One of the less intractable problems in the criminal justice system is how to deal more decently, more humanely and at lesser cost with women.
We know the problems: the majority of women are serving short sentences for non-violent offences and suffer significant problems with addiction and mental health.
We know that many suffer domestic abuse, have suffered childhood trauma and are themselves primary carers. We know that they have poor education and employment backgrounds, come from and return to, poverty.
It sometimes feels that there are more reports cataloguing these facts than there are women in custody.
The problems and most importantly the solutions, were outlined in the report by Baroness Jean Corston in 2007.
She said that the existing system of women’s prisons should be dismantled and replaced by smaller secure units for the minority of women from whom the public requires protection.
The prison service, has, in the last 18 years had a succession of evanescent strategies led by equally fleeting ‘heads of women’s group’ that have ignored Corston and merely continued with the same custody-only focussed approach. Indeed in 2021 plans were announced for the construction of 500 more prison places for women, a strategy only recently ‘paused’, not abandoned.
But we have a new prisons minister and a new government. The question is will it force the prison service into doing what everyone has been saying for nearly two decades needs to be done.
There is now a ‘Women’s Justice Board’, which will meet 4 times a year. It will be supported by the ‘Women in Justice Partnership Delivery Group’, which has appeared out of nowhere.
We are told the “first meeting will review the current issues contributing to female offending and how these can be best tackled”. Please!! Not another report about the nature of women in prison. We need action not another decade of hand-wringing.
A glimmer of hope comes in an interview by the Guardian of Lord Timpson. He talks of doing things differently and perhaps closing one women’s prison and investing in community facilities.
The real answer is to keep just one open, close the rest and massively invest in community based facilities providing safe spaces for women and supportive, constructive interventions. There are models and organisations out there who know what to do and how to do it. Indeed one great example is mentioned in the Guardian piece. And having attended the opening of Hope Street, Edwina Grosvenor’s vision, I can attest to the pinnacle of what can be achieved.
I spent ten years as a trustee of the Pilgrim Trust. We used to invest in programmes in prison but ceased to do so (like many other trusts and foundations at the time) because the money was wasted by the prison service.
We moved to supporting women and girls at risk and I have the privilege of meeting many of the organisations we funded. Inspirational organisations led by dedicated individuals but surviving on a shoestring and beaten senseless by short term government funding. Too much valuable time was spent on the bureaucracy of begging rather than helping women.
A new prison for 1,400 men costs around a quarter of a billion pounds. A fraction of that to these organisations to develop their work and their facilities would dramatically reduce the number of women in prison to just one secure facility. That would free up around 3,000 spaces (or two new prison at half a billion pounds).
The prison service has been masterful for decades in ‘Yes Ministering’ politicians into ‘reviews’ and ‘strategies’ and ‘reorganisations’. The knowledge, expertise and dynamism is out there, it’s just that it is not within the prison service. So too is the money, except that £4billion is earmarked for new warehouses, so profitable for so many vested interests.
A significant part of the criminal justice could be transformed so very easily. Women’s lives and those of their children so often thrown into care could be turned around, communities would be safer.
Maybe we just need some Trumpian executive orders to end the handwringing.
