"Crime - A Challenge To Us All"

Brendan O'Friel

22 September 1995

Introduction

I am very grateful to Peter Wildman and his colleagues for inviting me to give this the first Walter Moore Memorial lecture. This is an unusual and exciting opportunity for me. Prison Governors spend an increasing amount of time talking to local groups and the local media about the work of their establishments and the work of the Prison Service. Occasionally, as I know to my cost, we find ourselves in the national media spotlight because of some disaster that has befallen one of our establishments. But rarely do we get an opportunity to deliver a public lecture to a distinguished audience.

I should explain that I will be speaking this evening as Chairman of the Prison Governors Association. The Association, an independent Trade Union represents the great majority of the middle and senior management of the operational Prison Service in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I will, however, while drawing on some of the Association's policy be speaking very much in a personal capacity.

While I did not have the good fortune to meet Walter Moore, I have been able to learn something about him from those of you who knew and worked with him. I have been able to obtain a flavour of his thinking from his book 'Set Me Free'. I was very forcibly struck by Walter Moore's personal experience of hardship, poverty and unemployment. He was clearly a man who knew the problems of deprived people from his own personal experience.

The Importance of Crime

I am sure that Walter Moore would approve of my choice of title and my choice of subject. He himself accepted the challenge that crime presents. He set out to do something positive about offenders.

So I put before you this evening my thoughts on 'Crime: a challenge to us all'.

I make no apology for putting forward my belief that dealing with crime should be among the leading issues on our national agenda. Crime is not an academic issue. We all have views and opinions. So I want to start by asking how we should react to the problem of crime.

Public interest in crime is often fanned by headlines in the media proclaiming the growth of crime, particularly violent crime. We may also see headlines soon proclaiming a reduction in crime. There is, of course, plenty of evidence of rising crime but we must all recognise that this is an extremely complex subject. The headlines reflect reported and recorded crime. At least part of the changes in the volume of crime is about reporting and recording. Similarly comparisons between present crime rates and past crime rates must be treated with considerable caution. The historians among you will know that there have been periods of lawlessness and riots in our Country's history which makes the worst of recent public order problems look relatively minor.

How then should we react to crime and to people who commit crime?

First, a cautionary note. Beware the simple solution that is advanced by those who believe they have the answer to the crime problem. Reacting to crime and criminals requires careful thought and a recognition that this is a complex issue. You will find that part of what I hope to do this evening is to raise important questions - but do not expect me to provide all the answers.

Some Principles

I suggest that there are some important principles that can guide us through this difficult subject.

First, is our vision of each person as a unique individual. All the great faiths especially the Christian faith emphasise the uniqueness of the individual created in Gods image which gives each and every person an immense dignity. We need to work through in our own minds the implication of that dignity when we are facing those involved with crime -the victims of crime and those who have committed crime.

Let us pause for a moment and think about the victims of crime. The is a growing awareness of the needs of the victim but much remains to be done. I would suggest Christians have a special responsibility towards victims. How often have we heard the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan? We have perhaps not sufficiently emphasised the fact that the Good Samaritan rescued a victim of crime. If we are to follow the example of the Good Samaritan it means that the victims of crime must be given our special attention. We must ask ourselves whether we as individuals and whether our society does enough to support those who have suffered the trauma of being victims of crime.

Another principle that I am sure many present this evening will accept, is the Christian belief that each person has a freedom of choice. It follows that holding those who commit crime accountable for their offences is part of the process of treating people with dignity. It is part of the respect that we owe each individual. Other things being equal we presume that each individual is responsible for his or her actions. This is right and proper.

