Women in our jails

This article is drafted on the day Susannah Hancock’s independent review into placements and care for girls in youth custody has been published. It highlights the complex mental and physical health issues these girls often face, with self-harm at a concerning level. Ministers have acted immediately to end the practice of placing girls in young offender institutions following recommendations from the review. This is an important step forward towards ensuring that all girls in custody receive appropriate levels of support, care and therapeutic interventions to address their physical, mental health and emotional needs. We hope to see more reforms like this in the near future. 

The Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, has acknowledged: “For women, prison isn’t working.” The Sentencing Review announced at the end of last year gives the Government an important opportunity to address some of the most serious challenges in our justice system, and in particular, for radical reform to the punishment of women.

In her book, Misjustice, Helena Kennedy KC describes her first case at the criminal bar. Her client was anxious, having not made child-care arrangements following her hearing at which she pleaded guilty to shoplifting kids’ clothes. She was in breach of a suspended sentence and was “taken off to Holloway, weeping for her children”.[1] This type of punishment, in which, arguably, it is poverty that is criminalised and the real victims are children separated from their mothers, is sadly not uncommon. There are more than 3,600 female prisoners in England and Wales. Almost three-quarters are inside for non-violent crimes.[2] And every year in the UK, around 17,000 children are affected by maternal imprisonment.[3]

Family life is harder to maintain for a female offender than for males as there are only 12 women’s prisons in England. The average distance from a woman’s home to the prison in which she is held is 64-miles.[4] There are no women’s prisons in Wales. The average distance for a Welsh female held in prison from home is 101 miles.[5] This also affects re-settlement.

There are no women’s prisons in London. Practitioners will be familiar with some of the realities representing female prisoners in the criminal justice system. Women appearing via prison video link (PVL) are given little time for pre-court hearings and rarely connect post-court. I saw a woman appearing by PVL in Staines Magistrates’ Court in the hearing ahead of my client’s. The magistrates had refused her bail. She was trying to speak up and tell them about the effect her remand would have on her children. The bench muted her. 

95% of all children whose mothers go to prison have to leave the family home and, often, they end up in the country’s underfunded care system.[6] In her book, Jailbirds, Mim Skinner (who spent time teaching prisoners) describes the mothers in prison “whose children, passed from pillar to post by the care system, had followed in their footsteps and lived just up on the corridor on one of the other wings”.[7] Children who have had a parent in prison are more likely than their peers to commit a criminal offence.[8] They are more likely to stop education earlier, to suffer with mental ill health, to earn less than their peers, to have drug and alcohol addictions, and to die before they are 65.[9]

Sledgehammer, an abolitionist text by Pat Carlen describes women’s imprisonment as exactly that “a sledgehammer - a penal instrument smashing at the already-smashed and which, in its penal ferocity, is a disgrace to civilised society”.[10] Any probe into the biographies of women prisoners reveals lives plagued by domestic violence, sexual abuse and coercive control. Such issues seem to be given little weight when decisions are made to prosecute women, despite the proactive approach of the CPS prosecuting the male perpetrators of such offences. 48% of women prisoners report committing an offence to support someone else’s drug addiction, and 25% of them arrive in prison with some form of addiction problem, whether to legal or illegal drugs.[11] There is little evidence of the efficacy of criminalisation to prevent drug use.

The occurrence of self-harm in women’s prisons is 11 times higher than in the male estate.[12] Jasmine York, jailed at HMP Eastwood Park for 10 weeks for her part in the “kill the bill” peaceful protests, said that women there “self-harm in prison in ways that I have never even imagined”.[13] This reflects Helena Kennedy KC’s description of visiting women in custody and seeing them “tearing into their own flesh with hairclips and bottletops”.[14]

No More Prison was an abolitionist pressure group formed in 2005. The driving force behind it was Pauline Campbell whose daughter, Sarah, died in 2003 at HMP Styal. Pauline’s campaigns involved direct action. She lay in front of HMP Styal’s gates and, when a van arrived with new inmates, she told the driver to “take the women to a place of safety”.[15] In a 12-month period between 2002 and 2003, six women killed themselves there. At Sarah’s inquest, the prison ombudsman stated: “I have no doubt that many of [these] women could have been more adequately and sensitively cared for outside a penal environment”.[16]

So where could they go?

Baroness Corston stated in her 2007 review that she does not believe, like some campaigners, that no women should be held in custody, but she did conclude that a radical change was needed in the way we treat women throughout the whole of the criminal justice system. She praised Calderdale, a women’s centre that is still running despite funding for such refuges being cut by more than £7 million since her report was published.[17] Calderdale is a community-centre in Halifax that offers holistic support to women by providing a safe space with an on-site nursery and support on housing, debt, addiction, mental health, employment, education, domestic abuse, and parenting. These are all services that can prevent women from being swept into the criminal justice system. In 2010, a pilot scheme testing cautions conditional on a female offender’s attendance at a local women’s centre found “a compliance rate of 75% with evidence of improved self-esteem, reduced drinking and improved money management for the women involved who said they felt listened to”.[18]

The average cost of keeping a woman in prison every year is £42,765; the estimated cost of providing a woman with community-based services every year has been estimated at £1,360.[19] With the money that is saved through reducing prison places for women, adequate funding would become available for high-quality women-led centres to help address the root causes of offending.

The review marks a meaningful opportunity for changes like these. This opportunity should be taken up enthusiastically by government – and it seems as though progress is being made. The Sentencing Council has released comprehensive new guidance on imposing community and custodial sentences.  The guidance states that a pre-sentence report will normally be considered necessary if (amongst other things) the court considers that the offender is, or there is a risk they may have been, a victim of domestic abuse, physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, coercive or controlling behaviour, economic, psychological, emotional or any other abuse. The guidance provides that, when sentencing female offenders, judges should consider the available evidence that shows:

• Female offending is commonly linked to mental ill health (including trauma), substance-misuse, being a victim of domestic abuse, or financial and homelessness issues. 
• There are only a small number of prisons for female offenders.
• Female offenders are at greater risk than male offenders of leaving custody without accommodation and being unemployed after release, leaving them vulnerable to further abuse and exploitation.
• The disadvantages female offenders face in the criminal justice system may be compounded for female offenders from an ethnic minority background. 

Such guidance is welcome. A final note - practitioners will be familiar with some of the realities of representing women in the Criminal Justice System:

• Wide considerations of the needs of their children or dependents when making case decisions
• Specific physical health considerations
• Specific mental health considerations
• Previous multi-agency interventions and disclosure requirements
• Wives/partners charged alongside their significant other without a real view being taken of the lived reality of that person (immigration status, language barriers, financial position, dependents, cultural standards)
• POCA and home/eviction implications both as the defendant and as an interested party. Section 10A POCA provides interested parties with the right to make representations re the extent of their interest in any jointly held property (eg. the matrimonial home), before HHJ makes a determination as to the proportion of the Defendant’s interest. Legal aid is not available
• Length of time it is now taking to bring proceedings and the extra impact on women – biologically, with children ageing in their care