My Lords, I thank all who will contribute today for staying until the last moment before the House rises for a well-earned recess. There is a wealth of expertise on the list of speakers, and I greatly look forward to hearing everyone’s contribution.
Opening a debate provides the opportunity, perhaps even the responsibility, to stand back a little and set the scene. Last month the Ministry of Justice launched the final report from my review, Importance of Strengthening Female Offenders’ Family and Other Relationships to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime—quite a mouthful. Commissioned as part of the female offender strategy, in effect I was asked to look at women in the criminal justice system through the lens of family and other relational ties.
Obviously, it is my intention that this debate should go much wider than that. However, over the course of the review, I became aware of just how fundamentally important healthy and supportive relationships are to women in the criminal justice system, and how many other problematic issues stem from a lack of these. Ministry of Justice research identifies them as women’s biggest criminogenic need. If a woman has bad relationships and lacks good relationships, she is at greater risk of reoffending.
Nearly three-quarters of all female offenders, whether in custody or serving sentences in the community, have problems with relationships that increase this likelihood. This rises to over 80% of female prisoners. Many enter custody from chaotic relationships from which they require protection, and domestic abuse, which frequently includes pressure from coercive partners to commit crime, lurks in the background for 57% of them. Over half experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse in their family backgrounds and almost one-third spent time in care as children. Unresolved trauma related to such adversities in childhood or later life typically drives unhealthy coping strategies such as substance misuse and self-harm. Indeed, women’s vulnerabilities, concentrated in the criminal justice system, are the distillation of the breakdown of family and other relationships so prevalent in our wider society.
My concern about this and the lack of a comprehensive and coherent government strategy to address it was a key motivator for my becoming involved in politics over 12 years ago. It is a quarter of a century since the then aspirant Labour Prime Minister talked generally about being tough on the causes of crime and particularly about the role played by family breakdown. The implication was clear then and still is now: we need to do more to prevent crime happening in the first place. Research from the Centre for Social Justice, which controlled for factors such as socioeconomic grade and ethnicity, found that those who experience family breakdown in their childhood or youth are over twice as likely to experience homelessness, be in trouble with the police or spend time in prison.
My Lords, the timings in today’s debate are very tight, so I think the House would appreciate it if all noble Lords speaking could keep to the time limits on the Order Paper.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. He has given us an extremely brilliant and articulate account of the prison system and the place of women in it. He has given us a wonderful start.
It is widely recognised that our prisons, as well as our entire criminal justice system, are designed with male offenders in mind. Their structure and practices, and the assumptions we make about who is likely to commit a crime and what the consequences of being in prison will be, are all based on a male offender being the central character. In recent years, women have been recognised as offenders, but that is more of an add-on to our larger thinking than a central or constitutive principle of our way of designing the criminal justice system. That is the point we are here to debate and talk about.
In recent years, the number of women in prison has increased. Broadly, the figures are as follows: there are 82,700 prisoners in total, of whom 78,900 are male and 3,800 are female. The most common indictable offence for both male and female offenders is shoplifting, but again one begins to see the difference with 17% of offenders being men and 38% women. If we look at the cases of self-harm in prison, which are very tragic and very disturbing, women are five times more likely than men to commit self-harm, largely because they are worried about their children, what will happen to the family and to their children’s education, and about the bullying and name-calling in school that their children might go through. As a result, they undergo a period of depression almost bordering on psychosis, which is what the Farmer report talks about and which I think is absolutely right.
In the light of all that, the questions we need to ask ourselves are threefold. First, how do we reduce the number of female offenders and prisoners? Secondly, how can their treatment in prisons be made more humane? Thirdly, how can they be integrated in the community? To answer these three questions and achieve these three objectives we have to think of female-specific needs. What needs of female offenders are peculiar to them and not shared with men? We need to address that and provide female-specific solutions to these questions. That is broadly what I intend to do in the next four minutes.
3:21 pm
The Lord Bishop of Rochester
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for obtaining this debate and for his unstinting efforts in this area, not least the welcome emphasis in his most recent report on relationships, which he expounded so clearly when introducing this debate.
I am sorry that the right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Gloucester and the Bishop of Newcastle are not in their places today, because they both take a very close and informed interest in the issues around women in the criminal justice system. However, I have visited a good number of women’s prisons over the last few years and, in making those visits, I have been both shocked and inspired.