But a third principle that Christians and many others would also accept is that because we expect a person to accept responsibility for their wrong doing it does not follow that each person necessarily bears full! responsibility nor that the individual bears the responsibility alone. Let me tell you two stories to illustrate this question of responsibility. The first is about the visit of the Bishop of Exeter to Dartmoor Prison for a Service of Confirmation. He asked the prison Governor whether mental deficiencies had brought most of the men into prison. 'No' said the Governor 'But think of what you yourself would have been if your father, your mother or both and most of your brothers and sisters had been thieves' the Bishop reflected for a moment and said 'You think that I too would have been a thief - well perhaps you are right'. Like the Bishop we might perhaps reflect on where we might be tonight if most of our family were criminals.

Here is the second story. This time it is of a crime committed in London earlier this century. Picture the scene, a lad of 18 out of work for many weeks sits on a kitchen table swinging his legs, while his young wife sits on a chair with her 3 month old child upon her knee. There is a loaf of bread and a knife on the table, a few blankets in the corner and that is all the home that they have. The lad tells her he has failed again to find work that day and has returned without a penny. She accuses him of idleness, words grow bitter for they are sore, hungry and without hope. Finally she says that if she went out she knows a way to bring back more money than he did; the lad is maddened and draws the bread knife across her throat.

That youngster was found guilty of murder and served a long sentence at Dartmoor. He was held responsible for killing his wife. But was he alone responsible? Should any of the responsibility be placed on society, on politicians, on employers?

Responsibility for Crime

Let me turn from those stories to the general point about whether those convicted of crime should bear the responsibility alone. The world we live in is not a perfect place. We all contribute to it's imperfections. I am especially concerned by the immense emphasis in our present society on material success and on the importance of material possessions. The influence of the advertising industry and of the media generally measuring success almost entirely in terms of material possessions places a very heavy burden on inadequate, ill-educated youngsters trying to find someway to assert themselves as individuals. I stress that I seek not to excuse the crimes offenders commit. I simply want to ensure that we understand the pressures that we in our society put upon our young people. Let me put it another way. Do our society structures and organisations reinforcing as they do the considerable material prosperity many of us enjoy present too great a temptation to many of our disadvantaged youth? I say youth because recorded crime is largely committed by young people, usually male and often from the deprived areas of our great cities. This is the group we need to be concerned about, Are we sufficiently concerned?

A further example of this issue of wider responsibilities would be the connection between excessive alcohol consumption and crime. The connection is well known, well researched, well documented. The young frequently succumb to it. Yet we consistently place before the young encouragement through advertising to drink alcohol and the opportunity to easily obtain alcohol through the way we sell the product. Are we contributing to the youngsters offending behaviour by our social and economic structures? If so what do we do about it?

Before I try and answer the question of what we do about it I want to turn to the question of the penalties we use against crime, particularly the use of imprisonment.

THE PLACE OF IMPRISONMENT IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME

There is a regrettable tendency at the present time to see an extended use of imprisonment as the principal answer to our crime problems. Prison works. This evening I want to challenge that assumption and put before you some of the realities which those of us working in the Prison Service are faced with. If we do not understand the realities of imprisonment, we as a society will not make the best use of it.

Overcrowding

First, let me say a word or two about prison overcrowding. I start with overcrowding because since World War 2 the Prison Service has been derailed by this problem. In one way or another it has dominated the lives of all of us caught up in the penal system for 50 years. At the height of the overcrowding crises between 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners were compelled to share cells and even today substantial numbers cannot be given a cell on their own.

I hope that most of you are aware of the more obvious objections to overcrowding. Being locked in a cell with strangers and sometimes without sanitation is disagreeable enough. Let us hear from a prisoner what overcrowding is like. This prisoner wrote to Lord Justice Woolf about the conditions he endured in one of our Victorian prisons in 1990 and his letters along with many others was published in the Woolf Report. This is what he said

'When I discovered that 3 men had to share a cell of only 8 x 12 feet, or thereabouts, I was astounded. A remand prisoner has no work, therefore, he has to stay in a cell with 2 other men who he probably hates the sight of for 24 hours a day. Many cells have only one chair or 2 chairs or may be no tables so the inmates are forced to eat sitting on the bed. Try sitting on the lower bed of a double bunk and eating a meal. You too would become frustrated and angry. Meal-time over you have to lie on the bed. Just for a change you could may be sit on the bed. If he walks up and down the floor he is told to sit down or be put down. He has a head full of worries and problems about the forthcoming court case. One of the other inmates has a radio on full blast, driving him crazy. He needs to use the toilet but the staff won't let him and he dare not use the bucket or he gets beaten by the others. Wouldn't anyone get depressed?'

