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

Women offenders: after the Corston Report 71184. The Secretary of State told us that he intends the commissioning reforms to betteralign rehabilitative services in custody with those in the community, as proposed in ourprobation report. Consequently, the Government plans to reconfigure the custodial estateto designate specific prisons as “resettlement hubs” with closer links to particulargeographical areas may also prove more difficult in the female prison estate as the problemof distance from home communities is more acute than for men. HM Chief Inspector ofPrisons was unsure how this could be resolved without radically changing where womenare held. 384185. The cost of women’s prisons is disproportionately high. 385 Women’s prisons are moreexpensive to run, and each intervention, including mental health and drug treatment, andtraining, is more costly to deliver than in male prisons. The current benchmarking reviewmay therefore impact disproportionately on the female prison estate. Rachel Halford ofWomen in Prison attributed some improvements in the treatment of women in custody toincreases in levels of staff in women’s establishments, but feared that this could deterioratein the face of staffing reductions. 386Small custodial units186. Baroness Corston disputed the previous Government’s primary reason for notaccepting the need for small custodial units which they argued was “because womenthemselves did not want them”. While on the face of it, she could accept this, for example,as in prison environments women’s disputes tend to result in bullying, she believed thatthis could be overcome with appropriately enforced respect policies. 387 She was alsosceptical about arguments that their costs would make them unfeasible: “[...] the cost ofrunning these 13 women’s prisons is astronomical. I think that, probably, the cost overallof having small custodial units may well be the same, but the cost in terms of disruption tohuman lives and to society is incalculable [...] For me, the cost, both in financial andhuman terms, of small custodial units is made.” 388 She acknowledged that issues such asstaffing models may require adaptation but she did not consider these to beinsurmountable, giving the example of the 218 Centre in Scotland as proof that theproposition could work. 389384 Qq 247–248385 Q 287386 Q 166387 Q 5388 Q 16389 Q 16, Qq 25–26. In her report she proposed that staffing for such units would, over time, be removed from PrisonService control to be run by specialists.