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

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Ev 88Justice Committee: EvidenceQ.8 Have plans for “Titan” Prisons been shelved? Have experimental “villages”—style prisons beeninvestigated (Denmark or Iceland)?Q.9 How are they going to resource 78% of women coming back to Newhall? Re-offending is too high.Q.10 Do you really think that you understand women’s needs and if not, what are you willing to do about it,apart from getting data you don’t act on?September 2012Written evidence from the Corston Independent Funders’ Coalition (CIFC)The Corston Independent Funders’ Coalition (CIFC) welcomes the Justice Select Committee Inquiry intowomen and the Criminal Justice System (CJS). The CIFC brings together a group of charitable Trusts andFoundations which have funded voluntary sector agencies that work in the criminal justice field over severaldecades. For this reason we wanted to draw the Committee’s attention to the very different and specific rolewhich charitable foundations play generally in the criminal justice sector and more particularly in helping toprogress the recommendations of the Corston Report. (In 2010 alone it is estimated that independent fundersinvested over £34 million in work with offenders, both in the community and in prisons.) The CIFC wasformed in 2008 to press for the full implementation of the Corston Report and to work together withgovernment departments and the voluntary sector to support that implementation. It represented a uniquecollaboration of grant makers bringing their joint influence to bear in advocating for the reform needed in anarea of social justice in which we are key stakeholders. The Corston “blueprint for reform” offered the chanceto develop a system-change model required to address the specific needs of women offenders and those at riskof offending thereby providing a just and proportionate disposal for women that ensured the gender equalityduty was upheld.As independent funders we have both the evidence and insights to support the proposition that prison is notthe best way to reduce women’s offending and that for most women community based projects are moreeffective. With the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) we have provided specific funding that has developed sustainedand strengthened holistic women’s community services and, in Women’s Breakout, created an infrastructurewhich, it is hoped, will maintain their development.To give some context to our involvement with this agenda: in 2008, the MoJ took up our offer of constructivedialogue and we worked closely with Maria Eagle, Champion for Women in the CJS, and officials as they tookforward the implementation of key Corston recommendations. Following on from the allocation of £15.6million in 2009 to develop and expand the network of women’s projects with wraparound integrated services,we joined with the MoJ in a ground-breaking partnership. Our match-funding of the two phases of the Women’sDiversionary Fund (WDF) in 2010 and 2011 provided a further investment of over £5 million to sustain thenetwork of over 30 women’s projects and establish Women’s Breakout, their infrastructure organisation. Ashighlighted in the Cass Business School’s review of the CIFC in 2011, “Funders in Collaboration”, “withoutthe WDF there would have been no initial £2 million to sustain projects coming to the end of previous MoJfunding or to develop services where there were important gaps. And there would have been no £3.2 millionrescue package for women’s centres, many of which would have run out of funding and folded long beforeApril 2012”.CIFC has maintained its interest and commitment to the women’s agenda, an interest we sadly feel is notmatched by Ministers, given the lack of sustained focus on reform and the absence of a strategy to achieve it.The unusual and real partnership between the charitable Trusts and Foundations and the statutory authoritiesrepresented, in our view, a golden opportunity to do things differently. We are deeply disappointed by themissed opportunity represented by the failure by the MoJ and NOMS to follow through on that partnership.CIFC continues to meet with officials in the hope of bringing our influence to bear and to share our experiencein sponsoring innovation, but it is apparent that our involvement is no longer a priority. Perhaps this is due toa loss of corporate memory of previous progress made and of what is needed to build on that progress. Thedismantling of the cross-departmental CJS Women’s Strategy Team and Inter-Ministerial Group on women hasmost obviously contributed to that memory loss. The lack of a transparent specific strategy for women meansthere is no obvious framework for the sustained delivery of the Corston recommendations that is sorely needed.To the CIFC, there just seems to be a confused jigsaw of what is being planned, without any clarity of visionor on outcomes sought. We remain convinced that we have an important role in this agenda, given oursubstantial investment in the development of the network of holistic women’s projects—the “bedrock” neededif there is serious intent to deal effectively with women in the community rather than custody. However, facedwith the current confused “jigsaw”, we are now unclear how our role fits in.Many Trusts have had a real interest in acting as a catalyst for voluntary sector agencies to contribute a keyrole to the innovation needed for this agenda. The MoJ and NOMS could have built on the partnership offeredby the CIFC, together with the women’s projects and Women’s Breakout—an exciting and non-departmental,outward facing partnership—and could have made that partnership a key part of the innovative systemschangeneeded. Instead, rather than engaging directly with the women’s projects, they appear to have distancedthemselves, floating them off from their sphere of influence with the plans to give Probation Trusts the