Now it is time that in 1995 physical conditions are improving, but the fact remains we still have significant numbers of prisoners compelled to share cells and we have not yet got toilets in all the cells in the prison system.

But let me tell you of another more sinister danger of prison overcrowding. Even if physical conditions are greatly improved herding large numbers of prisoners together whose common bond is criminal behaviour is potentially a recipe for disaster. Let me quote to you the experiences and views of a prisoner called Austin in an address he gave to a conference of Prison Visitors which was held at Risley Prison in the Autumn of 1991. This is what Austin said

'Given the low self-esteem and under-achievement commonly found in prisoners, imprisonment interferes with a human personality to adverse affect. It does this by reinforcing the prisoners criminal inclinations by introducing him to like minded people, the bad apple analogy applies. It reinforces the prisoners resentment and hostility towards anyone who attempts to discipline him and it relieves him of all responsibilities for his own existence. In the process it makes him lazy minded and feckless. The prison environment exposes each individual prisoner to a high degree of criminal influences. We prisoners have a common interest and share a common identity. We are criminals and we talk about crime in the way you might talk about your work quite openly without embarrassment'.

Austin is now discharged from prison and I hope he will not re-offend. The fact that he prepared that lecture (which took him the best part of 3 months) and delivered it in public for the first time in someway goes against the total negativity of prison that he portrays. Nonetheless I feel that what he says is an authentic view of an articulate individual of what he had experienced in prison over a number of years.

The conclusions I want to draw out of Austin's comments is this. There are serious dangers of prisoners deteriorating in prison through the influence of other prisoners. So we cannot just lock people up. We have to provide an active and positive regime to counteract contamination. Running positive regimes in prisons is not an optional activity for management. It is an absolute necessity if we are not to allow prisoners to degenerate in the way that Austin has so graphically described. Now let us go back to overcrowding. I have to tell you from personal experience that prison overcrowding destroys positive regimes. In an overcrowded prison staff and management time is devoted to basic survival. There is little time or resource to create positive regimes. Conditions deteriorate and in that climate, negative criminal sub-cultures start to dominate. We face then the real prospect that prisoners will leave prison worse than when they were sent to prison.

If we send more people to prison than the Prison Service can cope with we will fulfil a recent Home Secretary's prediction that prison is a very expensive way of making bad people worse.

IS PRISON A PUNISHMENT?

Let me turn next to the question of whether prison today is a real punishment. The popular media, highlighting some of the improved facilities that we are gradually providing in some of our prisons, criticises establishments as providing luxurious conditions for prisoners. A recent example would be criticism of the Prison Service for providing all-weather sports pitches inside prisons. If the Prison Service is to provide positive activity for prisoners we have to have facilities for positive activity. But let us be clear on this. Providing decent facilities for positive activity does not remove the punishment of imprisonment. The punishment is the deprivation of liberty. For most prisoners the deprivation of liberty causes considerable pain. The worst suffering is created by the separation of prisoners from the people who are important in their lives. To illustrate this let me give you the experience of a woman prisoner, this is taken from a talk that she gave at Risley in 1994 reflecting on her experience of imprisonment. She says

'Among women prisoners and particularly those who are mothers thoughts of our children and families seldom leave our minds. We worry about our children particularly - are they alright? Are they being well looked after? Will they forget us? Will they forgive us for leaving them? But prisoners families is about more than children, important though they are. It is also about husbands and wives, about mothers and fathers and grandparents, some of whom may be elderly and have very genuine fears that they may not live to see their son or daughter released'.