I have been shocked, saddened and disturbed, as I have met some of the most vulnerable and damaged people that I have ever encountered in our society: women who have been “done to”, usually by men, often from their earliest days and, in some cases, from before their births. As many studies show, and the noble Lord’s reports build on them, issues which we find in the wider prison population—poor mental and physical health, self-harm, addiction, being victims of abuse and violence—are writ large among women in the criminal justice system. These women are often convicted of crimes committed on behalf of another, usually a man, such as theft to support a partner’s drug-taking or prostitution, where a male pimp takes the money and the woman takes the risk, often out of desperation, and then takes the punishment.
I have been shocked and saddened, in many respects, but also inspired sometimes by the sheer fortitude and resilience of some of the women I have met and their determination, despite everything, to turn things around. I recall one woman, whom I met in HMP Styal. We participated in a filmed piece of research by the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, which I think is still available on YouTube. She was preparing for release after a lifetime of considerable difficulties. She had reached the stage where she was going out each day to work for a charity in one of our larger cities, thereby herself supporting other vulnerable people. She had, with considerable determination and a lot of support, turned her life around, and I found that inspiring.
I have also been inspired by some of the staff, and their commitment and passion for the work in which they are engaged, in our women’s prisons and in some of the community initiatives. I recall, on a visit to HMP Eastwood Park, meeting a male prison officer, probably in his 50s, and having the opportunity to talk to him about his role. He spoke to me about the delicacy of maintaining proper boundaries between himself and the female prisoners for whom he cared. He observed that, for some of those women, the relationship that they had with him was probably the first adult to adult relationship they had ever had with a man that was not abusive. The opportunity that he had, as a man in that setting, to try and set a different pattern, I found quietly inspirational.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for bringing this debate to the House today and for the opportunity to take part. His excellent published review shows how relationships are so important for women and for the personal emotional needs of women in the criminal justice system. We need to see a new course of action.
I am pleased to acknowledge the ongoing work between the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and Public Health England in developing a treatment requirement programme which aims to reduce the number of community sentences, addressing prisoners with mental health and drug and alcohol issues. It is being tested in courts across five areas in England. We know that stable accommodation is a key factor in reducing reoffending.
What will be effective is making the shift from prison to more community sentences, backed up by a probation system that commands the confidence of the courts and the public. When a prison sentence is being considered, it is recommended that comprehensive pre-sentence reports are prepared, but at the moment there appears to be a lack of comprehensive reports. It is plainly unacceptable for magistrates and judges to sentence a person to custody without the benefit of essential information and advice on why they offended and their current circumstances. This limits alternative sentencing options. Prisons and probation services are therefore often left without vital information to manage the individual’s case after they are sentenced.
The main issue to tackle is, again, the lack of accommodation, to address barriers to claiming universal credit, along with better access to mental health and substance misuse treatment. Community supervision is less likely to have a negative impact on employment and family time and is better chosen over prison sentences. There has to be more investment in the probation service, as it is the key driver of maintaining that thread to the outside world, with its work and family. This would avoid as much as possible prisoners becoming institutionalised and ultimately losing hope. As research shows, the more a prisoner is released on a temporary licence, the less chance there is of them reoffending, but they need support throughout.
My Lords, I refer to the disclosures that I have made in the register of interests; those interests have continued. I warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on obtaining this debate and on his two excellent reports, in particular his second report, The Importance of Strengthening Prisoners’ Family Ties to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime. I hope that his recommendations are accepted.
I cannot help but indicate that I am sad that events in the wider political field mean that we have lost a Minister of Justice who I thought was exceptional in his attempt to acquire knowledge of the problems in the prison system and to promote changes that would help to break the cycle that has gripped our prisons for so long. Time is needed for the changes that are necessary in the prison system; the constant turnover of Ministers of Justice has been an unfortunate aspect of the scene for as long as I have known it.
There is no doubt that, when it comes to sentencing female offenders, special considerations arise. This has already been accepted by the Ministry of Justice. However, regrettably, insufficient effect has been given to this recognition. It is my hope that the second of the reports for which the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is responsible will have the effect of redressing that.
I am a recently retired member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which has considered this subject recently. There will be a report from the Joint Committee in due course—after the Recess, probably in September. One of the matters focused on in the report is the effect that imprisoning mothers has on their children. It also stresses that the Human Rights Act requires, as a matter of law, the human right to family life of children. In considering this subject in relation to women, I suggest that considerable importance should be attached to that matter. The unfortunate fact is that the regeneration of criminals, as generations pass, is one matter that explains why we have such a consistent problem within our prison system. We must realise that if we do not get our approach to women and mothers right, that will continue. We will keep on creating the circumstances that lead to generation after generation being the subject of intervention from our criminal justice system.
