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

Ev 56 Justice Committee: Evidence26 March 2013 Helen Grant MP, Ian Porée and Michael Spurrmeasures. The softer measures, relating to individuals’response when they come back—how they involvethemselves in employment and so on—do matter. Weare collecting those data now, which should give us abetter understanding going forward.Steve Brine: There is something else, but we willmove on.Q272 Chair: Can I look at the issue of deaths incustody, which was, of course, the starting point forCorston? There has been some improvement on that,but the INQUEST group published a research reporthighlighting serious flaws in the learning processfollowing inquests into deaths in custody. It identifiedpatterns in cases of deaths in custody: histories ofdisadvantage and complex needs; inappropriate use ofimprisonment; isolation from families; prison beingunable to meet women’s needs; poor medical care;and limited access to therapeutic services. Incidentally,those are all things of which we saw the oppositeyesterday, as better attention is being given to themthere. However, that range of criticisms, the continuedhigh rate of deaths in custody among women and thevery high rate of self-harm all suggest that you havesome way to go yet. Do you agree? What are you doingabout it?Helen Grant: Lessons always have to be learned.We take the findings from coroners’ inquests veryseriously indeed. Of course, this information has toinform our policies, initiatives and strategies. Again,this is Michael’s area, so I ask him to comment.Michael Spurr: I do not think it is fair to say that wedo not try to learn lessons from coroners’ inquestsor, indeed, incidents as they occur. We have a groupwithin headquarters—the safe custody team—thatlooks specifically at incidents of self-harm and deathsin custody and is dedicated to learning from those.Overall levels of both self-harm and deaths in custodyhave reduced. With self-harm, that is particularlybecause of reductions in the female estate; it hasactually gone up in the male estate, with young men,but it has come down significantly with women, interms of both the number of women who have beenself-harming and the number of incidents of self-harm.The number of deaths is relatively small, because thefemale estate is relatively small. You therefore have tobe very careful about statistical analysis, but thankfullythere have been fewer deaths. The overall rate ofsuicide is as low as it has been since the mid-80s. Thatis not completely by accident—it is because we havebeen trying to learn lessons.We work very closely with INQUEST. The MinisterialBoard and Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths inCustody have supported us in that work. We sit withINQUEST and others and look at what learning we cantake out. The reality is that an awful lot of what thereport from INQUEST said, which I do not disagreewith, acknowledges the very complex needs thatwomen have. The whole issue around mental health—the vulnerability that women have when coming intocustody, which puts them at a much greater risk of bothself-harm and, therefore, potential suicide—makes itnecessary to do the type of work that I was talkingabout earlier to identify the specific interventions thatwe can develop to address those needs, and that canmake the difference. The type of support groups thatwe put together for women to address, in custody, thewhole issue of abuse that many women have sufferedare things that we neglected for far too long; we havebeen trying to do more of those. I do not think that weare resting on our laurels at all. Do I think we havefurther to go? Absolutely, because every incidentof self-harm and every death is unacceptable fromanybody’s perspective—we do not want that to happen.In no way are we where we want to be, but I believethat we have been making progress on that.Q273 Chair: It has long been this Committee’s viewthat initial training for prison officers is too limited. Towhat extent do you give additional or special training tothose who are going into the women’s custody estate?Michael Spurr: Since 2007, we have developed specificwomen’s awareness training. I will not disagree withyou that we would like to be able to give our staff alot more training and professional development. TheCommittee has made that point before, and I haveagreed with it before. There is an affordability issue. Icannot hide from that, but we have developed specificwomen’s awareness training, which I think has helped.It goes along with the whole line of trying to getgender-specific arrangements in place for managingthe women’s prison population, which, it is now fullyaccepted, is different from the mainstream populationwe deal with, which is obviously dominated by men.Q274 Chair: Do you think that the rough balanceof male and female officers in the women’s estate isright? Do you have a view on what it should be in mostinstitutions?Michael Spurr: It is about right. It is about 60% femaleand 40% male. On both male and female, I would notwant it to be very different from that; around 60%to 40% is about the balance that you would wantfor the specific gender of the population. In someprisons where the figure is slightly below 60%—notby much—I would want it to be up to 60% womenin the establishment. That is a reasonable benchmarkfor what we think operates properly, while being ableto provide equality of opportunity for women to workin male establishments and for men to work in femaleestablishments. Equally, we must recognise the specificneeds of the population, as obviously there are certainfunctions that can be carried out only by somebodyof the same sex as the offender. It is a necessaryrequirement, therefore, to have a higher proportion ofthe gender that we are managing in a particular prison.Q275 Chair: Are there any problems with getting thatbalance right?Michael Spurr: There have been. The problemsnormally occur if you re-role a prison and have thewrong mix. We have not done that for a while. We wentthrough a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when wewere changing men’s prisons into women’s prisons;that is when most of the issues occurred. You may thenhave the wrong balance, and switching that over isdifficult. Of late, we have not done that. The only rerolehas been the other way—out of the female estate,for Morton Hall to become an immigration removalcentre—so that is less of an issue. We recruit to the