In clarifying the purpose of imprisonment in your minds, you may find the following helpful.

Alexander Paterson, the great Prison Commissioner of the 1920s and 30s expressed the purpose of imprisonment this way. A person is sent to prison as a punishment not for punishment. The punishment is the deprivation of liberty - that is a substantial and painful punishment for prisoners.

The Task of the Prison Service

So what then is the task of the Prison Service?

The task of the Prison Service is first to ensure that we keep prisoners in custody for the period laid down by the courts and secondly to ensure that the positive and active regimes we run in our prisons make as great a contribution as possible to the prisoners not returning to custody. Alexander Paterson laid down that the acid test of a prison administration is the proportion of prisoners who having served a first sentence of imprisonment, return for a second term. It is the record of many receptions into prison, but few returns that is the sign of a good prison administration.

If the Prison Service was less preoccupied with the appearance of punishing prisoners and put far more energy and effort into preventing re-offending in my view that would be of much greater benefit to the public. Most of our prisoners are released from prison. Only a handful will stay in prison until they die. My interest, your interest and the interest of our fellow citizens is that those prisoners avoid further crime when they return into the Community.

A little earlier, I explained the importance of positive regimes to combat the dangers of contamination. In order to combat contamination and achieve this protection for the public the Prison Service needs to be able to concentrate it's efforts in at least 3 areas. First, we need to give prisoners every opportunity to achieve by improving their skill and ability to acquire and hold work on discharge. Prisoners also need opportunities to develop a capacity to use non work time in a constructive, none criminal way. Second, we need to provide a full range of programmes for addressing prisoners offending behaviour. Offenders have a wide range of problems. Programmes have been developed in recent years that specifically address many types of offences. Our third priority should be to give prisoners opportunities for reparation, for putting something back into the Community. Very many prisoners welcome such opportunities. That is good for the Community, it is good for the individuals and it reinforces positively the link between the penal institution and the Community from which the offenders come.

To give you some practical examples of how those programmes can benefit us all, let me say a little about what we are seeking to achieve at my present establishment HM Prison Risley. First - encouraging achievement. We have developed at Risley an extremely good education programme giving many prisoners the opportunity to improve their education. Improving education ranges from encouraging those lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills right through to those taking open university degrees. I have been immensely impressed by the determination with which many prisoners decide to make good use of their time in custody, by acquiring new qualifications and new skills. We support our education programme with a widely based programme of skill training, mostly leading to NVQ qualifications in such practical subjects as Information Technology and Desk Top Publishing, Industrial Cleaning, Hairdressing, Painting & Decorating and Store-Keeping.

But academic and skill achievement on it's own would still leave the public vulnerable to re-offending. So we also run a wide range of programmes to address offending behaviour. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has singled out the sex offender treatment programme at Risley as being among the best in the Country. I have been immensely impressed too with the programmes we have developed on anger management - that is basically teaching prisoners how to control their temper and on the programmes to help those with alcohol and drugs problems. Finally we have not neglected the need for our prisoners to have opportunities to put something back into the Community. Our prisoners are involved in a very wide range of charitable work, including a small number of selected prisoners close to their release date who work out of the prison on local Community projects usually renovating and maintaining Community facilities. But many others contribute in small and large ways to a wide range of charity projects this includes making goods for sale in the Prison Charity Shop at York. I want to extend these programmes because I am convinced that the opportunity to put something back into the Community is very much welcomed by prisoners and significantly improves the chances of their successful re-integration into society on release.

However, if the Prison Service is to be allowed to discharge it's duty in the way I have outlined we need to get away from the present mis-use of imprisonment. Slogans like 'prison works' send the wrong signals. Prison should only be used when all other options have failed and the use of imprisonment needs to be kept to a minimum. Let me remind you that this is currently not the case. Prison is frequently used when other options have not been tried. There are many examples of the mis-use of imprisonment and there are 2 I would like especially to draw to your attention this evening.

