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

Ev 18 Justice Committee: Evidence15 January 2013 Peter Kilgarriff, Jackie Russell, Sharon Spurling and Joy Doal63% for those coming out after a short prison sentenceat, say, Foston Hall. It does not make any sense. If youare talking about reducing reoffending, the servicesthat we provide do make sense. But yes, we haven’t gotnational coverage. We can’t even deal with the wholeof Birmingham. In some areas there is no provision forthose women, but there could be—at a hugely reducedcost.Going back to your original question, there areother things. One of the dangers with “TransformingRehabilitation” is that all the people below tier 3offenders are to be managed by a private company,because they are all deemed to be low-risk. But withwomen, you also have to understand that, although theyare low-risk in terms of harm to others, they are veryhigh-risk in terms of need, and of risk to themselvesand their children, because their lives are often chaotic.They will be classed as a low tier of risk of harm tothe public, so under these proposals nearly all thesewomen will be managed outside. You can pretty muchstick all the women in that box, because they will allbe in tier 3.Q92 Jeremy Corbyn: I am very interested in thepoints you are making. What would be the equivalentcommunity sentence to a very short prison sentence,such as five or 10 days?Joy Doal: We do specified activity requirements,which are anything up to 60 days. That could be 60days for up to 12 months.Q93 Jeremy Corbyn: Sixty full days.Joy Doal: Yes. Someone may attend our centre 60times—60 days—over 12 months, but it could be 30days or 20 days.Q94 Jeremy Corbyn: What would she do on thosedays?Joy Doal: She would access all sorts of support, andshe would also access courses—offending behaviourcourses, anger management courses, DV coursesand drug awareness courses. There would be a fulltimetable.Q95 Jeremy Corbyn: Who monitors this?Joy Doal: Probation. We work in conjunction withprobation. We have co‐located offender managersin the centre who manage the cases, but our supportworkers do the actual front-line support with thatwoman. She will have a worker who will deal withall her issues and help her with housing, issues withthe children, social services and parenting courses.We have a crèche on site. It is holistic: everything isthere for her in one place. She is receiving the support,but she is also undergoing punishment in terms of herliberty. She has to attend, because obviously that ispart of the court order; otherwise, you have also gotcommunity payback by unpaid work. She can do hoursin the community.Chair: Perhaps we could stop there, because we aregoing to come back to the nature of what you are ableto do with your organisations.Q96 Mr Llwyd: Arising from that, 60 days is quiteintensive and obviously worth while, but, bearing inmind that a lot of these women have chaotic lives, howmany fall off and do not complete?Joy Doal: Not that many.Q97 Mr Llwyd: Roughly how many?Joy Doal: We have a really good success rate. I cannotgive you the exact figures, but very few orders arebreached. If they are breached, usually it is at thevery initial stages, when someone has not even comethrough the door.Jackie Russell: I don’t think that 60 days would bethe order for somebody as an alternative to five-daycustody. That lower tier would have less contact timein a sense, although it could be, as Joy said—Q98 Jeremy Corbyn: What is the equivalent? Ifsomebody would have been given, for example, a 10-day prison sentence, how much community work orcommunity attendance would they get instead?Joy Doal: It varies.Q99 Jeremy Corbyn: It is not that scientific.Joy Doal: No.Q100 Chair: It is not that consistent.Sharon Spurling: What also varies is that not allareas have access to specified activity requirements.In the Northumbria Probation Trust that is particularlyaround ETE, not anything specific to women. Thatarea does not do conditional cautioning, so there arechanges across the patch as to what you can access forwomen. If that was a bit more joined up, we would beable to give you lots more data, because we would allbe working in the same kind of regime of monitoringand collection.Q101 Andy McDonald: Putting to one side theefficacy and appropriateness of non‐custodial sentencesand focusing on those occasions when custodialsentences are necessary, Her Majesty’s chief inspectorof prisons suggests that women do best in smaller open,or semi-open, establishments. Given that, do you sharethe disappointment expressed by Baroness Corston tous in December at the Government’s decision not toaccept her recommendation to establish small custodialunits for women?Jackie Russell: Yes, absolutely.Peter Kilgarriff: Very much.Jackie Russell: We have heard that small custodialunits would be expensive, but what we have not seenis a fully costed proposal of what that would looklike. You also have to remember that that proposalwas based alongside other proposals that would havereduced the prison population. Whereas there are4,000-plus women in prison today, the small custodialmodel was about asking questions such as: how manyof those women should not be there because theyare there for breach of an order that would not haveresulted in prison anyway? How many of those womenare there on remand? How many of those women arethere for under three months, or under six months?Once you start to deal with those women appropriately,your prison population drops, which gives you aproper model, and it is that model that should havebeen costed for small custodial units. We have not seen