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

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.”