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

Women offenders: after the Corston Report 21orders include a punitive element. Other options such as tagging and curfews canalso be used to provide greater monitoring and structure to offenders’ lives.2. Ensuring the provision of services in the community that recognise and address thespecific needs of female offenders, where these are different from those of maleoffenders.3. Tailoring the women’s custodial estate and regimes so that they reform andrehabilitate offenders effectively, punish properly, protect the public fully, and meetgender specific standards, and locate women in prisons as near to their families aspossible; and4. Through the transforming rehabilitation programme, supporting better lifemanagement by female offenders ensuring all criminal justice system partnerswork together to enable women to stop reoffending.The document to a large extent restated existing priorities but also announced the creationof a new Advisory Board for female offenders to be chaired by Helen Grant MP. ThisBoard will provide expert advice and work across Government and with key stakeholderson: i) enhancing provision in the community; ii) designing the system for implementingthe transforming rehabilitation proposals; iii) reviewing the women’s prison estate; and iv)developing a ‘whole system’ approach, within and outside the criminal justice system. Wewelcome the production of a set of strategic priorities for women offenders but theyneed to be given substance, and we believe that the recommendations we make in thisReport should be the basis for taking the priorities forward.New governance arrangements45. We now consider whether the Advisory Board, and other mechanisms for crossdepartmentaloversight, constitutes the clear governance structure that our witnesses calledfor. Helen Grant initially proposed that the Board would include other GovernmentMinisters—which she believed would “pull all the levers we need to pull right acrossWhitehall to get the job done”—but subsequently clarified that cross-departmentalmembers would be at official level. 91 She explained why this decision had been taken:We believe that the work streams on which the Board will focus will benefit from thedirect engagement of officials, who will bring to the table a detailed knowledge oftheir policy areas and how they impact on female offenders and those women at riskof entering the justice system. There is, of course, a clear expectation that theseofficials will engage with their Ministers on specific issues, where necessary. I mayalso invite Ministerial colleagues to attend a particular meeting of the Board, orotherwise to be engaged in its work, where this would be helpful. 92She envisaged that the Advisory Board would build on existing inter-departmental workwith: the Department of Health on liaison and diversion services from police custody andfrom court, and on pilots for intensive treatment-based alternatives to custody; the Home91 Q 25992 Ev 128