Frances Crook

Question: What are the key issues for the Howard League currently?

Frances Crook: Our remit is that we want a safer society where there are fewer people who are victims of crime.

I think it's important to say that because we get accused quite often by people who have a rather simple view that we're only acting on behalf of the offender. Well that simply isn't true.

We want offenders to make amends for what they've done and change their lives. That's absolutely critical.

Those two things are at the heart of everything we do and everything we believe.

Within that we're pretty practical about the way you achieve those things. All the evidence we have ever seen, and own research has shown, the inappropriate use of prison custody achieves the opposite.

What it achieves is a huge cost to the public purse and more crime and more victims.

The prison population is a major concern at the moment because it's virtually doubled in 10 years. There are huge numbers of prison who are in prison who shouldn't be. They should be doing something much more useful in the community to atone for what they've done.

That would help prevent future victims, save the taxpayer billions and I think, very importantly, it would also reflect the nature of our society.

It sounds rather pompous and philosophical but I think if we have at the heart of our society a system which is so highly punitive and vengeful it affects the way we look at people who transgress. It makes us more cruel as a society.

Question: Do you think the media is partly responsible for the way we perceive crime and criminals?

Frances Crook: I think there is a media obsession with crime, particularly with murder.

We do a project with schools and we've now worked with 15,000 children across the country.

We do a quiz with them and one of the questions is 'how many people are murdered in this country every year?'.

We get estimates generally between 5,000 and 15,000. That's completely ludicrous because it's actually around 700. I think the public are so badly informed about what crime is and the best way to deal with it, and the factual media and drama have a lot responsibility for that.

Question: What do you think of the TV prison drama Bad Girls?

Frances Crook: It's absolutely dreadful. Total drivel. People say "oh everybody knows it's drama". Well most people probably do recognise it's fiction and doesn't bear any resemblance to reality. However, by repetition and by being actually quite powerful drama, it is insidious. This affects people without them knowing.

I'm not saying people are naive, because I don't think that's so, but it's like advertising. Of course advertising has an impact otherwise people wouldn't spend money on it. These dramas that are so powerful must have an impact on people's views.

I refuse to get involved with dramas like this because they're actually very damaging.

Question: Young people are often the biggest number of victims of crime and often the biggest number of offenders. Isn't this an issue here about education?

Frances Crook: I think you've got to be quite careful about this. Young men and boys as part of their growing up process are more aggressive. They can be violent towards each other. Normally that doesn't go beyond a certain point.

More often the problem with violence among young people is alcohol-fuelled and something has to be done about that.

Question: How would you tackle an issue like this, particularly the drinking culture?

Frances Crook: I'm concerned that there's been more focus on drugs as opposed to alcohol because I think there's more crime that affects more people through alcohol than drugs. Yet one is legal and one is not.

We don't pretend to have a solution on this.

Question: Drugs is a key issue on the law and order agenda. Is it an unsolvable issue?

Frances Crook: What we have looked at is the drug testing and treatment order, looking at the different ways you can treat people who have committed offences; either buying or selling drugs or getting money for the drugs.

I think the drug treatment order is a positive step in the right direction - but it's not without its problems. On the other hand, some of the programmes that are available in prison as part of the educational process of getting off drugs have had enormous problems.

Although they can be enormously successful what happens is that sometimes people have come out of prison, gone straight to get their next fix and it's killed them.

I spoke with a coroner recently who was getting increasingly alarmed by the number of young people who were dying of drug overdoses within days of release. It was because their tolerance levels had gone down while they were in prison.

There's a huge lesson here that you should never send people to prison to get them off drugs or to educate them.

Education is for schools and colleges and drug rehab is done by the health specialists. That is not the role for prisons.

Prison should only be available for people who have committed serious or violent offences and who are a danger.

Question: But the perception among the public is that community orders are some kind of YTS scheme and are a soft option?

Frances Crook: You've hit on a very important issue. Ministers themselves have to lead the debate about what works in the community and how there are some ways of managing people in the community which have proven to be more successful than prison.

The high quality supervision, probation, community service was a great success story. Everybody liked it; it was cheap, easy to manage, the local communities benefited enormously and people who were put through it changed their lives.

I'd like to see ministers talking about how we could develop that and the new stages in it and how we can involve victims and local communities more. Let's see some leadership from ministers on this.

I can't remember the time that David Blunkett has done something like that.

Question: Many of Britain's jails were built in Victorian times. Can they provide for a modern prison service?

Frances Crook: I know there've been some parliamentary questions. Many of the Victorian prisons are shabby and crumbling. The are inherently unsafe and unhealthy. There's rats, cockroaches and asbestos. Take your pick.

I was amazed that over the summer there wasn't a serious outbreak of a really nasty disease of some kind.

I was expecting cholera or typhoid or something. It was just a miracle that it didn't happen.

Imagine being in a cell over the summer's heatwave without being able to open a window, two or three in a cell the size of a family bathroom for 20 hours a day. And with an open lavatory in there with you.

Question: What's your view on the new director of public prosecutions?

Frances Crook: I've had no contact with him at all so far. All I can say is that I look forward to working with him.

Question: What's your view on prisoners that sell the story about their crime and prison sentence?

Frances Crook: If they want to talk about their experiences in prison that's fine. I think there's a slightly different issue when they try to make money out of their individual offence. Sometimes that involves the families of the victims and victims themselves. I don't think that is appropriate. But people talking about prison and their experiences is perfectly legitimate. The public has a right to know and judge for itself.

Question: Lord Archer is due to speak at a conference you are organising. What are you hoping he will say?

Frances Crook: We have other ex-speakers coming to speak as well, a prison governor is coming to speak and all sorts of other people too.

I hope that because of his high profile that when he talks about drugs in prison, about the lack of work in prison and how futile much of the prison experience is for many people that it will get to a wider audience and the public will sit up and listen.

He is a way of getting a wider public debate about the serious issues we want to raise.