My Lords, I am most grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. It touches on issues with which I was closely aligned before coming to this House. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Farmer for introducing this excellent debate and conducting this new review, further to his very good review in 2017. It makes important recommendations that highlight the need to address the specific circumstances of female offenders. In particular, I wholeheartedly agree with my noble friend that the promotion of strong family ties and other relationships must be the golden thread running through the whole criminal justice system. Prisoners who receive family visits are, as previously mentioned, 39% less likely to reoffend. Research suggests that these relationships are even more important for women than men. We cannot ignore this significant figure.
Furthermore, according to the Office for National Statistics, 22% of females in prison are serving sentences of less than 12 months, compared with 9% of males. Sadly, women are easily caught in the so-called revolving door, with short prison sentences. They lose their homes and often custody of their children, which exacerbates a downward spiral into more serious offences and an inability to secure the vital employment they need. Prison is and should continue to be the appropriate option for women who commit serious crimes. However, for those who commit less serious, non-violent offences, there are alternatives.
As mentioned before, last year I too visited the Nelson Trust women’s centre in Gloucester. It is clear to me that female offenders are among the most vulnerable in our society. As part of the female offender strategy launched last year, the Government committed to working with local and national partners to develop a residential women’s centre pilot in at least five sites across England and Wales, offering an alternative to short custodial sentences. As per the Minister’s Written Statement last month, I am pleased that the Government have recently concluded the first phase of the consultation to inform the scope of the project, and will now continue to consult to refine the design and delivery of the pilot. This is encouraging.
My Lords, I, too, welcome this debate and the report of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. It was a full and sensible report, with many practical recommendations for supporting female offenders as they pass through the criminal justice system. I remind the House that I sit as a magistrate in adult, youth and family jurisdictions, and it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, as we sat on the same youth panel for a number of years.
I shall concentrate on the purpose and utility of short sentences for women—I am talking about sentences of six months or less. The current position will be well known to participants in today’s debate, but I shall briefly set out some of the statistics, many of which other noble Lords have referred to.
There are 78,000 men in prison in England and Wales and 4,000 women. Shoplifting is the most common offence for which women are imprisoned. Statistics from the Revolving Doors Agency indicate that three in five women report drug or alcohol dependency when arriving in prison—that is a higher proportion than for men; one in four are homeless when they are released; seven in 10 reoffend within one year of release; and eight in 10 of those convicted of theft reoffend within one year of release. Many agencies agree on the common factors among women prisoners. They are more likely than men to self-harm when in prison; custodial sentences increase the risk that dependent children will also fall into a life of crime; and more than half of women prisoners have experienced domestic abuse.
In a speech earlier this year, David Gauke said—I think quite frankly—that the impact on women of short custodial sentences was “particularly significant” and that they often caused,
“huge disruption to the lives of their families”.
He said that he believed there was a strong case for abolishing short sentences.
3:58 pm
Lord Bhatia (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for initiating this debate on the Motion that this House takes note of the needs of women in the criminal justice system. One has to look at the reasons why women end up in prisons. These are varied and many, and largely depend on whether the woman is from a BAME community or the majority white community. However, the common factors are: violence at home by the husband or other family members; the poverty of the family; and, because of poverty, shoplifting, which becomes necessary to feed or clothe the family, particularly the children.
From reading the documents of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and from my own experience, there is perhaps a need for women judges to preside over these proceedings, since male judges may not comprehend why a woman is being charged. The law in such cases is blind as to which sex is being charged. Similarly, there may be a need for women lawyers and solicitors to appear on behalf of a woman being charged, and the Crown prosecutors should also be women. The best practice is to increase the number of women police in charge of such cases.
There are also considerable variations when women from BAME communities come to court to face trial. Translators should be present to translate questions put by prosecutors and judges. Some women from BAME communities do not speak or understand proper English. Many years ago, before there were translators in court, there was a case in which an Asian woman was asked whether she was guilty of killing her husband. The woman thought that the judge was asking whether she had made a mistake, because there is a word, “gulti”, that means “mistake” in her mother tongue, and she said yes. The judge thought she had pleaded guilty and put her in prison for a long time for murder. In the prison, some white inmates were very friendly and asked her what had happened and why she had killed her husband. She was able to explain that her husband had continually beaten her for the smallest error, or came home fully drunk and assaulted her. She suffered this over a long period until, one day, she could take this violence no more and, while her husband was sleeping, she murdered him. The women in the prison persuaded her and her solicitors to go to court to reopen the case, because she had not pleaded guilty and because she had been provoked to end his life by years of being beaten up. The Court of Appeal finally released her.
