There are greater than 3,600 girl prisoners in England and Wales – a quantity the Ministry of Justice tasks will rise to 4,200 by November 2027.
However Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood believes “jail isn’t working” for girls. She informed the Labour Social gathering convention that after serving a brief custodial sentence, a girl is “considerably extra possible” to reoffend than one given a non-custodial sentence.
In the meantime prisons minister James Timpson has mentioned he sees “numerous very unwell girls” on visits. This echoes analysis which discovered 82% of ladies prisoners reported they’d some type of psychological well being downside, and information pointing to a rising variety of self-harm incidents in girls’s prisons.
The vast majority of imprisoned girls have skilled home violence.
So what might be executed? Two government-commissioned publications, the Corston Report (2007) and the Ministry of Justice’s Feminine Offender Technique (2018) really useful that in some circumstances, as an alternative of jail sentences, the usage of girls’s residential centres, which give attention to trauma assist and the place youngsters can generally keep, or group sentencing, could be extra acceptable.
The brand new Labour authorities has introduced measures together with a Ladies’s Justice Board to scale back imprisonment numbers. Beneath the Conservatives, a 2021 white paper outlined plans for necessary workers coaching in girls’s prisons to scale back self-harm and higher assist for pregnant girls.
InDepth has spoken to individuals with expertise of the legal justice system to listen to how they suppose it may be reformed for feminine offenders.
Most ladies are imprisoned for nonviolent, non-serious offences, and so they don’t seem to be actually a menace to public security. They might profit extra from group alternate options.
Ladies with short-term sentences, six months or much less, shouldn’t be in jail. In that point you’re not going to attain any significant change or actual engagement with rehabilitation. So it doesn’t serve a purposeful perform for society or for girls.
Over half of ladies prisoners go on to reoffend. Ladies are going straight again into the identical surroundings, similar circumstances, that they have been in earlier than going into jail – comparable to homelessness, or substance abuse.
It’s true that jail can supply construction when a whole lot of these girls stay very chaotic lives. There are additionally some good examples of prisons with applications that particularly take care of trauma. Nevertheless, girls’s centres are a greater strategy as they’re extra centered on addressing the causes of offending – for example, underlying points comparable to trauma.
There’s all the time a danger that the federal government may lean in direction of populist measures that lock extra individuals up, however I feel there may be growing public consciousness about the necessity to do issues otherwise due to the reoffending charges.
Unsurprisingly, the important thing problem is funding and funding. There’s a rising variety of girls’s centres however an absence of funding implies that there aren’t sufficient of them.
I used to be in Eastwood Park Jail from March to July 2022 for perverting the course of justice. I used to be below the impression that prisons have been alleged to be rehabilitative services that assist nurture individuals again into society. However that’s merely not the case.
Throughout my time in jail, we have been locked in our cells for 23 hours a day, with little to no entry to training. Prisoners have been alleged to have maths and English classes, however the jail was so under-resourced that jail officers would by no means open the door.
We’d solely have an hour outdoors our cells, and we must select between having a bathe, exercising, assembly different individuals, or being outdoor. One hour was merely not sufficient time to get something significant executed.
After leaving jail, I realised how damaged the system is. A whole lot of the individuals going into jail have been very younger and lots of had grown up in care. They’ve been dispatched straight from the care system to the legal justice system. Whereas private accountability for his or her selections is crucial, I feel it’s actually necessary to begin discussions on how we will higher serve individuals earlier than they find yourself in jail.
Preventative measures are necessary however I wish to be clear – I don’t agree with abolishing prisons. Violent and harmful offenders ought to be eliminated for the security of wider society, for the sake of the victims and probably for their very own security. However what we do to these individuals in jail wants to vary.
Some girls are violent, sexual or prolific offenders and ought to be in jail. The aim of jail is fourfold – to punish, defend the general public, deter crime and make it possible for rehabilitation.
Simply 4% of individuals in jail are girls and they’re a really totally different inhabitants to the opposite 96% – they’re much less more likely to be violent or prolific offenders. We do want extra jail areas, however these locations ought to be crammed with violent or prolific males, reasonably than girls who will not be.
We must also contemplate points which apply to girls. For instance, being pregnant.
The legal justice system is in an totally shambolic state. A proposal for a collection of residential girls’s centres, which got here from the Feminine Offender Technique in 2018, has – with a few exceptions – barely acquired off the bottom. We have now the most important Crown Court docket backlog on document. We all know what helps scale back reoffending however we systematically fail to do it.
Partly that is funding, but in addition there may be the ineffectiveness of group sentencing, and as a part of that, drug rehabilitation, training and employment applications.
Locking up non-violent and non-prolific girls will not be the one resolution. Key to deterring individuals from committing crime is catching extra of them, doing it faster, and probably sentencing them to one thing apart from jail in the event that they’re not violent or prolific offenders.