First, the mentally ill. We still have committed to our care prisoners who are properly the responsibility of the National Health Service. I am sure most people here will welcome the moves to close the old Victorian mental institutions. But there are signs that those moves may have gone rather too far too quickly. A number of people who would previously have been dealt with as National Health Service patients are now ending up in penal institutions. This is quite wrong and the Health Service should have sufficient secure places to cope with mentally ill offenders.

Alternatively, if the Government wish the Prison Service to deal with a proportion of mentally ill offenders, we need the resources both of buildings and trained staff to be able to deal with this group properly. Mixing them with ordinary offenders in overcrowded prisons makes the Prison Services' job even more difficult.

Secondly, let me highlight the use of imprisonment for fine defaulters. I have been appalled over the last couple of years by the number of women fine defaulters coming into custody for a range of non-payments. I have been especially concerned to see women coming into custody for non-payment of their television licence fee and other non criminal debts. It is a serious reflection on our society that at the end of the twentieth century we have no other means of collecting fines and debts. It appears to me a gross mis-use of expensive penal establishments by locking up these fine defaulters. They are often very unsophisticated individuals. Mixing fine defaulters with much more criminally sophisticated people carries with it all the dangers of contamination I have warned about earlier.

These 2 examples will illustrate that there are people in prison who should not be in custody. A concerted effort by the Government to reduce the prison population is what we now require. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. Since 1992 we have seen the prison population climb from a low of around 40,000 to over 50,000. In August 1995 the population reached 51,800 a new all time record. The projections are that the population will exceed 53,000 in the next year or so.

If the predictions are correct much of the Prison Service's efforts and energies will be diverted away from positive activities to simply coping with additional prisoners with insufficient accommodation. If that happens it will be a sad day for the Prison Service and it will be of no benefit to the wider Community that we try and serve.

The future could be very bleak indeed. The United States is currently locking it citizens up at about 4 times the rate we are in the UK. There is no evidence that this use of imprisonment has made the United States a safer society. They are spending far more on prisons than we are with no clear benefit. We need an informed and thoughtful public opinion in this Country is we are not to follow the pattern of the USA.

SOME POSITIVE PROPOSALS

So far this evening I have sketched out some principles in approaching the challenge of crime and the problem and limitations of the Prison Service in dealing with offenders. I must emphasise that the Prison Service has a limited role in tackling crime and that prison should be used only when essential. Remember the dangers of contamination through an excessive use of imprisonment. It follows that we must look to a wide range of other penalties and other methods for dealing with our crime problems. So I turn next to some suggestions as to how we might tackle the crime problem.

The Need for Moral Ethical and Religious Motivation

But before setting out some positive proposals I would like to refer to the importance of underlying principle and motivation . Walter Moore would have begun by reminding us of the importance of the great Christian virtue of love of our neighbour. Because of the multi-cultural society in which we live I would like to widen that to draw in the ethical and moral principles of the other great religions and of the virtues of all people of goodwill. In tackling the challenge of crime we need as a Community to recognise the importance of the moral ethical and religious principles on which we act. The broad principles of behaviour are not in dispute. Tackling the challenge of crime requires great effort, considerable sacrifice and determination. Meeting the challenge may make considerable demands on our society. It may require us all to reorder our priorities. Let met explain my reasons for saying this.

The Preferential Option for the Poor

Several years ago I came across a very striking article about the preferential option for the poor, some of which I would like to share with you. My background is Roman Catholic and for 10 years I was educated by the Jesuit Fathers. The article I came across was written by Michael Campbell Johnson provincial of the Jesuit Fathers in England. It was a very challenging article. In the article the preferential option for the poor was set out. The preferential option for the poor is a challenge to all of us to choose to disentangle ourselves from serving the interests of those at the top of society and to begin instead to come into solidarity with those at or near the bottom. Such solidarity means commitment to working and living within structures and agencies that promote the interests of less favoured sections of society.