In the subcontinent, a woman’s position is still considered inferior. While I was a trustee of Oxfam, many years ago, I was given a very moving report and a letter from a social worker in India, Dr Jha, a lady with a great understanding of a woman’s position in an Indian family. I would be happy to give the full report to any noble Lord who would like to read it. It was a story of a family with a son and a daughter. The mother said that whenever she or her daughter fell sick, the local village quack was called in, but if the husband or the son fell ill, the trained doctor had to be called and they were hospitalised in the best hospitals. During mealtimes, the son and the husband ate first, and if there was meat, most of it was eaten by the husband and the son. The statement that the mother and the daughter made was, “Do you see why we look so frail and thin?”
4:05 pm
20 of 45 shown
Around a quarter of families with dependent children are headed by a single parent, which has perhaps normalised relationship breakdown. An understandable zeal to avoid piling stigma on top of the very heavy load single parents already bear can hamper public discussion about the significant challenges they face. They can also be framed almost exclusively in terms of financial poverty, as lack of money is a major problem for half of single parents. The lack of a co-parenting relationship to ease the load is a less readily acknowledged challenge, which is greatly amplified when a woman becomes enmeshed in the criminal justice system. The dependent children of three-quarters of women in prison are not looked after by their fathers. One study found that adult children of imprisoned mothers are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than adult children of imprisoned fathers.
Such evidence compels me to support this and former Governments’ efforts to keep women out of prison where possible, as such punishment encroaches on family life in many troubling ways. The damage done to good relationships is one of the “referred” pains of imprisonment, the psychosocial burdens experienced by an inmate’s family members. These pains are particularly acute when it is a primary carer who is behind bars.
Professor Nicola Lacey from the LSE points out that for most of the two centuries in which imprisonment has been routinely imposed as punishment for crime, the systems of thought and governance on which it rests have focused on,
“the individual offender and his or her relationship with the state”.
She goes on:
“Penal philosophy’s strongly individualistic presuppositions about the nature of human beings and social relations are open to challenge”.
Hence my call for the importance of family and other relationships to be the golden thread running through all processes and the culture of the criminal justice system, including liaison and diversion services, sentencing, probation and prison. Ministry of Justice research found that male and female prisoners who received family visits were 39% less likely to reoffend than those who do not. Healthy and supportive relationships are undoubtedly rehabilitation assets. Enabling offenders to maintain and strengthen these relationships where appropriate must be valued as much as other rehabilitation activities such as employment and education. Indeed, this is the third leg of the stool alongside these, and can bring stability, meaning and motivation to offenders’ lives.
As I have already touched upon, female offenders are typically among the most vulnerable members of society. This word is used so frequently in relation to female offenders that we need to understand exactly what it means. From the Latin “vulnerabilis”, it means “wounding” or being susceptible to “attack”, “physical harm or damage” or,
“emotional injury, especially in being easily hurt”.
This describes very well many of the women I met in prison, or those serving community sentences. Deprivation of liberty, the purpose of detention, has to be accompanied by diligent exercise of the duty of care. This has to involve thinking ahead to when a woman leaves prison, where she will live and who will be there to meet her.
While I was deeply motivated to improve the lives of mothers in prison and their children, many women have no children and no one in their family able or willing to come and see them. About half of prisoners may have no family or other visits and some have no supportive relationships at all. Frankly, these are the women who concern me most. Without the safe haven of good relationships, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to rebuild their lives. When they leave prison, they lose all anchor points and are cast adrift, and life can be unbearably difficult. Many will return to drugs or other crime. Abuse and trauma can have profoundly affected their ability to develop and sustain healthy, trusting relationships.
Therefore, it is essential that all professionals, wherever they are in the criminal justice system, are trained in and adopt a trauma-informed approach, and know which relationships are rehabilitation assets in the life of a female offender and which are toxic. I recommended gathering information about a woman’s relationships, any children in her care and other circumstances, such as her accommodation, in a personal circumstances file which she, not the state, owns and controls. The aim is that, with her permission, this information is used to help her sustain or resume supportive, meaningful relationships with people with whom she might otherwise lose touch. For the more than half of women in custody who have dependent children, we need to know who and where those children are.
A key priority of my review was enabling mothers to continue to shoulder their parental responsibilities. A governor told me women often ask her, “How can I stop being a mother now that I am in prison?” She replies, “We don’t want you to stop, we want you to continue”. These women are still assets to their family and need to know it, yet the practical and emotional difficulties that mothering from inside prison entails must not be underestimated. Several of my recommendations sought to mitigate these. For example, I proposed Skype-type visits for all women who do not breach risk boundaries.
