Douglas Hurd

Politics have fascinated me since the General Election of 1935. My duties then were comparatively simple. I sat my two younger brothers, aged 5, 3 and 2, in the front row of the village hall in Wiltshire wearing bright blue coats, in order to put off the Liberal candidate, who was addressing the meeting. We were successful; his opponent my grandfather was re-elected. Politics have always fascinated me because my grandfather and my father were back bench members of Parliament and I grew up in that atmosphere. It was an atmosphere based on a tradition, which is now difficult to maintain, against the cynicism which besets most people’s perception of politics and against the present narrowing of the political class. This is not a matter of party, as it applies in both parties.

Old Labour included people who had driven trains, or been down a coal mine, or taught a class. The Old Tories included people who had been farmers, like my father, or Brigadiers, or industrialists who ran a company. All of whom had practical experience of the world outside politics, and in some cases kept that experience going with outside interests. Nowadays, more and more, we are governed by a people who have never been anything except politicians all their lives and never will be. This is going to be difficult to reverse, but it makes it difficult to maintain the tradition in which I was brought up, a tradition of service based on experience from outside, which saw politics, not wholly - I don’t want to be sanctimonious about this - but saw politics at least partly as a form of service, as well as a competition for power. I have competed for power and I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t exaggerate the extent of service which I, or indeed other politicians, have given.

Some politicians will go on trying to keep alive and active that idea of politics as a form of service. For my part, it springs from a central Anglican tradition which is broad church; which is deeply old-fashioned; which is rather rural, rustic even. It’s the village church, the Prayer Book, Easter, Christmas and Harvest Festival, not destroyed but banished to corners of England like the Oxfordshire village in which I live. This tradition in politics, like many traditions in which many of us have been brought up; like the tradition of business in which Walter Moore was brought up, feeds through into an emphasis on voluntary activity, doing things which we are neither forced to do by law, nor paid to do by anybody else. This crucial part of the life of our country is not confined to one party.

Parties play with and re-define it and claim it and re-claim it. It is familiar at the moment in the Prime Minister’s speeches; I make no complaint about that. However, if you read, as I have just been doing, Ted Heath’s memoirs, you see, in the One Nation group formed in the Tory party in the 1950s, exactly the same concept. The names are different but the concept is the same. Ten years ago now - at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s power, when I was Home Secretary, I felt and people around me felt, that the time had come to stress an aspect of the Conservative tradition, which was different from the one on which the Prime Minister was laying emphasis. So I began to make speeches about "the active citizen". We took advantage of the 200th anniversary of Robert Peel’s birth, at Tamworth down the road in this county, where he had set out in 1834 the start of modern Conservatism, and we tried to set up the doctrine of the active citizen.

Many of us have been in this business of labelling and re-labelling the concept of voluntary service. I now find this process irritating - politicians labelling and re-labelling, capturing and re-capturing something which anybody with any sense knows that, regardless of government or regardless of the results of a General Election, is the essence of English society - the concept that people go out and do things which they are not forced to do and which they are not paid to do. The more intricate our society grows, the more extensive the expectations, the more complicated the difficulties - HIV and drugs are classic examples of this - the more important this aspect becomes. Neither commercial enterprise nor the processes of legislation and bureaucracy are going to catch and meet these needs as they become more complex and more difficult. I take the labels of the moment - "inclusion" and "exclusion". In the Criminal Justice System, the ultimate exclusion was capital punishment.

That form of exclusion is now fortunately removed from this country. The next form of exclusion is prison; the enthusiasts for prison believe in it as exclusion. They want to exclude people by putting them into a waste-paper basket. People in this waste-paper basket can’t burgle or rob or murder. They are punished and incapacitated, and that is the fundamental feeling which encourages the enthusiasm for imprisonment. A symbol of this exclusion is the fact that convicted prisoners don’t have the vote. I don’t quite understand the logic of that but it’s well embedded in our system. We have actually said to convicted prisoners: "You are outside; you are excluded; you are not part of our society".