Justice Committee: Evidence Ev 89responsibility to fund/commission the projects. Funded by NOMS only until March 2013, the projects are yetagain on a “cliff edge” as their future remains precarious and gaps in provision remain.The relationship between criminal justice agencies and the voluntary and community sector has changed overthe last 15 years. The Probation Service’s long history of collaboration with voluntary and community–basedorganisations was underpinned by a mandatory top-slicing of their budgets but this has now gone and, underpressure to survive, their relationship with the sector has diminished. NOMS, and before it the Prison Service,has always had a tendency to think that “voluntary” equals “free” but over the years their appreciation of whatvoluntary sector agencies can contribute has markedly increased. Nevertheless, the CJS has relied heavily onfinancial investment from charitable funders for decades. The MoJ needs that investment but cannot assumeits automatic continuation unless it displays some energy in its proactive engagement of Trusts as an equalpartner. The lack of sustained engagement with Trusts’ interests in innovation and systems-change brings areal risk that they could turn their attention away from the CJS to more fruitful ground.We are convinced that this Inquiry presents a real opportunity to set out to Ministers the steps that arerequired to get the Corston agenda back on track.Key elements needed:1. A published strategy which sets out the Government’s plans to reduce the number of womengiven a custodial sentence by making full use of the community services available. This strategyshould contain a route map which shows:(a) How, in the light of the move to localised commissioning, the position of the centres issufficiently strengthened that they stand a fair chance in a very difficult commissioningenvironment.(b) Markers on the journey towards successful localisation which signpost how, over the nextthree or four years the women’s centres’ evidence base across all of the outcomes ofinterest to local commissioners is improved; which recognises their role in joining upservice responses to the wider set of “women at risk” issues and which underlines theirrole in helping local commissioners fulfil their collective Gender Duty responsibilities.2. How this agenda connects with other disparate current policy elements, such as “TroubledFamilies” or Violence against Women, by drawing them together to improve their impact andachieve the best “gains” from the social and economic impact of holistic services for womenat risk and not just women who have offended.Not least amongst these gains are the financial benefits of limiting the next generation ofoffenders.3. How the necessary joint working across departments centrally and locally will be achieved.4. How the strategy will be delivered and lead—clear leadership together with the coreinfrastructure and champions needed to deliver sustained reform.5. Better use of the Gender Duty as a lever for change and engagement with sentencing, both inits formulation and delivery.6. CIFC itself needs Ministers to engage in a genuine partnership with both funders and thevoluntary sector, taking advantage of the creativity, experience and commitment there to makereal progress in achieving systems-change through innovative approaches to practice andresourcing mechanisms.September 2012Written evidence from Clinks and the Reducing Reoffending Third Sector Advisory GroupThis evidence is submitted jointly by Clinks and the Reducing Reoffending Third Sector Advisory Group(RR3). Clinks is the national umbrella body supporting Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisationsworking with offenders and their families and provides the Secretariat to the RR3. The RR3 recently respondedto a request by Crispin Blunt, Minister for Prisons and Probation, to convene a time-limited Task & Finishgroup to produce a series of recommendations on women. The resulting paper (published May 2012) addressedthe need for a distinct national approach to women at risk of offending and discussed the urgent need forclarity over where responsibility for specialist services for women will be located in the shifting commissioningenvironment. The final paper with a full list of contributing VCS organisations accompanies this submission.The Task & Finish group took a dynamic approach to the task by analysing the key routes of girls andwomen into and out of the CJS and considering how to stem the flow in a more gender-sensitive way. Thisrouting exercise revealed the larger reality that successive failures to divert girls and women into genderspecificand supportive community-based services have allowed the escalation of chaos in their lives andperpetuated the vulnerability to abuse that very often leads to tragic consequences for the women, their families
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