On that subject, more broadly, I encouraged governors and the Government to think about risk-to-reward ratios. As a trader, I take risks for a living based on sound intelligence and the expectation that I will reap a reward. Research suggests that taking bold and ambitious steps to make the most of prisoners’ family and other ties could reap significant gains. Whatever is learned by rolling out Skype-type visits across the small female estate will inform deployment of this technology in the much larger male estate, where the risk-to-reward ratio might be harder to gauge without the insights garnered from a pathfinder population.
I also called for workforce changes inside female prisons, largely on the advice of prison governors on the female estate, who are incredibly alive to the essential role good relationships play in rehabilitation. One told me, “I don’t want more prison officers, I want social workers and family engagement workers”. As parenting difficulties and other family factors are not addressed in the community, she often sees the third generation of offenders come through her gate.
The family engagement worker model evaluated by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology is highly effective in improving the quality of ties and resolving tensions between prisoners and family members. These workers can also help women reconnect, where necessary, with their families or friends. Much of their caseload involves supporting prisoners with ongoing children’s care proceedings, but they can struggle even to get hold of the community social worker who has a prisoner’s child on her caseload. They, and therefore the women they represent, are at a disadvantage because they do not have the same professional status. If every women’s prison had its own resident social worker, she or he could represent the interests of these women in professional dialogue with community-based social workers. In the sadly commonplace battles over custody of prisoners’ children, such equality of arms is incredibly important to ensure a just outcome.
Other noble Lords might describe the difficulties women face accessing housing on release—the desperate insecurity of those who have in some ways been kept safe in prison but are then turned out with nothing. Again, information captured in the personal circumstances file might enable contact to be made with someone who can provide a roof over her head until she gets back on her feet and, I hope, avoid the harrowing scenario of her ending up in a tent outside the prison perimeter.
A particularly pernicious Catch-22 is faced by women with children who cannot secure suitable accommodation until the family is living together, but whose children cannot join them until appropriate housing has been found. I recommended that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government change allocation guidance for local housing authorities to recognise the prospective housing needs of women leaving prison in a parallel way to families seeking large enough properties to house future foster and adoptive children. Every department of government, not just the Ministry of Justice, has a role to play in meeting the needs of women in the criminal justice system.
The Government’s implementation team, with whom I have already met, understand that the body of recommendations in the report is not a ceiling of good practice to aspire to, but a basic floor of provision. The goal is cultural change, in the criminal justice system and more widely in government.
I wanted to emphasise at the outset of this debate that meeting the relational needs of women in the criminal justice system is of fundamental importance. Without the unconditional support of at least one other human being, any talk of rehabilitation risks being empty rhetoric. Only once good foundations have been laid can we start to rebuild damaged lives. I beg to move.
First, we should reduce short-term custodial sentences. Custodial sentences should be meant only for serious and violent crimes. For others, residential women’s centres or community management should be the answer. It is also the case that those who have been confined to residential women’s centres tend to reoffend far less often than those who have been sent to prison.
The second important thing to bear in mind is that women offenders should receive more family visits. This was stressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in 1991 and by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. Crime is never committed in isolation. An isolated individual is a trigger through whom an entire social process is crystallised and explodes into a crime. Therefore, the answer to crime is to recognise this social embeddedness and the importance of relationships to the offender. This is very important. It has also been shown in the reports of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that people in prison who have been allowed more visits are 39% less likely to reoffend.
The third important female-specific factor has to do with female judges and sensitivity training for male judges. I could cite many cases where, for example, a prisoner is brought before a judge who then makes assumptions about how an ordinary person in her position would behave and judges her on those grounds, but the judgment turns out to be totally wrong because it is a woman who does not meet these assumptions. Therefore, it is not quite female jurisprudence but female-sensitive jurisprudence and female-sensitive judges that are extremely important.
In that context, it is also important to bear in mind that there are female-specific or gender-specific applications of law. Take a simple case, which happened in the United States: a Muslim woman was asked by her father-in-law to carry drugs from the United States to the UK. She was in no position to say no. Quietly, she carried them; she was arrested at the airport and given lighter punishment. A man in her position would have been treated differently. He is expected to stand up to his father-in-law and to behave independently, whereas in this case the woman had long been trained to obey, and if she dared to disobey it would have made no difference at all. Her father-in-law would simply have compelled her to do what he wanted her to do. In this case, one needs to tweak and adapt the law to the individual situation.
There are two other important factors to bear in mind. One is what is sometimes called a personal circumstances file. There should be a file for each offender, to ensure that sensitive information is easily available when it is needed. This file could be carried through the entire criminal justice system and include all the relevant information about a particular individual and the way that various factors trigger that individual’s behaviour in certain ways.
