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

Ev 28 Justice Committee: Evidence29 January 2013 Juliet Lyon CBE, Frances Crook OBE and Clive Martinworry that the small voluntary organisations that do sowell with women in the localities will not be able tobid because they are not big enough fish so they willbecome sub-primes or sub‐sub-primes of the very bigproviders. I am not sure that is a good equation, eitherin terms of their financial resources or indeed theiridentity as a voluntary organisation.Q141 Steve Brine: Frances, do you agree with that—“fragment” or “improve”?Frances Crook: Fragment, not improve. The system,which is relatively new for centres for women, isworking quite well, arguably perhaps better than thesystem for men. The gender‐specific services providedby women’s centres, and by some other communitysentences, at a local level works quite well. Thereoffending rate for women is much lower than formen. There are all sorts of reasons for that, I appreciate,but perhaps it is also because those women are linkedinto other services so effectively. The women’s centresand services specifically for women are seen as a veryholistic service, not specifically just dealing with onepart of their behaviour but linking them into the backstory of their lives and helping them to change. Thatis incredibly important, but it is not cheap: it is veryspecialised and gender specific and it needs to bea dedicated service for women only. That is my realconcern.If the Government’s plan is to build a national or aregional bidding system for the big corporates to runthese things, as Juliet says, these firms will subcontractand subcontract. Or, they will want to run their ownservices, because it will be too expensive to sub-primespecific services for women and therefore women willbe lumped in with men, which is unsafe for manyof them. Most of the women who are involved inoffending have been victims themselves and requirequite a lot of careful management, with extra safetyand extra care, because they have often been victimsof male violence, domestic violence, pimping and allsorts of things like that. So I am not convinced thatthe national or regional commissioning model formanaging women on community sentences or postcustody, which will be almost entirely allocated to runby the private sector, will serve women well at all. Wewould be dismantling a system which at the moment isworking well.Q142 Steve Brine: Chair, with your permission, Iwant to ask Mr Martin about what he says in writtenevidence, because it is such a big question, as to whata new strategy should focus on, or we will never get onto question 3.Mr Martin, for our benefit, is it the case, as Women’sBreakout say in their written evidence, that since Maylast year the Government have not involved the thirdsector in its preparation of this long‐awaited documenton women offenders?Clive Martin: Not much, no; there has not been muchengagement.Q143 Steve Brine: They say they have not and yousay “not much”. Which is it?Clive Martin: There has been post‐announcementconsultation about certain principles. There has notbeen, for example, an up-front discussion about, say,mentoring— mentoring means many different thingsand the voluntary sector is expert at it—such as “Howcould we implement it? What do we need to do to getfrom what is a postcode lottery to national mentoring?”There has been no consultation about that whatsoever.There has been no consultation around gender‐specificservices, race‐specific services or anything of thatnature. There has been post‐the‐event consultationaround certain detail but not in terms of what we wouldthink of playing to the strengths of the voluntary sectorand early consultation about certain aspects of it.Chair: I am lingering a bit because my question aboutstrategy will emerge, to some extent, from some of thesubsequent points that are going to be raised.Q144 Mr Llwyd: One of the frustrating thingsabout this discussion is that there seems to be overalla recognition that the prison estate for women is notworking; yet not a great deal is happening at themoment and some of us are very concerned aboutthis. Several witnesses have told us, including HMInspectorate of Prisons, for example, that women’sprisons are too big, too far away from women’s homesand do not provide the level of care which is necessary.Why do you believe that the previous Governmenttook the decision not to accept Baroness Corston’srecommendations to establish smaller custodial units?Juliet Lyon: It is because, essentially, the reviewthat occurred was an in‐house review conducted byofficials who took a large prison and reduced it sothat the economy of scale no longer applied and theyrealised how very expensive it would be to build smallcustodial units for women. It was an approach thatfailed completely to take account of Baroness Corston’srecommendations about a network of women’scentres in the community, some of which might haveresidential accommodation attached. Consequently, ifyou had looked at it from the other end of the telescope,“What could be done for vulnerable women in thecommunity who did not represent a serious risk to thepublic?”, you would have been left with a very smallnumber, albeit serious offenders, who would need tobe detained in units of that kind. Then you could havelooked at it differently.The other failure was not to do it in conjunction withHealth but to look at the ways in which, given the levelof health need, Health and Justice could work together,and probably the Home Office too in relation to theforeign national women. So there was nothing muchthat was joined up about the process. It said everythingabout simply taking prison statistics and boiling themdown. Of course, if you take a prison for 600 or 1,000men and try and boil it down to a handful of women, itis going to be incredibly costly. So I think there wereother models. I do not think there was any internationaloverview taken of smaller units in other countries,which has subsequently been done by Women inPrison. It was one of those failed exercises. It wastedabout a year. It was another year following the Corstonreview where that was supposedly under consideration,with a disappointing outcome.Frances Crook: I would agree exactly with what Julietsaid. I perhaps will say it a little more bluntly. I thinkthere are two reasons. One is cost, because exactly as