I reconvene the meeting for item 5 on the agenda. I welcome, from Audit Scotland, Bob Leishman, a senior manager of performance audit, and Phil Grigor, a project manager of performance audit. They are here to brief the committee on the Auditor General for Scotland's report, "Scottish Prison Service: Correctional opportunities for prisoners". I invite Mr Leishman to make a short opening statement, after which members will ask questions of our witnesses.
The Auditor General's report records the results of our examination of the opportunities that are provided in Scotland's prisons to reduce the risk of reoffending by improving prisoners' skills, addressing their offending behaviour, tackling their addictions and preparing them for release. Those opportunities include education, work-related training and behaviour management programmes.
Thank you for that introduction. I want to raise a general point. You say that the Scottish Prison Service has no statutory duty to rehabilitate prisoners; however, I presume that there is some kind of framework—the report refers to the core plus initiative. How do prisons and prison governors know what they are supposed to be aiming for? What are their parameters?
That is a difficult question to answer as far as the existing business planning process in the Scottish Prison Service is concerned. One of the points that we have tried to make in our report is that there are no objectives for some correctional opportunities. The targets that are used in the Prison Service cover some activity in some areas, such as education. However, there are no targets or objectives for important areas such as employment and addictions treatment.
Are we effectively asking our prisons to operate within a slightly unrealistic framework, in that they are charged with the responsibility of detaining people in custody and generally looking after them but, other than that, they are in slightly unmapped territory?
To an extent. As our report says, the Executive has set the overall objective of reducing reoffending, but has not outlined what it thinks the Scottish Prison Service's contribution to that should be. That cascades down to individual prisons deciding what their individual contributions should be, on the basis of their resources. As business planning is developed, there is an iteration, but it is not clear who should be contributing what. We were unable to get a clear position as to why there were particular levels of provision in the individual prisons.
You state in your report that there should be a review of resource allocation in certain prisons. That would be desirable but, in all honesty, it is quite difficult for the service to know what reallocation to make.
Yes.
Having visited a number of prisons, I am conscious that behaviour management programmes are accessed by substantial numbers of prisoners. Was there any evidence to suggest that the SPS had examined not just the effectiveness of those programmes but evidence from other countries that operate similar behaviour management programmes?
There is some limited information. The SPS itself evaluated some, but not all, programmes, and it did not go beyond the behavioural programmes into the educational programmes. The service is also involved in an international group that compares practice across prisons, although the group has not produced an awful lot of evidence yet. There is a degree of willingness, but the service has not got there yet, and there are no specific plans for when it is going to get there.
So there is no indication of the likely effectiveness of the behaviour management programmes.
As we reported, there is information from research carried out down south that various interventions can reduce reoffending by certain amounts.
You make a point in your report about tracking prisoners after their release. Is the SPS likely to take that issue on board? You state that the SPS recognises the need to evaluate better the impact of its correctional work. Specifically, do we know whether it will engage in tracking prisoners?
I do not believe that the SPS has any such specific plans. However, there are plans to improve working relationships between the SPS and the external agencies that look after the prisoners after their release. The improved IT system will allow for a better information trail. That should help, but I do not know whether there is any specific objective for the SPS to start to track prisoners.
Do you think that that would be desirable, given that we are trying to understand what works? An understanding of what particular prisoners who have gone on to reoffend have done might well inform future policy.
Anyone evaluating the success of a programme would want to find out what happened after the prisoner left.
I start by asking about the evidence and level of data that we have. You mentioned the United Kingdom study by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on the financial cost of reoffending and indicated that the Scottish Executive has not carried out an equivalent study. Have you had discussions with the Scottish Executive or the Scottish Prison Service on why there have been no such studies in Scotland?
We have had no specific discussions about that. The reason is probably to do with scale and the availability of resources.
Early in your report, you mention a 1999 survey that showed that 47 per cent of prisoners released from Scottish prisons returned to prison. Are those the most recent data?
Yes.
On the variation in programmes that you mention in your report, you said that longer-term inmates are more likely to be offered places. To an extent, that is inevitable, because the programmes are often at least a year long. Is there any evidence on the effect that such access to programmes has had on reoffending among longer-term inmates? Have you been able to tell what that effect has been?
No, because the evaluation that the Prison Service has done is limited.
The SPS conducts an annual survey of all prisoners and you cite the 2003 survey on page 27 of your report. I was struck by the fact that it indicated that 51 per cent of respondents
A limited number of the programmes have been evaluated in a bit more detail.
What were your findings on the efficacy of the programmes that might be considered, if I can put it flippantly, more of a tick-box exercise? I mean those that prisoners attend for show. You give quite a bit of detail on the financial cost per programme per establishment. Has there been any change to those programmes on the basis of the evaluation that you have just said has been taking place?