Secondly, and most importantly, the entire culture of prison needs to change. If one looks at prison, it is a macho kind of place; it is authoritarian, highly disciplined and force based. There is no sense of community. If one looks at our society, it is more informal, more sociable and warmer. Prison is a totally different picture; it is a totally different world. It is important to recognise that in prisons there could be a warmer relationship among prisoners themselves and between prisoners and wardens; it could become a community, where people are able to talk freely about their problems and solve them.
My simple suggestion is that a better understanding of the typical problems that affect women, of the circumstances under which they function and of the way in which various factors can influence their behaviour is quite important in tackling the position of the woman in the criminal justice system.
I am also inspired by the efforts of our voluntary sector organisations—many of them faith-based—often working with and alongside the chaplaincies in our prisons. If the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester were here, she would draw our attention to the work of the Nelson Trust women’s centre in Gloucester, and there are many others like it. As has been alluded to in the various reports, there are funding issues around women’s centres and the aspiration to see the formation of residential women’s centres. I applaud any efforts to move us in those directions. Those kinds of interventions are both effective and cost-effective, and the place of the voluntary sector within that world is an important one.
I want to pick up on one thing which the noble Lord spoke about in his opening comments. One of the key factors in helping all prisoners to turn away from crime is security of accommodation on release. It is a scandal that some 40% of women released from prison are released to no fixed abode. That was the figure in the independent monitoring board’s report last year into HMP Bronzefield—no wonder so many reoffend within a year of release. It may be anecdotal that charities are providing women with sleeping bags upon release, but it is true; I have seen it. As a member of our society and our nation, I am ashamed by that.
This week, I heard about a small charity, the Imago Dei Prison Ministry, working mainly with women prisoners in the south-east, where the housing issues are sometimes the most acute. This tiny charity is seeking to raise funds to buy a 12-bed house for women leaving prison, where they will have not only a roof over their heads but also continued training and support towards employment and independent living. It is a tiny initiative but an example of what needs to be happening across the country to meet the needs of women leaving our prisons. Surely it is not beyond the capacity of our society in the 21st century—given the relatively small numbers of women leaving custody—to ensure that these kinds of housing provisions are in place. The right reverent Prelates the Bishop of Gloucester and the Bishop of Newcastle are hosting a seminar in this place on 15 October around these issues. I dearly hope that some good initiatives will come out of it, and out of other thinking in this area.
Earlier in your Lordships’ House, people were offering their good wishes to Mr Johnson and his new Government. I join them in doing so, but I recall it being said that a society is often judged by how it treats the most vulnerable in its midst. Here is an opportunity for Her Majesty’s Government, and all of us in civil society, to do what we must to ensure that the judgment on us is a positive one.
However, for those in prison, I welcome the £7 million investment in new in-cell telephones to maintain family links. I agree with my noble friend Lord Farmer that each prison should have an on-site social worker to provide dedicated support for women and their children, to ensure they are able to maintain those vital ties with children and family outside the prison gate. The old system, I fear, is outdated; we want to see fewer women in custody, especially on short-term sentences, and a greater proportion of women managed in the community successfully. Having better conditions for those is unquestionably the best route forward.
The emphasis must also be on partnership working, backed up by a strong co-ordinating strategy. A key theme must be to include health, police and crime commissioners and local authorities to develop a whole-system approach. I look forward to the development of this and the publication of a national concordat on female offending by this autumn, so that we can have better joined-up working and collaboration at national and local level to improve those outcomes.
Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of supporting healthy relationships. They are utterly indispensable for every woman in the criminal justice system, helping them turn away from criminality, reduce intergenerational crime and contribute positively to society—and see it as an opportunity to take. Unfortunately, families are still having to travel and may be faced with long distances. The associated cost is certainly another barrier and a driver in breaking down family ties.
There is also evidence strongly demonstrating that prisons are not currently maximising opportunities for rehabilitation, which is being held back by restrictions related to staff shortages and other disruptions. These restrictions severely undermine the delivery of rehabilitation services: for example, those on education, mental health treatment, substance misuse treatment and offending behaviour programmes. More staff are required to drive this change.
For the future, the issue is to turn the negative into the positive and therefore create interventions, so that prisoners more often see a real opportunity to change their lives around, giving them hope for a new start. Their need for help with mental health is twice as likely as it is for men, with their more complex needs making prison a negative experience. Putting women into prison can do more harm than good to society, by failing to cut the cycle of reoffending while increasing difficult family circumstances.