There is a paradox here, which anybody concerned with prisons knows: when you lock a man up, you are imprisoning him but you are also releasing him. You are releasing him from his responsibilities as a citizen. You are releasing him to a large extent from his responsibilities to his family, his wife, his children, his neighbours, his village, his town. You’re taking care of all that, or you’re pretending to take care of all that, because you’re preventing him from carrying on this responsibility. He may have made a total hash of it, but you’re excluding him, not just from the freedoms and pleasures of life, but also from the responsibilities of citizenship. You are therefore leaving a gap; a gap which he may have filled imperfectly, but a gap in a family, in a house, in a street. You are also forgetting something; they come back - 99% are released and therefore your exclusion hasn’t worked. They are back, included again, and may, depending on what’s happened while they are prison, be re-included in a form which is more harmful to society than before they were originally convicted.

This leads to the reason why, when Jon Snow asked me to take over from him as Chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, after sleeping on it, I accepted. Of my time as Home Secretary, of the many vivid experiences I have of that job, prisons remain most vivid in my memory. The aims of The Prison Reform Trust complement what many of you and Adullam Homes attempt to achieve. The Prison Reform Trust has two main aims. One is to explore and promote alternative methods of punishment to custody. I am a Tory; if we are trying to carry public opinion with us in this argument we should not shy away from the notion of punishment. One of the difficulties I used to have with the Probation Service, or more particularly with NAPO their organised union, was that they were at that time, 10 or 12 years ago, shying away from the concept that they as Probation Officers should have anything to do with punishment. We are talking about punishment, but we’re not saying that the only effective form of punishment is one which is served behind bars. These debates go in circles. I am glad to see that the select committee of the House of Commons has recently published a report on alternatives to custody which is extremely sensible. What is important to me is that it was unanimous.

The Conservative members of the committee voted for the report. This report brings to an end, I hope, a period during which the two parties vied with each other in an unintelligent way, arguing who was tougher or softer on crime. This authoritative document impels the Government down the path which I hope the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, wants to follow, of studying and carrying forward all the different alternatives to imprisonment. Technology helps. We started with tagging when I was Home Secretary, but that technology didn’t work; the machines broke; it became ludicrous and it was abandoned. Now the machines work and Jack Straw is depending on Home Detention Curfew quite substantially for his future plans for keeping the prison population within reasonable limits. We will see the early release of prisoners after a calculation of risk i.e. only those who it is thought would not be a risk to the public - early release of prisoners on the condition that they accept a tagging order with some form of curfew or some form of restraint on what they do or where they go.

Even before that comes into play, the worst fear which we had 6 months ago about the overcrowding of prisons has begun to diminish. The prison figures for September are down. Although I believe the prison service expect them to rise again, they are not as overwhelming as they were when we had to handle them 10 years ago, or as many people, including myself, feared they would be by now. That leads to the second concern which we have in the Prison Reform Trust. This is with regimes; what happens inside a prison. Most prisoners have failed or been failed by the education system. I went to Feltham, the big Young Offenders Institution near Heathrow, to the south of London. Of the young men there, 70% had roamed the streets. They had either played truant or been excluded from their school and yet the Local Education Authorities, who in one way or another had failed, pay no contribution to the education of these young people when they are in prison. Jack Straw, Home Secretary, came and gave our annual Prison Reform Trust lecture in London in July.