Michael Campbell Johnson gives 3 principles for action. These are

The need of the poor take priority over the needs of the rich.

The freedom of the weak take priority over the liberty of the powerful.

The participation of marginalised groups in society takes priority over the preservation of an order that excludes them.

Finally, Michael Campbell Johnson says that the most important point he wishes to make is this "the preferential option for the poor is not something just to be read about, studied academically, understood in the mind. It has to be lived and experienced. It calls for a genuine conversion or change of attitude."

Now you are all asking yourselves: what has this got to do with crime? One of the difficult features about the people I deal with and the people that Walter Moore dealt with is that very many of them came from the marginalised, deprived, underclass of our society. We have, in my view to ask ourselves fundamental questions about whether our society is just and if not what we do about it. This is another of those questions that I can only ask and hope you will ponder over in the next few days or months.

Positive Activity

That said by way of background, let me turn to specific proposals for tackling crime. Let me start with the much wider need for positive activity.

I have argued strongly for the need for positive activity inside prisons. The same principle applies to offenders and potential offenders in the Community. Many offences are committed by bored young people with nothing to do. I believe there is great deal more that could be done to provide positive activity. The potential benefits are great. There are ways in which costs can be kept moderate. In any event the costs of providing positive activity must be balanced against the benefits.

As an example of the need for positive activity let me single out a group of young people who are particularly at risk. I refer to those who for one reason or another are excluded from school. I find it surprising - extremely surprising - that for many young people excluded from school there is often a lengthy period before the authorities find alternative education provision. Many of those excluded from school are by definition going through a difficult period. To leave them without structured activity puts them gravely at risk. There are not huge numbers of youngsters excluded from school but I suspect that quite a high proportion of them are currently involved in or on the fringe of criminal activities, albeit mainly minor ones. But they are particularly at risk of getting sucked into the criminal sub-culture that will ultimately lead them to becoming hardened criminals.

Why are we allowing this to happen? What are we doing about this?

The same argument applies on a much wider scale to a general need for positive activity, particularly for young people, during school holidays. It also applies to those young people who have left school and are quite unable to find work.

So how might we fund and provide positive activity? Is there anyway that we can reorder our priorities to put some more resource in the direction of these vulnerable young people? Can we persuade Government, Industry and Commerce that they have a responsibility here? After all, much crime results in additional expense for us all. Crime prevention can save future expenditure. Here are a few suggestions. Could funding for positive activity come from those who produce and sell goods that we know are particularly dangerous, such as alcohol? Could we persuade those companies particularly affected by crime to co-operate to provide some resource to tackle this problem? Could those companies whose business profits are derived from dealing with crime to make a special contribution. Above all could we see some real leadership in this matter?

I would like to see our captains of industry and commerce taking a far greater interest in this crucial issue. We have all heard of the huge increases in pay awarded to some of the captains of industry. Could we not challenge those Leaders to divert a proportion of these very large increases in pay into providing employment or training or occupation or activity for some of our dis-advantaged young people? Can we not develop some competition between the Chairman of British Gas and the Chairmen of the privatised water companies as to how many dis-advantaged youngster each one could take on? It is that sort of leadership that we desperately need, a readiness to make sacrifices in a good cause. It is a readiness to take up the cause of wider social problems as many business leaders have done in the past. Walter Moore, who we remember today set a splendid example.

Nor should the Public Sector be excused from making a contribution. I understand that in France in one particularly difficult Summer the military were called in not to shoot rioters but to provide positive activity for young people. I am sure our own military could provide some resource for the same purpose during summer holidays for disadvantaged youngsters. Other public services might be able to help too - the Fire Service, the Police and the Prison Service. Even Education could help at least by making buildings and sports facilities available. I am sure too that we could attract some volunteers to such an enterprise.

