Contribution
My Lords, I too have very little experience in this area, but I felt I did have something worth saying from a professional point of view. My experience of prisons is not personal but, while I was on call at Hammersmith Hospital, I did go inside prisons to see sick patients when they were quite seriously ill. It was being ignored, but finally there was no doctor present.
I was the obstetrician on call at the hospital and ordinarily I dealt with deliveries and surgeries. However, there was nobody else to see the male inmates at Wormwood Scrubs. I saw the absolute squalor, the appalling circumstances, the lack of hope and the complete negligence in people’s understanding of what was behind these people’s suffering. When one such patient was brought to Hammersmith Hospital still handcuffed, so I could not actually examine his abdomen, I realised how far we had sunk as a society.
There was another patient who was in custody for several years. His wife was a patient of mine who had been desperate for children; she had been trying for a child for almost 10 years and she was getting older and older. Her husband had recently been sentenced and was in prison for, I think, four years. I had spent a year trying to persuade the authorities, who were completely indifferent, including many people in the Home Office, that we needed to get some sperm from this man. We did not need to do in vitro fertilisation; simple artificial insemination was all we needed. It was the most difficult tussle but, at the time, they broke a rule, finally, because of the persistence. It got into the newspapers, and nobody in the newspapers understood the suffering behind that. However, as has been said in this debate, it made a difference later on to the cohesion of that family when the child was born, and I am quite proud of that moment.
Letters I have had from prisoners, sent to me by the Howard League for Penal Reform, show some of the terrible lacks we have been talking about. Overcrowding is massive. There is one prisoner who is clearly autistic—he points this out—and obviously has other mental health disorders. He says he is surrounded by constant noise and cannot sleep. He is unable to express his mental condition. As an autistic person, he is extremely sensitive to noise. This is not at all atypical; it is simply that nothing can be done about it in that environment. Another inmate talks about the lack of training and rehabilitation. He says that sometimes it might finally be available when you are ready to be released for the first time, and there is no chance of learning trade skills. What is interesting about all those letters is that they are not hysterical; they are very calm and limited in what they complain about, but they come to the point very well.
We have a human brain, which is one of the most complicated objects in the known universe. It has about 100 billion neurons. Each of those neurons will be connected up to 2,000 times to other areas of the brain. What we know is that, as the neurons develop and as we learn, new connections are found as a result. You can see this now under a microscope; I have wonderful photographs of this happening. When there is a change in the environment, you can see how the synapses connect up other nerves. If the stimuli in that environment are constantly repeated, you end up learning more and more. You inherit the fixed learning that you need as you get old. What we have in prisons is exactly that; we have an environment which is constant, but constantly against the right kind of learning. Inevitably, we end up with people who are already damaged being damaged more. Their brains are damaged by us. This is something we should recognise. It is essential. The environment is absolutely critical and it is absolutely appalling.
I cannot leave without saying briefly how much I valued the contribution from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, in his wonderful maiden speech. It is not the custom to keep on going on about new Members, but it was an exceptional speech. It is wonderful to see Cross-Benchers of his calibre coming into this House to improve the knowledge and experience that we desperately need in this Chamber. We should be so grateful that he is here. His speech today was a very good start.
Finally, I want to say that this is not a private matter to be sent away. We discuss all the time in this Chamber schools, defence and healthcare. Again and again, we ask the same questions at Question Time. How often do we talk about the shame of prisons? We think that the prisoners are ashamed—but no, we should be ashamed. This is our shame as a society. We need to change this and we need to do a colossal amount about it. As these prisoners know, the prison system is collapsing at the moment; it is seriously threatened. Therefore, there is a threat to us—not to our safety, but to our well-being as people. Let us remember our humanity and try to do something about it.