitally urgent need, and one to which the right reverend Prelates the Lord Bishop of Bristol and the Lord Bishop of Exeter both drew attention, is of financial assistance now towards voluntary bodies for the provision and running of hostels for homeless ex-prisoners. I had a case just a few weeks ago when I was in Newcastle and spoke to the Newcastle Council of Social Service. I was told that the Bishop of Hexham had given a house for that purpose, and that it would be run without public cost by a charitable organisation but that they needed a grant for furnishings and equipment. So, on their behalf, I applied to the Home Secretary for a grant, only to be told that he could not give it but that we must await the outcome of this Report. My Lords, we have the Report now. The Margery Fry Memorial Fund has a Halfway House for ex-prisoners. They will start another when the funds are available, and that is only the beginning in the provision of small hostels for ex-prisoners run as family life homes.

I entirely endorse what was said by the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter about the great anxiety of people to help. They want only to be told. They want to be given leadership. They ask, "What can we do?" One is sick of having to write back and not being able to tell them. I am sure that a comparatively small capital sum and modest advances for maintenance would make it possible to provide a hostel place for every discharged prisoner who wants one—a decent, clean, friendly home to go to when he leaves prison.

The old established D.P.A.'s, as my noble friend Lord Listowel said, had become discouraged of late and were short of funds. There is need for help, for Government action and leadership; and I hope that the Home Secretary will do much more than take note of the Committee's recommendation to encourage religious bodies and voluntary organisations to take part in this work. The right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of London has given a lead by making available a guild church—St. Botolphs Without—in the City of London. Next month it will start as the headquarters of an after-care organisation, with the vicar of a London church, who has 25 years' experience as a prison chaplain, as full-time director. 1057 He will be supported by an experienced lay committee and by social workers, and I hope that this and similar voluntary efforts will be given financial support from the Government.

My Lords, I apologise for keeping you longer than I expected; but my last point, which is a major one, is to urge the Government to consider now inviting the Law Officers to review sentencing policy with a view to drastic reduction in the prison population. It is virtually impossible to do anything in the way of serious rehabilitation in our older local prisons while they are as grossly overcrowded as now. Those prisons are, to a large extent, overcrowded by people who should not be there at all. I will mention one or two examples. Let us consider the matter of preventive detainees. It is twelve months since we had a Committee Report recommending the abolition of preventive detention. In those twelve months we have waited for a decision of the Home Secretary. Meanwhile, despite a practice direction from the Lord Chief Justice advising to the contrary, men are still being sentenced to prison for seven, eight, ten or fourteen years for trivial offences. I have corresponded with literally hundreds of them. Many of them are obviously mentally subnormal or borderline mental cases.

I had a letter from one of them this week. I have corresponded with him regularly; I am probably the only one who writes to him. His letter is dated the 29th of November and he tells me that he came out of prison in July from eight years' preventive detention and that he is now doing another seven years' preventive detention., having been convicted in October for stealing a radio and a £5 note. What social purpose is served by sending a man who is, in any case, a hopeless social inadequate and who has already been in prison for most of his life and has just done eight years' preventive detention, again to prison for seven years at a cost to the nation of around £2,000 a year? Is that the way we should deal with people? If we cannot trust Judges not to pass sentences of that kind then we must take out of their hands the power to pass these sentences and we must abolish preventive detention. Why should they not be sent to farm colonies? I wrote to 1058 NADPAS about another case with which I am concerned. I will read one sentence. It has to do with a man in Wandsworth Prison. R— has a long history of mental disorder and his present offence was committed whilst a patient in a mental hospital. He was a patient in a mental hospital and was arrested for larceny and sent to prison.

Now my Lords, we come to remands in custody. Some 35,000 untried men are remanded in custody every year; and more than half of them, if convicted, are not sent to prison after conviction. Why crowd our prisons with people whose offences, even if they are found guilty of them, do not merit a prison sentence? Why brand them with the prison stigma? Well over 3,000 alcoholics are sent to prison every year. One admission to Pentonville out of every six is a drunk. Some of them have been back fifty times. Is it sensible to go on sending such people to prison? If we have no treatment centres for alcoholics, then we should wait until we have provided them so that they can be dealt with properly. As regards first offenders, we are not supposed to send them to prison if there is another way of dealing with them. I moved the Third Reading in another place of the First Offenders Act. Yet we send 6,000 of them to prison every year. One of them, a first offender, for stealing 200 cigarettes a few weeks ago got four months. What kind of social good does it do to act in that way?