But we cannot go on leaving bored youngsters hanging around our streets and housing estates and then be surprised that we have a growing crime problem.

There a challenge - will someone take this idea forward?

DEVELOPMENT OF ALTERNATIVES TO CUSTODY

But I recognise that whatever we do to promote positive activity there will be many who come before the courts and who the courts have to deal with. If I am arguing that we should not be locking people up in prison it is incumbent on me to suggest alternatives. I believe there is considerable scope for developing further alternatives and I particularly point to the possibility of making greater use of semi-custody.

First, we must make the greatest possible use of the existing non-custodial penalties including fines, Probation and Community Service. Then we should examine options for semi-custody. Semi-custody has a number of advantages.

Taking away peoples liberty hurts. That we have established. Why do we not take away peoples liberty in much smaller chunks to register our reaction to crime. We have already experimented with this a little with attendance centres for football hooligans. But many countries have gone further and have experimented with weekend imprisonment and overnight imprisonment. I am sure there are a range of alternatives that we could develop where we do not take people out of the Community for more than very short periods, but that we make those short periods extremely inconvenient. Short periods of semi-custody are relatively cheap and avoid the damaging effects of Prison.

Let me give you another example of a semi-custodial penalty that we have evolved largely as a crime prevention method at Risley. You may recall some 3 years ago the tragic death of 2 young children in Toxteth as a result of joy riding. Following that tragedy two of my prisoners came to see me expressing a great desire to do something to prevent these tragedies recurring. These 2 men were top drivers from the Toxteth area and they were both doing quite well in Prison. I sent them away to draw-up some positive ideas. From that meeting came the Risley Car Crime Scheme whereby we bring into the establishment for a couple of hours through the Probation Service and Social Services a group of youngsters involved in joy riding. They are confronted by prisoners with the hard facts of Prison life and are given a considerable fright. It is very much a confrontation programme and it is one that I believe has had some benefits. We have run the programme for some 3 years now and there is some evidence it has had a useful effect together with other initiatives in reducing joy riding around the North West.

I have learnt a great deal from being involved with this Scheme. It has highlighted the way selected offenders may be able to make a contribution to crime prevention. I have been pleased with the way my staff and prisoners have worked together on the project. I have been interested in the way my staff, my prisoners and the Social Services and Probation Service, the Police and Community representatives have worked together to make the programme a success.

My experience of the scheme has led me to the following conclusions.

If we are to develop a wide range of alternatives to custody we need new structures. I am very concerned that the Criminal Justice System is over-centralised and dominated by London and Whitehall. I believe that we should be looking to regional and local structures to develop responses to particular difficulties in particular areas. That, after all, is pushing back responsibility into the areas where the problems lie.

PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

I would like to turn finally to wider crime prevention measures.

As part of the overall strategy for tackling crime, crime prevention needs to be given much greater priority. Crime prevented means less victims to comfort, less offenders to punish and a reduction in damage to the Community.

There is increasing evidence that carefully targeted crime prevention measures can be extremely effective. Better designed housing estates reduce the opportunity for crime. Improved lighting deters thieves and muggers. Close circuit television sharply reduces crime. Vehicles that are difficult to steal reduce car crime. But all these initiatives require strong social and political support for them to become priorities, especially at local and regional level.

Wider Crime Prevention Issues

But there are also some much wider crime prevention issues. I have already drawn attention to the difficult environment that we create for our young people. I would especially like to draw your attention to an excellent publication entitled 'Crime and the Family', from the Family Policy Studies Centre. This publication from NACRO and Crime Concern is sub-titled Improving Child Rearing and Delinquency.

