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

Ev 30 Justice Committee: Evidence29 January 2013 Juliet Lyon CBE, Frances Crook OBE and Clive Martinhalf empty. The statistics bear that out. If you look atthe research, very few women have visits. Often, thereis no one at home who is looking after the childrenwho would be prepared to take them to visit their mum.Sometimes, they don’t want visits. A colleague of mineat Prison Reform Trust, when she was in prison, didnot want her daughter to visit; she felt it would be tootraumatic and was prepared to forgo that. It was verypainful, I know, for her but she could not bear herdaughter coming into that environment.Q151 Mr Llwyd: Is it true as well that there would bea number of kids, unfortunately, who would be takeninto care due to those circumstances?Juliet Lyon: Yes, but it is a smaller percentage thanpublic perception. Records we have been able toexamine indicate less than 10%. The vast majorityare farmed out to family and friends. Sometimes thatis successful, sometimes not. But a lot more care andattention could be paid to dependent children. It waspleasing to see the Sentencing Council changing theirguidelines in relation to drugs offences and looking,in relation to mitigation, at people with primary careresponsibilities, which obviously included the few menwho are lone dads as well as the single mums.Mr Llwyd: Thank you.Frances Crook: The Howard League gave evidence tothe UN special day of discussion on the children ofprisoners, and we published a report on the childrenof women prisoners. We estimate—nobody knowsexactly—that around 17,000 children every year areaffected by the imprisonment of their mother. So I hopethat the review will not just look at the prison estateand provision for women once they are sentenced butwill look more widely at sentencing patterns and theunnecessary use of custody.One of my concerns is particularly the unnecessary useof quite intrusive community sentences. As Juliet says,sometimes prison is used as respite care for womenbut also magistrates sometimes over‐sentence womento very onerous conditions in community sentencesbecause they want to help sort out their lives. Theymay get a woman in front of them who is very chaoticand needy and, in a benevolent way, they think that ifthey pile on the provisions this can help sort her out.Of course, it does not. What it does is ensures that shewill breach because she cannot do it and she will thenend up in custody as a result of that.So a review of the estate cannot just look at the prisonsociety, what happens in a prison. The answer to thatquestion will inevitably be wrong because it is thewrong question. We do not want to look at what happensto women in prison because we want to make sure theydo not go there in the first place. It is expensive anddamaging and it leads to more crime. What we shouldbe looking at in any review is a much wider vision ofsentencing options, sentencing practice, communityprovision, funding arrangements and gender‐specificservices.Q152 Yasmin Qureshi: Good morning. I want toask questions regarding reducing the use of custodyand expanding community‐based provisions. Despiteall the changes that have been taking place in thelast number of years—and there seems to have beenagreement or cross‐political consensus on this issueabout trying to reduce the number of women inprisons—as the Howard League has noted, there hasbeen no real discernible impact on the number ofwomen in prison, and in fact the number of womenwho are imprisoned who are assessed as being at ahigher risk of harm to themselves and others is about3.2%. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation has expressedthat perhaps sometimes too much emphasis has beenplaced on women who have not committed seriousoffences and not enough on the vulnerable women. Doyou agree with the fact that the progress that has beenmade since the Corston report came out in expandingthe network of community centres and diversionschemes has not impacted on the number of women inprison? What do you think, realistically, can be done,in addition to what has already been done, to help keepvulnerable women from custody and from the criminaljustice system itself? What practical further steps canbe taken?Clive Martin: There is such a leadership gap here. Iwill give you an example which I think demonstratesthat. I chair something called the Ministry of JusticeReducing Re‐offending Third Sector AdvisoryGroup. We were asked by Crispin Blunt to prepare anoverview on behalf of the voluntary sector of what wesaw in commissioning for women’s services and howwe could redesign the system, which we did. That wassubmitted. Despite it being requested at that level, therehas been absolutely no engagement from the Ministryof Justice around that, so much to the extent that inDecember we decided to have a public conference: 120people came; Dame Helena Kennedy gave the keynoteaddress; it was chaired by Dame Anne Owers; and noone from the Ministry of Justice even turned up at thatconference. So there is a yawning gap in leadership inthe sector.The reason I made that point is that years ago ProfessorRod Morgan did some research around how, unlesssentencers are kept aware of issues to do with whothey are sentencing, the type of sentences they giveand so on, it falls from their agenda. There has beenno consistent leadership around this issue for a longtime. We do not see it in training programmes for thejudiciary, and we do not see community alternatives tocustody being promoted in the media.Returning to the previous discussion, things like smallcustodial units do not sound like prisons, so people shyaway from promoting them. It is really difficult justto point to one thing, but what I think we can pointto is a general lack of taking this issue seriously assomething that can be progressed at almost every levelfrom political and official level right the way down.That is what needs to be addressed, and it is where mycolleagues here and other colleagues in the room fromthe third sector are really trying to push on this agendabecause it is quite difficult to see where that leadershipis going to come from.Q153 Yasmin Qureshi: Leaving the issue aboutthe leadership to one side—say you had a fantasticleadership—what we are asking about here is whatpractical things can be done? What further do you thinkcan be done to try to reduce the number of women inprison? We hear there are women’s centres coming up.