Indeed what good are short sentences at all? Anyone who knows anything about this subject knows that short sentences are useless for rehabilitation. Why go on "dishing" them out? Why do we give magistrates the power to send men to prison at all if the maximum is six months? Why not give them the power to award suspended sentences so that if a man sins again he can really be dealt with? My Lords, I put forward these views very seriously because if we begin sensibly to empty the prisons now and really use the probation service and plan in society as a whole, we can convert most of our prisons into open prisons. With the 5 per cent. or 7 per cent., whatever it is, of the real thugs and desperadoes who need maximum security left in their private hell, we can really treat the rest in an enlightened way.

1059 Finally, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Derwent, will say something about this; I hope he will recommend what I regard as the most revolutionary and beneficent development in the world of prisons—I was going to say in my lifetime—in the last twenty years. This is the recent declaration by the Prison Officers' Association. I have more faith in that than I have in anything that will be said in this debate or in any promise from the Home Secretary or anything in this Report, if prison officers have now decided that their task is rehabilitation and if they have said—in my mind very rightly—that they are the people who are close to the prisoners and they are the people who should be the social workers and the rehabilitation officers. "Train us", they say, "if there is a shortage of social workers."

There is no real shortage of prison officers in the prisons—at least the shortage has been to some extent alleviated. There will be no shortage at all if you cease to have a position where 80 per cent. of the prison officers' time is taken in locking men in, in unlocking them, escorting them for their meals, telling them to stand up, or sit down, or shut up, all the time, as if they were turnkeys in the early 19th century. That is the way prison officers spend their time and they are sick of it. They realise they will become as institutionalised as the men, and they do not want it. They want to have things changed, and changed in a sensible way, as I believe do all noble Lords to-day.

My Lords, I make no apology for the fact that on this subject I speak with perhaps more heat than is customary in your Lordships' House, but if every day of the week you get, as I do, these problems brought to you and you worry about them and work at them and then some up against obstructions and apathy and no action, then when an opportunity like this arises, if you are going to speak at all you have to speak up and from the heart. I hope that this time we shall get a reply from the noble Lord which will indicate that something will be done.

§ VISCOUNT AMORY

My Lords, if your Lordships will not rule me out of order and instantly move "That the noble Lord be no longer heard," I should 1060 like to start by expressing my great pleasure, after a little over two years absence overseas, in finding myself once again able to participate in the deliberations of your Lordships' House. I am sure that many of your Lordships envy me the great privilege I have enjoyed of spending two very happy years in that great and exciting sister country of the Commonwealth, Canada, among the most friendly and hospitable people in the world. I can never hope to be able to repay the kindnesses I received during these two years.

While it is true that during my absence I have noted a slight tendency on the part of some Members of your Lordships' House to "break out", I can assure your Lordships that I was equally concerned to "effect a re-entry"; and, having done so, I hope to stage something like a sit-down strike for the rest of my life. I should like to say also, strange thought it may seem for an old politician like myself who has so recently obtained sudden release from the gentle restrictions and discretions imposed on a temporary civil servant, that I propose on this occasion to inflict on your Lordships a speech of no prolonged length.

First, I would say how sincerely I join in the gratitude that has already been expressed to the noble Baroness, Lady Swanborough, for giving us this opportunity of considering this important matter of the after-care of discharged offenders in the light of the recommendations of the recent Report of the Advisory Council. The noble Baroness has a wide knowledge and experience of these matters which all of us greatly respect and admire; and in no field, if I may venture to say so, have her services been of more outstanding value than in the leadership she has so unselfishly given over many years to that excellent movement, the Women's Voluntary Services. It was only a few days ago that I participated in the opening of a project in my own county which was yet one more example of the spontaneous voluntary service to the community which is so devotedly rendered by members of that splendid movement.

I would also associate myself with the tributes that have been paid to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Bristol. I 1061 find that the felicitations I keep in stock for a maiden speaker do not seem quite appropriate in this case. I usually say that the speaker must feel greatly encouraged by the success of his first venture into the field of oratory, and I express the hope that he will seek any further opportunities that come his way of developing his talents for exposition. As I suppose the right reverend Prelate has preached more sermons than all of us here, added together, have made speeches, this does not quite seem to fit. But certainly we greatly enjoyed his contribution.

I confess straight away that I have no special knowledge or experience in this field of social service. Therefore I have no comment of value to make on the technical or administrative aspects of the problems we are discussing. In fact I have ventured to intervene only because, as a citizen, I am sure that it is right that we should be giving urgent attention to this problem of the rehabilitation of offenders into the normal life of the community, and that it is very timely that some pretty bold action should be taken to develop further and make more effective the work that is being done in so many quarters.