Statistics show that, for women on release, only 55.8% are released with settled accommodation. As I mentioned earlier, the lack of accommodation increases the risk of reoffending and a woman’s inability to engage in employment, training and support services. Employment is worse for women following short prison sentences, with 50% of women in the CJS claiming out-of-work benefits two years later, as against 35% of men.
A strategy aiming to break the cycle must be well resourced if it is to deliver a meaningful approach to tackling the major issues. It should not only break the cycle but deliver a new start, however young or old the prisoner, with a move away from non-participation and a stop on the negative responses we hear, such as, “I will not be around long enough to change anything”. Something has to change.
One fact that comes out in the reports that have been published is that no proper statistics and records have been maintained of cases where children could be affected. I suggest that this is a worrying sign. Of the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that one should be given high priority because, if the records are not there, the defects in what happens will not be known in the way that they should. This indicates that sufficient attention is not being paid to what happens in our courts at different levels, every day, and the consequences on the responsibility of the judiciary for sentencing. The lesson has to be regularly repeated that judges have an important responsibility to make sure that they receive, in time to deal with it when it comes to sentence, sufficient information on the circumstances of the women before them. Once they have been dealt with and sent to prison, it is foolhardy not to arrange the available prison accommodation so that family ties are not prevented from operating normally because of the locations of prisons. I am afraid that that is the situation with female prisons today. It is a significant matter.
This is not a problem that is not capable of redress; it is just that one has to think about what is needed and ensure that it happens. We have to take into account that this is an important aspect of our criminal justice policy. Money will not be saved and our prisons will not be improved unless we give this the priority that it deserves. I say in the time available that, when this debate is over, we will hope that the messages that we have been learning today, from the admirable speeches that were made prior to mine, are taken into account in the future. Equally, I hope that it will be recognised that you cannot do this unless you are prepared to make proper use of the resources available.
A 2015 Ministry of Justice report found that the reoffending rate for female offenders who received support from women’s centres was lower compared with those who did not. We also know that women’s centres are a more cost-effective way of rehabilitating women than prison. Women’s centres provide an opportunity for a different path, and I strongly believe that the women’s centre model will deliver positive outcomes for more female offenders through the entire criminal justice system.
I will now speak to my noble friend Lord Farmer’s suggestion of making pre-sentence reports mandatory for all female and male primary carers before a custodial sentence is passed. I served as a magistrate for more than 20 years and, as I have said before in this House, one of the most difficult duties a magistrate faces is, where there is no alternative, to send an offender to prison. It is not a decision that is ever taken lightly, particularly when imprisoning women who have children, because of the often damaging impact that such a sentence can have on these relationships. Further, while it is important to recognise that women are likely to be the primary carer, we should also consider these recommendations for men.
When I was in the youth court, I saw first hand how essential pre-sentencing reports were in helping us come to our decision from a more informed viewpoint. I would support mandatory pre-sentencing reports for those cases where there is an opportunity for a different path to custody.
I recognise that any change in the law would increase the workload of the national probation service. However, if this measure helps break the cycle of reoffending by properly addressing and considering the vulnerability of many female offenders and their families, it is certainly worth progressing.
We must also pay more attention to the children of offenders, as previously mentioned. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 17,000 children per year are affected by maternal imprisonment, only 5% of children remain with their family when a mother goes to prison, and only 9% are cared for by their father. I was therefore pleased to see the Sentencing Council highlight to courts in its new Overarching Principles guideline the necessity of considering the effect of a sentence on dependants and ensuring that a court has the information it needs. The council also states that a PSR should be obtained when a community order or custodial sentence is being considered for any offender who has, or may have, caring responsibilities. These are welcome steps.
When considering my noble friend Lord Farmer’s recommendations regarding video-conferencing facilities and in-cell telephones, it is important to recognise, as I have mentioned previously, that prisoners who receive family visits are 39% less likely to reoffend. Maintaining these relationships can only reduce intergenerational offending.
I strongly support the recommendation that women’s prisons be prioritised for the rollout of virtual visits given the positive impact that they can have on dependants, especially when so many women offenders are primary carers whose children are likely to live far away. We can all sympathise with a child who wants to be with and speak to their mother on the first day of school, on their birthday or when they receive exam results. Video-linking and in-cell telephones will help reduce the trauma of separation, maintain relationships between offenders and their dependants; in turn, improving outcomes after they leave prison. Such facilities must of course be properly monitored and judged on a case-by-case basis.