He said that 60% of prisoners were at Level 1 or below Level 1 for literacy and 75% were at or below Level 1 for numeracy. This is Home Office speak for saying that most prisoners cannot read or count properly. That means that they are ineligible for 96 out of every 100 jobs that are going. Those are stark figures. They tell a good deal about the chances of those young people going straight or being able to go straight when they are released from prison. That is why education, perhaps even more than work - though work is crucially important too - should not be the Cinderella, the bottom, the last priority when a prison governor decides how to spend the prison budget allocated to him by the Home Office. There is some interesting research in Canada, which I haven’t seen referred to here; this is the sort of thing that we in the PRT exist to draw attention to. The Correctional Service of Canada runs two main basic education programmes. Those who enrol in the programmes are high risk prisoners, slightly younger than the prison population as a whole and more likely to be serving a sentence for violent crime. As in the UK, most of them have a very poor school background. The Canadians have found that their programmes are successful in improving reading skills and those who complete their programme experience modest but significant reductions in their rate of re-offending. Depending on the programme and the comparator, the chance of a released prisoner returning to prison is reduced by between 5% and 30%.

That is the cautious language in which researchers present their results. They show that it must be right to press that regimes in prisons should be improved, even when money is short. To do him justice, the Home Secretary has responded to this. In the same lecture I referred to, he talked about the resources which he is releasing for regimes. Security is not just a matter of prison officers and barbed wire. The security of the public depends to a large extent on how far during this period in prison those concerned with the prisoner’s life can remedy his shortcomings. Last time I spoke about prisons, someone wrote to me afterwards and asked why I had said nothing about drugs, and they were quite right. You can’t go to a modern prison without realising how important drugs are in one way or another. It struck me most forcefully in Holloway. Many women in Holloway are for some time on remand before trial, and maybe they then get a short sentence afterwards. They come out of chaos, out of a life where there are no rules, no relationships which are stable, where drugs to a large extent reign supreme. Drugs are the great interest, the great pleasure, the great source of excitement and interest in life. Then the woman arrives in Holloway. For a short time, maybe weeks or a few months, she is told she can’t have drugs. This is the agony of detoxification - a particularly miserable business. Then there is a possibility of going on to something better than detoxification - actual rehabilitation.

But then she is released back to the chaos of the world outside. She goes back to the same lack of rules and relationships which she had before. No-one can argue that she should spend longer in prison. There is an overwhelming argument, however, for what doesn’t effectively exist now in most of our big cities, which is throughcare. This means taking what has been discovered or started in prison and enabling the agencies outside prison to carry that through. There shouldn’t be a gap of more than a day or two before someone, who may have perceived, albeit imperfectly, that there is something else to life and that they have been missing something, is enabled to carry that perception forward into their lives outside prison. These possibilities depend on housing and on jobs. That is why the work of Adullam Homes Housing Association is crucial.

There are many people, including Adullam Homes, NACRO and others, who specialise in this. You depend for your success to a large extent on the public attitude toward people who have come out of prison. So we come back to public attitudes to imprisonment, to the philosophy of the waste-paper basket. I went to Maidstone last week at the request of Anne Widdecombe, who is the local Member of Parliament and was Minister for Prisons in the last Government. She asked me, to my pleasure, to go to the main shopping centre in Maidstone. Here, there was a sale , not on a huge scale, but the eleven prisons of Kent had come together and taken the initiative, and were selling the work of prisoners in the middle of the shopping centre. There were prisoners selling, along with prison officers. It was interesting to watch the reactions of the shoppers. First there was surprise and concern that the prisoners might escape. Then that passed, and it was seen that here were good creative things being done. The prison officers and the prisoners, as anybody who visits a prison knows can happen, were working together to create a good impression on the public. The sale raised £800, not a great sum; half went to Victim Support. In that small way, in an initiative in the county town of Kent, something was being done to change the popular attitude towards prisoners. This is a crucial part of what you and we have to be about.

The moment we begin to talk in this way, we become accused of being soft with prisoners about their victims. I’ve never seen the logic of that. The victims of a crime are not in any way helped if we make a hash of dealing with the offender. This would make it more likely that the offender will re-offend; that conveys no satisfaction, except perhaps something very fleeting and unthoughtful, to the victim. We have to put that aside and be bold and persistent in what we say and do. We are working together, as active citizens in the front line of our society.

‘Society’s responsibility for the irresponsible individual’

Friday 23 October 1998