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

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Ev 50 Justice Committee: Evidence5 March 2013 Nick Hardwick and Eoin McLennan Murrayhave thought that there was demand, and I do not knowwhether the fact that there are so many unfilled placesis an administrative problem or whether there reallyare not the women who could take up those places.Q240 Steve Brine: Mr Murray, do you have anythingto add?Eoin McLennan Murray: It can be difficult to providefamily-friendly visiting arrangements. It takes spaceand it takes resource and time, and obviously all thesethings are sometimes a scarcity in prison. You have tothink of other ways of addressing it.A more imaginative use of release on temporarylicence, or ROTL, for women would be a very goodway of ensuring that there could be pleasant contact ingood surroundings. We have already said that womendo not pose the same kind of risks that men do, so youcould be far more imaginative. Historically, we used tobe more imaginative with the use of temporary releasefor women. That would be one way of facilitatingvisits.The other would be to utilise IT more. We live in a worldof e-mail, and we can censor e-mail electronically.Why couldn’t we provide e-mail facilities or videoconferencing facilities? Why couldn’t we make thesetechnologies more accessible, particularly to womenand to foreign nationals, so that they can maintaincontact? It is not that expensive, and it is somethingthat you can monitor very closely if you are concernedabout security, but we seem to have an aversion toembracing some of these new technologies. Theywould offer cheaper and quicker solutions to some ofthese long-term problems.Q241 Steve Brine: Skype, for instance.Eoin McLennan Murray: Yes, Skype, absolutely. Andit is free, as well.Q242 Steve Brine: The hardware is not free, but—Eoin McLennan Murray: We usually have thehardware in most prisons.Q243 Steve Brine: As an adjunct to this, starting withMr Hardwick, I want to ask you about the treatmentof pregnant women—that is if you conclude that theyshould be anywhere near the secure estate in the firstplace.Nick Hardwick: On your last comment, there is a bigquestion about whether they should be anywhere nearthe secure estate in the first place, but, assuming thatthey are, there are three areas that I would touch upon.One is, in a sense, the appropriate level of professionalantenatal care. From the health point of view, womenshould be getting care and supervision, in the sense ofpeople being aware of what is happening to them andwhat their needs might be, and those needs should bebeing met in a sympathetic way.Secondly, there is the more general question ofsupport, that staff should be sympathetic to thosewomen’s needs. A lot of these women may end upbeing separated from their children after the birth, andthey will be anxious about what is going to happen. Allof those sorts of support needs need to be met. Thereis a role sometimes for mentors, and you see otherwomen prisoners providing that support. Thirdly, thereare some practical things around clothing, the mattresson the bed and other practical things to make life easierfor pregnant women that just get forgotten.It is about professional care, antenatal care andproviding the right sort of links with safeguarding outin the community. It is about more informal supportfor women who are anxious and upset, and it is aboutpractical things and about how the prison operates.Q244 Steve Brine: What is your experience, MrMurray? How do we treat pregnant women in thesecure estate?Eoin McLennan Murray: They are generally treatedthe same as non-pregnant women—although I shouldqualify that, because the medical support that pregnantwomen receive is good. Pre-natal health care provisionis good, and they are monitored, but in terms of regimefacilities, there is not much difference between howpregnant women and non-pregnant women are treated.Q245 Gareth Johnson: Mr Corbyn has coveredsome of the areas that I was going to speak about,including on small custodial units, but I have a coupleof questions arising out of what you said earlier.When the President of the Prison GovernorsAssociation says that 80% of women in custody shouldnot be there, I tend to sit up and listen. Mr Hardwick,you also said that there are women prisoners in custodywho should not be there. My question, arising fromthat, is that it is not really your role to say whether ornot people should actually be in prison. Surely, yourrole in serving society is to ensure that our custodialunits are effective and are run well, rather than actuallysaying, “These are the people who should be in prison;these are the people who should not.” That is forjudges, is it not?Nick Hardwick: I am not saying who should or shouldnot be in prison. I did not put a number on it. Myview is that prisons need to be able to care for, andhold safely, securely and decently, the people thatthey have. At the moment, there are women in prisonfor whom the system does not seem able to provideappropriate treatment and conditions. To be helpful tothe Committee, I would say that one of the reasons forthat is that there are women in prison who could bebetter dealt with outside in the community. However,I have a different role from that of the PGA, and onthe whole I steer clear of sentencing decisions. You areright, however, that we comment on the treatment andconditions of people once they are in prison.Eoin McLennan Murray: You are right in what yousay, from our perspective, from the practitioners’perspective. We just see this revolving door andcontinual reoffending rates. What we are looking atis how to reduce reoffending and therefore preventfurther victims. One of the things that we think is that,if you just put women in prison in the numbers that weare doing, you keep on exacerbating the problem.We would like to see that problem resolved, and webelieve that one of the ways of resolving it would beto have different disposals. I am not saying that theyshould not be dealt with by the courts, but just that whatis meted out by the courts we believe should be moreappropriate in terms of reducing future reoffending