When we consider the whole problem of the treatment of offenders, as laymen in these matters, we realise that there is practically no other aspect of our society about which we have less reason to rest on our oars or feel anything like complacency or satisfaction. Those who have caused damage and injustice and suffering to their fellows, and have broken the law, must be dealt with firmly and severely, when necessary. Softness by itself is no policy. Deterrence must always be an important consideration. And many offenders have inevitably to be segregated and punished. I rather agree, however, with what the noble Lord, Lord Stonham said: that we should take every care to see that people are not put inside and locked up unless that really is the appropriate punishment and treatment in their particular cases.

But, my Lords, though many offenders must be segregated and punished in this way, merely to segregate and shut up our fellow human beings cannot be accepted by any of us, I think, as an 1062 adequate or acceptable policy by itself. It simply cannot stop there. If it did, it would surely be a most despairing and I terrible commentary on the potentialities of our civilisation and the power of human beings to influence those of their fellows who have failed in their personal responsibilities for their good. It is sometimes felt, I know, that too much attention is concentrated on the welfare of the perpetrators of crime and too little on that of their victims. But the justification for making our after-care work as effective as we possibly can is that, while it does directly concern the welfare and provide help for the offender—and when he has expiated his crime it is very right that charity and help should then be extended to him—it goes much wider than that. To give this matter really proper attention is surely just enlightened self-interest on the part of the community which in any case has to receive these errant members back again into society. It must be true that very many of these people, on leaving prison, have a genuine desire to do better, and unless we treat after-care not only as a part of importance, but as perhaps the most important part of treatment, then we are leaving the whole conception of incarceration in prison in a very negative, unhappy and depressing condition.

My right honourable friend the Home Secretary said a day or two ago in another place that offenders emerging from prison needed somewhere to live, a job and a friend to whom they could turn. How very true that is! An offender must so often need positive help in finding these three things. In passing, may I say that I was glad to note that my right honourable friend said that progress is being made in providing in prisons opportunities for really useful constructive work, as an alternative to that old-fashioned mailbag sewing which was surely the most devastating of conceptions.

In considering what better arrangements we can make, I am sure that we are right in paying tribute to the devoted work that is being done by so many full-time people, and also to the tremendous amount of voluntary service, as well as to the prison staffs themselves. I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, refer to the statement made recently by the prison staffs: that is excellent news. Though, clearly, we need 1063 greatly increased numbers of trained workers in this field, it will surely always be true that here is a field where voluntary service has a tremendous part to play. I agree very much with what my noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood said in this respect. May I say to my noble friend that I thought how fortunate she was to be so impressively escorted into this debate, sandwiched between two Bishops, a right reverend Prelate, as it were, immediately preceding her, scattering rose petals before her as he went, and another right reverend Prelate following behind, as it were, carrying her train. I was interested, too, in the observations of the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Exeter—"my Bishop", if I may so call him, because I am a member of his flock: I nearly said one of his constituents, but he used to be one of mine.

I should also like to say a word about the probation service. Again, I know it only as a layman, looking at its work, from a distance, as it were; but I feel that it is doing wonderful and constructive work and has immense experience in this field. I am glad to know it is agreed that in any future arrangements the fullest use should be made of the experience of this service. As regards the particular pattern of the organisation recommended, I realise that my lack of knowledge makes me incompetent to express a useful opinion; and to try to do so would, I think, be rather an impertinence. My own admiration for the achievements and the humanity of the National Assistance Board leads me to see a good deal of force in the suggestion made by the noble Baroness who moved the Motion, that the advantages of such an organisation should be secured in some way. But I have no experience to enable me, at this stage, to judge as between one organisation and another. I know my right honourable friend the Home Secretary to be a man of the greatest courage and dedication, and, of all men, I think, the least likely to be deflected from what he believes is the best course by considerations of what may be easiest or least controversial. Therefore, in a matter of this kind I should attach much weight to his judgment.

But, my Lords, whatever the administrative pattern may be, I hope that the 1064 structure will be such as to give the fullest scope for the injection of that degree of inspiration, driving force and leadership which will be essential if aftercare, side by side with the probationary work, is to be given full opportunity of playing the positive and constructive part in the treatment of offenders that we all believe it can do. In giving scope to local knowledge and help—one sees the immense importance of that—we must, at the same time make sure that our objects are not defeated by any efforts that fall short of sustained and increasing momentum. My Lords, let us give our firm support to a great forward move now when we have the opportunity of doing so, and so make it our aim to try to see, so far as we can do so, that those 60,000 offenders who, I understand, emerge each year from our prisons have the best chance we can provide of becoming responsible law-abiding citizens and useful members again of the community.