There should be a gender-specific strategy to legal justice, as girls find yourself in jail due to issues which can be gender-specific in society.
In case you’re solely fascinated about working with girls on the level at which they’re despatched to jail, you’re beginning too late. The actual options are earlier upstream, the place change must occur.
Ladies are being despatched to jail primarily as a punishment for being poor and falling into debt – they’re the shock absorbers of poverty. Survivors of home abuse are criminalised.
They typically expertise horrendous psychological well being issues. The listing simply goes on. The system is totally damaged.
Labour‘s Ladies’s Justice Board is welcome if it might actually do one thing. In the long run, we wish to cease girls being criminalised for the discriminatory experiences they’ve.
Any assumption that you are able to do rehabilitation or high quality therapeutic work in jail will not be true – they’re not protected or therapeutic environments.
Prisons are terrifying. They utterly take away your id. A number of girls simply within the final two weeks have informed us coming into jail was like coming into a psychological asylum from the 1800s – individuals screaming via the night time, individuals banging their heads on the partitions. It truly is hellish.
Simply because you’ve gotten a gender lens, it doesn’t imply you don’t take a look at males. Having a gender lens implies that you perceive how disproportionately many ladies offenders are themselves victims.
Prisons are supposed to be about rehabilitation, however now they’ve turn out to be purely about punishment. I perceive that individuals wish to see those that commit crimes pay the value, however a whole lot of girls which can be in jail are almost definitely victims of significant offences themselves.
There additionally must be particular consideration for girls which have youngsters and higher psychological well being assist for them. You’ve gotten a whole lot of girls self-harming due to the situations in prisons.
There are a whole lot of societal points that trigger individuals to finish up being in jail. Individuals discover themselves in poverty and do issues which can be questionable.
However it’s simply not the case that everyone who does one thing terrible leads to jail. Black individuals are twice as more likely to be arrested, remanded and sentenced than their white counterparts. In case you’re extra more likely to first face legal expenses and custodial sentences, then you’re almost definitely going to should take care of the affect of prisons.
After I speak about points which can be taking place with girls after they’re in jail, I’m speaking about girls general. However we will’t ignore the disparities that black girls face after they face legal expenses.
The way in which we function the probation system and the broader offender administration system is frankly sloppy. We’re not disciplined or rigorous sufficient in our expectations of offenders. These girls have dedicated a criminal offense. There are victims to whom we have now an obligation of care, and punishment in addition to rehabilitation is necessary.
If we wish to be a functioning liberal society, we have now to be one which operates with a excessive degree of belief. Irrespective of how petty the crime, we should be strict. In any other case we danger undermining the broader sense of belief.
Nevertheless, we have to think twice about our strategy to penal coverage as a result of we nonetheless have a early twentieth Century, semi-Victorian perspective, whereas behavioural science and analysis on offending and rehabilitation has moved on fairly considerably.
It’s additionally necessary to acknowledge the variations between female and male offenders. Males are typically extra vulnerable to violence and variations on the whole behavioural traits ought to be mirrored in our strategy.
Whereas I imagine there must be a penal factor to the justice system, there are smarter methods of coping with any person than simply shoving them in jail.
For instance, there are a proportion of ladies who’re in jail as a result of they’re perpetrating acquisitive crime to feed alcohol habit. We are able to use sobriety tagging, which has been remarkably profitable, to maintain individuals sober and so not offending and out of jail, mixed with unpaid work locally as a greater final result for victims and perpetrators alike.
If the general public knew who’s in jail, what it prices, what that’s doing in the long term, they might need change. Jail will not be succeeding in bringing round transformational change via rehabilitative work.
Most ladies in jail are victims in addition to offenders and in jail due to what they’ve skilled of their relationships.
Some have to be handled securely, however we have to handle points locally in an effort to cease reoffending, as most are there for brief sentences, and return via the revolving door.
I by no means wish to say “let’s simply let girls off”, however jail solely units up extra layers of trauma. That there are nonetheless pregnant girls in jail is unacceptable.
There are alternate options, comparable to girls’s centres and group sentences. Drawback-solving courts are being trialled, taking a look at easy methods to scale back reoffending – we want extra of that strategy.
So many stories simply find yourself on ministers’ cabinets. Even when you don’t care concerning the girls, you in all probability do care about taxpayer cash. What we’re doing makes no monetary sense.
If we might get this proper for girls, we might usher in a few of the similar ideas to the boys’s property.
Prime photograph credit score: Getty
BBC InDepth is the brand new house on the web site and app for the perfect evaluation and experience from our high journalists. Beneath a particular new model, we’ll carry you recent views that problem assumptions, and deep reporting on the most important points that can assist you make sense of a posh world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content material from throughout BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re beginning small however considering massive, and we wish to know what you suppose – you possibly can ship us your suggestions by clicking on the button beneath.