Justice Committee: Evidence Ev 515 March 2013 Nick Hardwick and Eoin McLennan Murrayrates—and more effective in terms of changing thelives of these women.Q246 Gareth Johnson: The reason why I raise thatquestion is that prison governors have a crucial rolein preventing reoffending, working with people whilethey are in custody. I understand that prison governorsare frustrated at seeing the same faces coming backagain and again. Surely, it is for prison governors todeal with the people whom they have and do what theycan to improve their anti-reoffending programmes. Itis not to say, “Well, four out of five of these peopleshould not be here, and the courts have got it wrong.”Eoin McLennan Murray: Again, you are right. Thatis exactly what prison governors do. Regrettably,however, most of what we do is ineffective, partlybecause they are such short sentences and because ofthe resources required. There are resources, but you donot have the time to meet some of the needs of thewomen, and they could be met more appropriatelyelsewhere. There is a better solution to this. That is thepoint that we are making, but at the moment we seemto be fixed on locking people up, and we do not believethat that serves society.Nick Hardwick: May I add one brief point? There isone group of women in prison now who definitelyshould not be, and that is at the more extreme end,with women who have the most acute mental healthproblems. It seems to me that they should be cared forin a hospital rather than in a custodial establishment.If you go to a place like the care unit at Styal, wherethe level of mental health distress is extreme, I defyanyone to come out of that and say that prison is anappropriate place for these people. They should becared for in a hospital.Gareth Johnson: We need to make that point, MrChairman.into the area in which they are held. If you are a womanoffender who lives in the west midlands conurbation,there is no local prison in that area from which youcan make the link between the prison establishmentand the community. You are likely to have womengoing back to that area from a whole range of differentestablishments, and it is not clear from the proposalsas they currently stand how that link will be madebetween the prisons and community provision. That isa problem for all prisons, but it is particularly acute forwomen’s prisons. If you ask the MOJ, they will say,“Yes, we recognise that that is an area where we stillhave to do more work.” They will acknowledge thepoint, but I would say that they need to get on with itand solve that problem.Q248 Chair: Is it not the reality that the proposalshave been drawn up to create better links and morethrough-the-gates care for male prisoners but that,when applying it to the female estate, one immediatelycomes up against the fact that the female estate, inmost people’s view, is wrongly configured?Nick Hardwick: Precisely so. It will be difficultenough in the male estate. There is talk, which wouldbe a good thing, about trying to organise prisons ona regional basis, but you are still going to have maleprisoners held in prisons away from the areas to whichthey will relocate. Unless you radically change wherewomen are held, the women’s estate, that problem isgoing to be more acute.The whole business about prisons, and women’sprisons in particular, has almost been forgotten in someof the thinking, and there needs to be some catching-upon it. It goes back to the point about leadership. Youfeel that you are always having to remind people aboutthis issue, rather than it being at the forefront of theirminds.Q247 Chair: What are the implications for the post-Corston agenda of the Government’s decision jointlyto commission rehabilitative provision across prisonsand probation?Nick Hardwick: I have said on a number of occasionsthat there is a hole in the Government’s thinking moregenerally about rehabilitation, because what happens inprisons seems to be very much a second order priorityin the proposals as a whole. The proposals neglect therole that prisons should play in preparing prisoners forrelease and reducing the risk that they reoffend. Thereis much to applaud in the proposals. The role thatprisons will play, and how the community providerswill link up with what happens in prisons generally,has not been properly thought through yet.Things are more acute for women’s prisons. The reasonis this. Because of the location of prisons as they arenow, women prisoners are less likely to be released________________Q249 Chair: Does that have any implications for theexisting prison and criminal justice joint inspectionregimes? You do quite a lot of joint inspections, do younot?Nick Hardwick: We need to see the arrangements indetail, but we work very closely with the probationinspectorate at the moment and we go into prisonstogether. That is quite profitable, because, certainlywhen we are looking at rehabilitation, at the momentwhat we tend to look at is the process—they are doingthe sorts of things, or not doing them, that ought tobe improved. If we can link that up with what theprobation inspectorate is doing in the community,we can come to a more definite conclusion, and thatwould be helpful. The relationships that we have at themoment can be developed to work in the new system.I am looking forward to that.
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