We do not have a history of the costs or evaluation results over time to allow us to do that.
That would—
I know that other members want to ask questions, so I ask you to be brief.
I have one further, brief question, which concerns the menu-based approach. Did you find that the SPS was working with the shorter-term prisoners, for whom the year-long programmes could not be carried out in prison? I could not see in the report whether you found any instances of the SPS working with the local community or outside agencies so that the same programme, or the same content, carried on being delivered outside the prison setting.
The Scottish Prison Service is attempting to develop link services to link what happens in prisons with the outside world, but that work is variable throughout the prison network. Some prisons have developed better link services than others.
Like other members, I have visited a number of prisons and my impression was that many of the courses were popular while some were unpopular. In effect, demand for certain courses in some prisons outstripped supply and prisoners could not get on to those courses. Did you find that that was the case and, if so, how prevalent was that problem? Did it arise because prisoners who had drug, alcohol or anger-management problems were being directed to the correct courses on which there was no room, or was it because prisoners liked to work in the workshop rather than do some of the other courses and were, as Jeremy Purvis said, ticking boxes—that is, going somewhere to fill in time rather than attending courses that dealt with their behaviour?
During the study, we examined the process through which the Prison Service assessed the prisoners' needs and transferred that information on to an action plan that would refer the prisoner to appropriate courses. It was not always possible to track that through, but where we could do so we found that, in a substantial number of cases, the prisoner was put on a waiting list because demand outstripped supply. However, we could not go into the business of assessing whether a prisoner's needs assessment was adequate—we would not be equipped to do that, and it would be unfair for us to do so.
I understand that. That leads on to my second question. Your key messages report states:
We did not see an in-built mechanism for sharing best practice; however, that is not to say that that does not happen. The Prison Service works as a network and there are a lot of conferences and so on. Nevertheless, there was no mechanism that we could recognise whereby good practice would be highlighted and spread across the network.
That was my opinion.
Did the witnesses have any sense of how the prison governors see themselves fitting into the whole structure? Everything in the report is about and directed towards the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Executive. Are prison governors able to be proactive and innovative in relation to their prisoners, or are they very much the delivery arms of the Scottish Prison Service?
It is a bit of both. The Prison Service sets a strategy within which there is a good deal of room for governors' discretion in identifying the needs of the individual prison populations and in developing appropriate opportunities to meet those needs. The governors are the men on the ground who know the prisoners and what is coming out of the needs assessments.
I wonder whether there is a slight confusion of roles. The report talks about the need to continue to establish links with relevant external organisations to promote the effectiveness of the opportunities that are provided in custody. It seems that it would be easy for a prison governor to cultivate those arrangements, depending on where the prisoners come from. It is not quite clear to me who, within the Prison Service, Audit Scotland thinks should assume responsibility for the delivery of some of your suggestions.
In our view, there should be a top-down allocation of the strategic direction. That should set out the aims and objectives for the service. Then, through the prison governors' contracts that have been introduced, the contribution that is expected of each individual prison can be made clear. There would be an iterative process between the Prison Service headquarters and local management to determine what was required of each prison, which would involve the governor looking at his prison population and identifying the needs of his prisoners and the Prison Service saying, from its point of view and considering the direction in which it wants to go, what it wants to see more or less of.
That, of itself, would begin to construct the mechanism.
Yes.
Are there any other questions?
Paragraph 3.23 of the report states that, in the interviews that you carried out, a number of prisoners said that they would prefer programmes to be delivered by psychologists rather than by prison officers. As far as I can see, none of your recommendations regarding the programmes of support within prisons includes anything to do with mental health or psychology. My question is in two parts. First, how extensively do the programmes cater for prisoners' mental health issues? Secondly, why did you not consider recommending the improvement of mental health services in prisons, particularly when prisoners go out into the wider community, given the establishment of links with criminal justice social work departments and local authorities?
We looked at correctional opportunities in terms of education and work-related training; we did not look at health issues, as such. That would have taken us in a different direction.
On the evidence of your inquiry, do you not think that the issues are connected? Is not mental health a contributory factor to the effectiveness of the educational and training programmes? You mention addiction treatments for prisoners who have substance abuse problems but not treatments for those with mental health issues. Arguably, such treatments could have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of the education, training and link programmes that exist.
It would have been necessary for us to see an evaluation of the individual opportunities. It may be that there is a need to evaluate what is delivered for prisoners with mental health difficulties; however, that information was not available, as the Prison Service had not collected it. It would probably have been beyond the scope of our inquiry to have undertaken what would have been a very detailed evaluation.
Would like to make any concluding remarks, Mr Leishman?
No, thank you.
On behalf of the committee, I thank you and Mr Grigor for appearing before us this afternoon. We all found the report extremely interesting.
Meeting continued in private until 15:59.