Charles Walker calls for a brave approach to prison reform to cut high reoffending rates by tackling the low educational attainment, addiction rates and mental health problems experienced by a significant proportion of prisoners.

Mr. Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con): I am terrified to be following my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), as I want to speak about prison reform. I am aware that many people in prison fully deserve to be there because they have committed heinous crimes. I do not argue that prison does not work-it does, as people in prison are not on the street committing crimes-but too often we see the revolving door in action. We see people go to prison for a period of time, leave prison, and within a year 48 per cent. have reoffended and many of those people are back in prison. In the case of youngsters, as many as 75 per cent. reoffend within a year and end up back in prison.

That is not good value for the taxpayer. The prison population is a captive audience, and that means that we must do something with them. I know that some progress has been made in that direction, but a great deal more remains to be done. Some 50 per cent. of prisoners have literacy and numeracy rates that are lower than an 11-year-old's, and they are simply incapable of functioning in the real world. A survey found that half of all prisoners were not qualified to do 96 per cent. of the jobs available outside prison, in the community. So we really must do something with the people who are in prison: we need to work on them to make them better people and to allow them to become fulfilled people able to turn their backs on crime

When I came to Parliament, I was not a very moderate or relaxed person. I very much believed that people in prison fully deserved to be there, for as long and as often as possible, but 10 per cent. of our current prison population-a total of 8,000 people-formerly served in our armed forces. These are people who made significant sacrifices for this country, so why are they now in prison? How did we let them down so badly that they ended up there? Many more will follow unless we do something about the problem. We in this place know that many young men who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent history are now in prison. Somewhere, therefore, we are letting those brave young people down, and it is a scandal that 8,000 current prisoners used to be in our armed forces.

Furthermore, prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. We closed down the asylums 30 years ago and moved many of the people into prisons. Some 40 or 50 per cent. of prisoners have undiagnosed mental health problems. I am not saying that people with mental health problems cannot do bad things. Of course they can. However, I am saying that mental health problems can be a significant contributory factor to people making the wrong choices in life, and consistently making the wrong choices in life.

Prison will not be a deterrent to an undiagnosed or untreated schizophrenic, so when we have people in prison who are ill, let us do something to help them. Let us do something to make them better. Every year that they spend in prison costs taxpayers £40,000. As my hon. Friend pointed out, if we let prisoners out unreformed and untreated, they do a lot more damage in society for the period that they are out of prison, then they go back to prison time and again and cost us a further £40,000 each time. This is not good enough.

My hon. Friend also pointed out that many prisoners suffer from drug addiction problems, and we know that drug addiction leads people to commit serious criminal offences. The scandal is that more people come out of prison as drug addicts than go in, so we need treatment programmes in prison to ensure that we clean these people up and get them to a position where they can go back into society, hold down a responsible job and start giving back to the community, as opposed to taking away from the community. That is why it is so important that when people are in prison, we do something with them on the educational and training front. We must give them the skills that they require to go and compete in the jobs market.

I am all in favour of building more prisons in the short to medium term, because unless we relieve prison overcrowding, we will not be able to address the underlying causes of reoffending. When prisons are overcrowded, it becomes purely a management issue for prison officers and the governors, as opposed to a rehabilitation issue. So let us, in the short to medium term, build more prisons so that we can start to have the space in the criminal justice system to rehabilitate people back into society, instead of sending out better criminals. Indeed, it is debatable whether we are sending out better criminals. To get into prison in the first place, they have to be caught, so they are not learning their skills from particularly bright operators.

It is important, going ahead, that as we clean up our communities and make society a safer place, we start to address seriously the revolving door of prison. Let us be sure that when people go to prison for a significant period, we use that time to make that prisoner a better person. Certainly, punish them. Having their liberty removed is a punishment. For many of these people, going to drug treatment classes-

David Taylor: The hon. Gentleman will have heard the comments from the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies). If prisoners are showing evidence that they are benefiting from rehabilitation and their behaviour is improving, does he believe that the concept of remission of sentence should be retained in the Prison Service? His colleague seemed to suggest that it should be abandoned.

Mr. Walker: I am not here to fall out with any colleague. Parole for good behaviour is positive. If people go to prison for five years and are then told that they will serve six years unless they demonstrate good behaviour, the switch is to a negative approach to managing prisoners. We need a rewards-based system, and good behaviour should result in early release-not obscenely early release, but certainly early release. I am not arguing for a softer approach to prisoners. I believe that we should be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Right now we are not being tough on the causes of crime because we are not addressing low educational attainment, addiction rates or mental health problems.

I know that time is short, so I shall conclude. We have to be brave in promoting prison reform. There are not a lot of votes in it for any of us, but it is the right thing to do, because we want to make the communities that we represent safer places. When we keep turning back out into these communities criminals who are unreformed, who remain violent, who remain ill, who remain addicted, they are just as dangerous or even more dangerous than before we sent them to prison. So I hope all Members will approach prison reform with open-mindedness and courage. If we get it right in the long term, there will be a consequential saving to taxpayers, and our communities will be safer places in which to live.

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