I have become increasing troubled by the evidence of damaged families producing a further generation of damaged families. We have heard much talk of the creation of an underclass. Those of us who know anything about very deprived areas will know there are parts of the country where there are very few adults who have experience of regular work. The norm of working fathers are quite unknown. Then there are an increasing number of parents who are having to bring up children in single parent families. Usually the missing parent is a father and children are having no experience of a regular male parent. The damage that this doing is probably unknown but I am sure my concerns about where this is leading to are shared by many of you this evening.

The publication Crime in the Family sets out a most interesting programme for trying to tackle the problem of breaking this cycle. Many of the ideas that they propose should receive a great deal of support and would appear to many people to be common sense. My view is that if we are take the problem of reducing crime seriously we must all be prepared to press for real improvements in these areas. Let me set out in very broad terms the programmes this study advocates.

Preparation for Parenthood

The report advocates a substantial improvement in preparations for parenthood and parent education aimed both at school children and also Community Education targeted at new parents. Education for parenthood is something that I am certain we could do a great deal more of in our penal establishments and probably in many other parts of the Public Service as well.

Pre-School Education

The report advocates high quality pre-school education in partnership with parents. Again there is considerable evidence that good pre-school education has a considerable affect on preventing delinquency in later life.

Support Services for Parents

The report advocates increased amount of health visiting to the parents of young children and the development of befriending baby sitting and other outreach services. It stresses the importance of developing family support volunteers to help improve the ability of parents to cope under stress. Then there is the need for family preservation services that can provide intensive support for families who are under particular stress.

Community Services

The report advocates the development of family centres that can offer services such as parent and toddler clubs, playgroups, toy libraries and can become a centre for parent training and special groupwork, including family therapy. The report points out the need for remedial design work and improved management of high crime estates. It stresses the importance of community policing, including preventative work with families. It also advocates the need for facilities both clubs and holiday activities for children and young people.

In this context I am delighted to be able to highlight the very good work carried out by so many people working for Adullam in providing housing for deprived people. But we need much more resource and effort to meet the great need that exists at the present time.

You will see that none of these things are particularly radical or necessarily very expensive. But they are long-term investments. The next generation of delinquents are being partially formed by their life experience as youngsters. Yet as this report shows there is much we could do to prevent that if we are only prepared to make the effort.

Are we as a society prepared to reorder our priorities? Even if it involves some sacrifice of our own standards of living. Because that may be what is needed if we are to really meet the challenge of crime.

CONCLUSIONS

I make no apology for spending this evening putting before you such a difficult and challenging topic. As I said at the beginning I am sure it is what Walter Moore would have expected me to do in his first memorial lecture. I also make no apology for talking about the dis-advantaged members of our Community, even if those same people cause us considerable difficulty through their criminal behaviour.

I started by suggesting some of the principles that need to underpin our approach when we examine the crime problem. I have warned of the dangers that prison may make bad people worse. I have challenged the assumptions that imprisonment is the principal answer to our crime problems. I pointed out some of the difficulties under which the Prison Service operates. I have set out why the Prison Service needs to concentrate on positive programmes for prisoners if we are to play our full part in encouraging prisoners from re-offending when they return to the community.

Above all I have pointed to a range of measures that we need to be considering if we are to tackle the crime problem in a constructive and effective way. The answers are not especially radical and most of them are common sense.

We need to encourage positive activity especially for those at risk of becoming involved in crime.

We need a larger range of penalties for the courts including the development of a range of semi-custodial penalties.

We need to put resources in to support families to try and reduce the dangers of more children slipping into crime.

These measures may require all of us to change some of our priorities. To achieve change, we may all have to make sacrifices. That is a difficult message.

Our country needs leadership to achieve change. That leadership is needed at many levels - national, regional and local. Have we leaders prepared to take up the challenge of crime?

Many years ago Walter Moore showed the way. He put his own time and a good deal of his own resources into working with the dis-advantaged. We need other leaders to pick up the torch that Walter Moore lit. We need this generation to produce real leaders for this work. Can you play your full part in encouraging these leaders to come forward?