Women offenders: after the Corston Report - United Kingdom ...

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Ev 4 Justice Committee: Evidence18 December 2012 Rt Hon Baroness Corston and Liz Hogarth OBEnot create the equality that criminal justice agenciesnow have a statutory duty to promote.” It goes on to saythat there is a lack of visible leadership and a distinctstructure. Do you believe that a system redesign isnecessary or even a new model, such as, for example,a Women’s Justice Board, in order to ensure that therecommendations in your report, Baroness Corston,are properly implemented?Baroness Corston: First of all, I agree with thatpremise, and what is very gratifying is when people startquoting your arguments back at you. To treat men andwomen the same is not to guarantee equality, becausemen and women are equal but they are different and tobe treated differently. I have to say that I believed it formany years, but, when I first said it on the record of myreport, it was greeted with some scepticism in someplaces. In my opinion, this agenda is only going towork nationally if there is some strategic national bodyto overlook the system. In a way, I don’t care what youcall it, but what I don’t want is the kind of board thatwe have seen such as, for example, the Youth JusticeBoard. It has done great work but it works with youngoffenders.I am sorry to keep banging on about this. Womenoffenders are obviously an extremely important focusand, in a way, have to be the No. 1 focus, but the verystrong No. 2 is women at risk. The great thing aboutthe structure we had before was that, with the helpof the Corston Independent Funders’ Coalition, fromwhom you will no doubt be taking evidence at somestage, there was the establishment of 39 centres acrossthe country that adhere to this agenda.Women can self‐refer. Somebody in my family is a GP,and I remember saying, when I was putting togethermy thoughts on this report, “What happens when youhave a woman who is a ‘heart sink’ patient?” A “heartsink” is someone who walks into your surgery—it issomething which happens to Members of Parliament,I know, from my own experience—and your heartsinks because you know this person has a problem butyou know you can’t do anything about it. I remembersaying, “How would it be if a woman like that cameinto your surgery and you were able to say, ‘Look, godown to 26 Clark Street, or wherever, to the women’scentre and talk to them’?” The response was, “Thatwould be wonderful.” That is happening, but, if youdon’t have any kind of national guidance as to thefact that this is an important priority, it either doesn’thappen or it can’t be sustained.Q14 Mr Llwyd: The Chair referred earlier to our visitto Northern Ireland, which seems to me to be a verygood model to adopt. Ms Hogarth, do you have a viewon the question I put to Baroness Corston?Liz Hogarth: We certainly need an infrastructure. Itwould be helpful to have someone with some senseof independence, too, who can hold everyone to somesort of account, to make that joined-up agenda work.There is no doubt about that. Without that, it will goa bit wobbly, I would say, because, with the best willin the world, it needs someone asking the questions. Itis quite a complex agenda. It is a way of doing thingsdifferently, and that always takes time.I fully agree with you in terms of the Northern Irelandproject. Looking at something like the Inspire project,you have probation working incredibly closely withvery strong women’s centres there, which may havegrown up in a political environment. But these arestrong women who know how to change people’s lives,and they are there, with probation, who are probablyless constrained by working primarily with high riskoffenders and resourcing following risk. It was anabsolute joy to go over there and speak to probationstaff working as one. It was a different role, but therewas the interface with the court to make sentencersaware of what was available. That is an ace model.Baroness Corston: What is absolutely crucial too isthat, whatever this organisation is called, the visibleleadership has to be ministerial. There has to besomebody who can drive that agenda within Whitehall.That, to me, is a prerequisite. Certainly, Maria Eagledid that when she was a Minister.Q15 Mr Llwyd: Ms Hogarth, do you know of anyexamples where the Ministry of Justice might havetaken unnecessary or even disproportionate actionunder the Gender Equality Duty in relation to policiesfor dealing with offenders?Liz Hogarth: No, I don’t, to be quite honest. I was abit taken aback when I read a reference in the mostrecent guidance to working with women for offendermanagers and others. I know lots of people foundit a very uncomfortable process when they cameup against the Gender Duty initially because it didrequire a huge change of thinking. I can fully acceptthat some officials thought, “My goodness me, thisis disproportionate. We are suddenly having to focusour working week on women and there are so few ofthem”, but I did not see anything that made me thinkwe are getting this out of sync or out of balance.Q16 Andy McDonald: Baroness Corston, canwe focus on women at risk? Could it be that themoney spent on building new, smaller, more genderappropriateunits diverts resources that could perhapsbe invested to better effect in community-basedprovision? I am really asking whether you see a casefor the view that small custodial units are not feasible.Baroness Corston: No, I don’t see that they are notfeasible, because the cost of running these 13 women’sprisons is astronomical. I think that, probably, the costoverall of having small custodial units may well be thesame, but the cost in terms of disruption to human livesand to society is incalculable. You see these televisionprogrammes about bad girls. Actually, if you go intoa women’s prison, and particularly if you go in as awoman, once they have got past the idea that I havethis title and I am somebody’s grandmother, andthey can chat to me, you realise that this noise, thisaggressive or show-off stance, is a mask for a deeplyacknowledged vulnerability. For me, it is importantthat these women can stay in contact with some aspectof their lives and nurture their children. To hear themon the phone trying to bring up their children is verydistressing. For me, the cost, both in financial andhuman terms, of small custodial units is made.I understand the institutional resistance of, “We can’tstaff them.” You can have different ways of staffingorganisations. In the eastern region, two amazingwomen put together a programme for a virtual women’s
