Men have no place in women’s prisons

From now on, the statement said, such offenders would not be housed in women’s prisons if they had male genitalia or had committed sexual or violent crimes.

Such a policy has been a long time coming. For several years, the prison service in England and Wales has operated a policy of allocating transgender prisoners to the men’s or women’s estate on a case-by-case basis – even though the Equality Act has provisions that allow single-sex spaces for women to exclude male transgender prisoners.

Data collected in 2019 show that there were 129 transgender prisoners in the male estate and 34 in the female estate. In 2017, a rapist whose birth name was Stephen Wood, but who changed his name to Karen White, was placed in a women’s prison where he sexually assaulted two women. In 2021, FDJ, an anonymous woman who had been sexually assaulted by a male prisoner in a women’s prison unsuccessfully challenged the MoJ’s policy in court.

Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) welcomes the MoJ’s decision, which will greatly reduce the number of male prisoners in the women’s estate. We believe, however, that it does not go far enough.

There should be no place at all for men in women’s prisons, regardless of whether they have convictions for violent or sexual offences, and regardless of whether they retain male genitalia. The very low conviction rates for rape and sexual offences demonstrate that a male prisoner who does not have a conviction for a sexual or violent offence cannot automatically be assumed to be safe.

Female prisoners’ need for psychological safety is also undermined by being housed with men, even those deemed low-risk.

A breach of international rules

The policy of housing males in women’s prisons has been harmful to female prisoners, who have been trapped in a confined space with male offenders, compromising their privacy, dignity and safety. The practice clearly breaches the Prison Rules 1999, which state: “Women prisoners shall normally be kept separate from male prisoners.” It also breaches the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, which state:

Men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women, the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely separate.

The policy of allowing men to be housed in women’s prisons is a particularly striking example of how the needs of women in prison are often overlooked. More than half of female prisoners (57 per cent) are victims of domestic violence, while 53 per cent report having experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.

Placing women in prison often breaks up families, leaving their children in the care of others. Yet the majority are in prison for minor offences, with only 3.2 per cent considered a high risk to others.

The casual neglect of women’s safety by housing them alongside men is of a piece with a longstanding unwillingness to reform the justice system’s treatment of women convicted of crime.

Male staff pose a safeguarding risk

In 2021, we co-hosted a public meeting, A Woman’s Place Is Not In Prison, with the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies to highlight the problems facing women in prison. It is time that the needs of women in the criminal justice system become a political priority, and, as outlined in our manifesto, we would like to see the governments in Westminster and Edinburgh implement the recommendations of the Corston Report and the Angiolini Commission respectively.

We would also like it to recognise that it is not only male prisoners, but male staff in the women’s estate, who pose a safeguarding risk to vulnerable women. In 2011, for example, the acting governor of Downview prison, Russell Thorne, was sentenced to five years in prison for grooming and sexually exploiting female inmates.

WPUK believes that no female prisoner should be forced to share prison space with male prisoners. The United Nations mandate to keep male and female prisoners separate is essential, not just for the safety of female prisoners, but for their privacy and dignity.

We call on the MoJ to implement a policy that only women should be housed in women’s prisons, as a first step in a wholesale reform of the way the justice system treats women convicted of crime.

Dr Kim Thomas is a director of Woman’s Place UK