Virtual visits should not be viewed as an alternative to face-to-face visits. They should be an addition to the ongoing rehabilitation of offenders through maintaining relationships with their dependants. Children do not deserve the punishment that might occur from their parents’ behaviour, nor to endure the generational cycle of offending. We owe it to them to support recommendations that will make their lives better and provide them with better life opportunities. We must recognise the importance of maintaining relationships between offenders and their children, family members and friends.
Tailoring interventions and the treatment of women within the criminal justice system is vital. Only then can we provide them with the appropriate environment to address their needs. Let us remember that this in turn will mean less reoffending, fewer victims of crime and a healthier society for all.
My response to that advocacy—if I may put it like that—is that I still think that short sentences have a place. One hundred per cent of the women whom I have put in custody have been through multiple community orders and, for one reason or another, have either reoffended or failed to comply with the elements of the order. In my experience—I agree on this with the noble Baroness, Lady Sater—magistrates are acutely aware of the impact. Although it may not be a statutory requirement, it is certainly common practice for there to be a full report, and one would see the impact of putting a woman in custody. However, sometimes, where there are multiple failures of community sentences, that is really the only option available to a sentencing magistrate.
There could be unfortunate side-effects if, for example, sentences of six months or less for women were banned. One would be to undermine community orders themselves if women knew that there was no way they would be sent into custody if they did not comply with the provisions of the order. Another unintended consequence could be—I am not saying this would happen—that women’s sentences would be increased to get to the minimum threshold. That would be an undesirable effect of a minimum sentence.
The whole purpose of the supervision element in the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014—12 months supervision after a short sentence—was to reduce reoffending: men or women who got short sentences would be supported by the probation services for 12 months. It would be easy to make comments about the Government’s approach to probation and the car crash of the reform the probation service. However, the problems of non-compliance with community orders have always been present, as long as there have been such orders. They were certainly present in the previous probation regimes that I was aware of. The particular vulnerabilities of women in this group have also been well understood—although the importance of domestic abuse is more apparent now than perhaps it was in the past.
I support all the elements of the Government’s female offender strategy to reduce the women’s prison population and to recognise women’s distinct needs. However, it is important that this is properly funded, so that the strategy has a full opportunity to take effect. The noble Baroness, Lady Sater, talked about the importance of women’s centres. I wholly agree with her. My own area of Hammersmith, in London, has the Minerva women’s centre. I have visited it a number of times and, as far as I can see, it is very effective in dealing with women, on both a voluntary and a statutory basis, to try to reduce reoffending. Will there be a commitment on the part of the Government that each of the 11 new probation areas will have specialist women’s support and that that will be a requirement when putting together support packages in those areas?
On one point I differ from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sater. It is a note of caution on the role of video or Skype links for mothers with children, based on my experience in the family courts. I absolutely understand and support the point that this is, or can be, a good way of maintaining family relationships. However, I deal with this type of arrangement for people in prison and for families where the parents have split up and, unfortunately, the arrangements can lead to further conflict if not sensitively handled. They can undermine the person who is actively caring for the child. From what I have been told, the children can find doing these regular Skype conferences a burdensome obligation. So they are desirable but they need to be managed in a sensitive way. This certainly happens in the family courts system; there are programmes to allow children to either maintain or restart relationships. But beyond that, I support the recommendations of the noble Lord.
The women are second-class citizens in many families. There is a belief in some families that the girl will one day be married, therefore there is no need for her to be sent to a good school for education. We hear of many cases in which rich or middle-class families are able to determine the sex of the unborn child and, if it is a girl, they get the mother to abort the child. In Pakistan, where, because of sharia, Muslim families have to give part of the family estate to the girls and the boys, many rich families do not get their daughters married but keep them at home until they die. I emphasise that such practices have considerably lessened because of new laws put in place by Governments in the subcontinent.
One last thing that needs to be said is that, despite the inequalities for women I have mentioned, there have been women Prime Ministers such as Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. In the UK, however, inequality and violence against all BME communities continues, resulting in deaths and divorces, and women escaping from home to shelters provided by the Government and by the work done by the Seven Sisters. In addition, husbands bring in brides from the subcontinent to become baby machines. They are expected by the family to cook and do housework, and are rarely allowed to go out.
In past years, I was involved in a project funded by the Government, through which female staff were able to train women to learn English and revive their skills of dressmaking, cooking, working as beauticians and using their henna painting skills. The result was that these women were able to speak English and communicate with their children. They learned to use computers and were able to read newspapers and reports from their countries of origin. They had their own income and did not have to ask for money from their husbands, and were able to provide more and more facilities for their children.
In the name of equality for women, I firmly believe that the Government should ensure that women’s rights are protected and that special training should be given to judges and lawyers when women appear in the courts.