Justice Committee: Evidence Ev 518 December 2012 Rt Hon Baroness Corston and Liz Hogarth OBEcentre where staff travelled to the women concernedbecause of the huge dispersal of population in EastAnglia. What it requires is imaginative thinking.Without wanting to be rude about anybody in theMinistry of Justice, when it comes to building prisonsI don’t think there is much imagination. I will giveyou one example. When I started my report, I spoketo people who were responsible for building prisonsand I said, “How do you build a women’s prison?” Theanswer was chilling, “Well, we build a prison for men,and then we see how we can tweak it to fit women in.”Q17 Andy McDonald: Related to that—to someextent you have already addressed this—what are yourongoing concerns about the appropriateness of thewomen’s custodial estate and the regimes therein?Baroness Corston: The first thing to be said, of course,is that most of the women who are there should notbe there. The previous governor of Styal prison inCheshire, Clive Chatterton, had worked in the PrisonService for 30 years, always in the male estate. Hislast job was as governor of Styal, one of our biggestwomen’s prisons. He found that experience deeplytraumatising and acknowledged it. There was a verymoving piece about him and by him in The Observernewspaper last February, where he said that, when heran a men’s prison, there would probably be an averageof five people who were on some kind of suicide watchor at risk of serious self‐harm. In Styal, it was 50women every day about whom that could be said. Hehad women there on a sentence of 12 days. You thinkabout the futility of all of that and the damage that itdoes.If I thought that prison turned round women’s lives,then I would say perhaps there is an argument for it, andfor some offenders it does do some very good work.But, for the generality of women and their children,it teaches them nothing because there is not the timewith these short sentences. A 28-day sentence is kindof a norm. That is long enough to lose your home andyour children. When you come out, you go to the localauthority and say, “I want somewhere to live”, andyou are told you can have accommodation for a singleperson. This is if you are lucky. Some local authoritieshave said, “You have made yourself intentionallyhomeless by going to prison and we are not responsiblefor you.” You go to social services and say, “I wantmy children back.” They say, “You can’t have yourchildren back because the only accommodation youcan get is for a single person because at the momentyou are on your own.” As a barrister, I remembersitting in a case where a child was freed for adoptionwithout consent and this little woman sat at the backof the room and wept. She was totally ignored by thecourt. She was the mother. This is done in our name.Q18 Chair: One of the purposes that prison servesin the public mind, and often that of quite a lot ofpoliticians in different parties, is as a sign of society’sabhorrence either of a particularly serious offence orof a person’s persistence in offending when all sortsof other measures have failed to change what they do.How do you avoid a situation in which society seemsto be giving a signal, if it largely abandons the use ofcustody in respect of women, that it is not stronglyenough asserting what it is not going to stand for?Baroness Corston: There are some women who shouldbe in prison. Rosemary West should be in prison. Thatargument does not even need to be made. But thereare two points about this. When people know who thewomen are who are in our prisons, they are deeplytroubled. The BBC did a programme about Styalprison, where the journalist concerned was allowed tobe in the prison for a fortnight and she was allowed torecord what she saw. The BBC website was cloggedafterwards with people sending distressed messagessaying, “I didn’t realise that there were women like thislocked up in our prisons.”Furthermore, an organisation called SmartJusticedid some opinion polling round about the time ofthe publication of my report. It was broken downby gender, age and region. The questions were allthe same but the responses were set out by region.The main question was, “Do you think women whohave committed low level offences should be sent toprison or should they be sent to”—and then there wasa description of a women’s community centre. Thelowest—I emphasise “lowest”—approval rating forthat statement in the United Kingdom was 81%, and itwas over 90% in some regions. So, politicians wouldnot be leading public opinion when they are talkingabout these women; they would be reflecting it. Weshould have the courage to do that. But, as I say, if Ithought that sending a woman to prison for 28 dayswas a good thing, then I would argue for it, but I haveseen for myself that it is utterly futile.Q19 Seema Malhotra: These are questionscontinuing the theme of reducing the use of custodythrough different routes and particularly by improvingcommunity provision. The Corston report made aseries of recommendations about women’s centres,both for women offenders and those who may be at riskof offending. I am interested to know if you can expandmore to what extent you think reforms have beeneffective at reducing or preventing women entering thecriminal justice system—so working with women atrisk—and, also, better forms or more effective forms ofpunishment than perhaps being sentenced to custody?Baroness Corston: To be sent to a women’s centrerather than to prison is much more difficult, whichmight sound a crazy thing to say. I was deeply movedby a woman whom I met, a 41-year-old, in a women’scentre. She had been in and out of prison since the ageof 15 or had come to the attention of the authoritiessince the age of 15. She had had three children; onehad been freed for adoption without consent, one wasin care and she thought she would never get that childback, but she had a possibility of living with the thirdchild independently. I said, “Why are you here?” Shesaid, “Because the magistrate realised that prison haddone nothing for me.” I said, “What difference has itmade?” She said, “It has been much more difficult thanbeing in prison. When I was in prison there was alwayssomeone to blame: if my mother had protected me; ifmy stepdad hadn’t done that to me; if I hadn’t beencoerced into drugs; if I hadn’t been poor; if I hadn’tbeen pimped; if I hadn’t had to become a sex worker;if I hadn’t got pregnant when I did and the way I did.”
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