Mr. John Clinton:

Having more people in open centres is feasible and there is no doubt about that. It must be tied into the sentence management plan. We have just taken the semi-open centre out of the system.

Are we going to replace it with open centres? The committee did a lot of work on this issue and drew up conclusions as to why we should have them. We believe we should have them and that we should use the ones we have. They can be developed much more cheaply than closed prisons and the problem is not insurmountable. We have drug-free units in ordinary prisons, but we could have more of them and a lot of people would buy into them. If we were to get a prisoner out of the main area to the drug-free unit, it would get him or her out of an environment in which he or she is pressurised to bring in stuff, which gets him or her involved in the drug culture within the system.