Authors: Vicky Pryce
The IT issue is a recurring theme. While I was in ESP I was struck by the unavailability of the
internet
– all that we could use were intranet sites or secure learning platforms such as those provided by the Open University. The lack of internet use was a great inhibitor to first, learning and second, the ability afterwards to reintegrate into society, especially for those who had a long sentence. I find it odd that in this day and age there can’t be applications available that while still providing security nevertheless allow a prisoner to have access to what is out there both for educational purposes but also to ensure that they
are then able to reintegrate with the community much more easily on release. The absurdity of the situation is made even starker when you realise that most open prison residents can access the internet anyway when on external visits or at work and it seems odd to deprive them of it in the few hours they are in prison.
But what would clinch the issue of the importance of education would be a proper econometric
analysis
that would prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that education works in reducing offending, reoffending and cost to society. There are still difficulties. Analysis would be reliant on reported crimes only. Another problem is that data on crime statistics and
educational
outcomes is not generally held together in one place and therefore is not easy to match together to allow one to estimate the causal relation. The Ministry of Justice Data Lab proposal does provide a potential solution to this by matching data from education providers with offending data from the police national computer. The Prisoners Education Trust is currently working with the MoJ to assess the impact on reoffending of its provision of
distance-learning
programmes to prisoners. This is welcome but more progress is needed.
We know that education and higher skills increase the chances of employment which in turn should reduce reoffending. It sounds correct in practice but there is still some way to go to ensure the correlation is proven. What is emerging, though, is a link between employment and a reduction in reoffending.
A Ministry of Justice report looked at the impact (if any) that employment (measured by having a PAYE employment spell notified by a P45) has on
reducing
reoffending.
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It compared the proven one-year
reoffending rates for offenders who received a P45 denoting employment in the year following their release from custody with a matched comparison group of offenders with no P45 employment. For robustness of the analysis it minimised the differences it could find on the databases on other
characteristics
that might have explained different reoffending rates, though the possibility still exists that other non-recorded characteristics rather than employment may explain part of the reoffending rate differences. The exciting thing about this study is the way it used linked data from the MoJ’s data linking project, which brings together data on offenders from across the criminal justice system, with data that tracks the employment and benefit status of offenders,
including
that from the DWP and HMRC. That allowed all sorts of things to be taken into account such as drug and alcohol misuse though this restricted the sample to data coming from ‘OASys’, the assessment system used by prisons and probation services to measure the risks and needs of offenders under their
supervision
. This also meant that the study only considered serious offenders whose attitudinal data is held on the system; in addition, low-paid people below the tax threshold and the self-employed were not included in the data. Also, given that in the report’s terminology reoffending is measured as ‘any offence committed in the twelve months after release from custody which receives a court conviction, caution, reprimand or warning in the twelve-month period or within a further six-month waiting period’, it could be argued that there are likely to be many undetected or unrecorded offences which are by definition not picked up in the analysis.
Nevertheless, despite all these caveats, the study points to a number of statistically significant results which I quote below:
The study concludes that ‘there are limitations to this analysis which are highlighted in this report. However, the magnitude of the estimates of the
reduction
in reoffending and their statistical significance, alongside the results of the sensitivity analysis we have conducted, means we are confident that P45
employment
has a positive impact on reducing reoffending.’
This is all very encouraging. There is
undoubtedly
more work that needs to be done in the UK by using matched data to take this further and extend it to a wider range of offenders. But it is becoming increasingly clear that education and employment
are key in achieving a reduction in reoffending. And yet the amount of effort made in this area is almost nonexistent. The MoJ has a prison budget of some £2.6bn year but only just under £100m is being spent on education, and very little on careers and employment help. Even in ESP, despite its positive approach to education and employment, women faced difficulties accessing paid jobs; while I was there the lady who was supposed to arrange
interviews
for residents to get jobs after they left prison was almost never available – I am sure for purely legitimate reasons – and many appointments were cancelled. And some girls reported that the ESP
advisory
office in the ‘out of bounds’ cabin made signing on at the Jobcentre seem an arduous task. I know of a number of women who didn’t bother to sign on because of the advice they were given. Given the
win-win
scenario from providing education and support for employment for offenders, it makes no sense to discourage people from trying to find a job. Quite the opposite.
O
n 19 June 2013, I received texts and calls from friends informing me that there was going to be a BBC Radio 4
Woman’s Hour
special on women offenders in advance of the justice committee’s
publication
of their review of women in prison. One of the issues that would be discussed was alternatives to prison. I wondered whether they were going to cover at all the situation in other countries and draw comparisons. The statistics for and attitudes towards women in prison seem to vary greatly from
country
to country. I had been intrigued by attitudes in places like Italy where apparently there are very few women in prison as the belief is that they should not be separated from their children and they are instead put under what they call ‘house arrest’. This is clearly not restricted to women as ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at one point faced house arrest as well, in this case ostensibly because of his age, according to news reports.
Worldwide there are approximately 625,000 women and girls held in detention, including those convicted and those on remand, out of a total of about 10.1m prisoners serving sentences or in custody.
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Of
these women about one third are in the USA. Out of the total prison population, the median percentage of women in prison worldwide is about 4.45 per cent, with Africa generally being just under and Asia being a bit over. There has been an increase in the number of women in prison worldwide of 16 per cent since 2006, particularly driven by the USA where there has been an increase of 23 per cent. Europe as a whole has actually had the lowest increase – only 6 per cent.
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While the collateral effects upon children of
imprisoned
mothers are felt throughout the world, there is difficulty in making direct comparisons between countries since information on whether a detainee has dependants is not consistently checked throughout the world, and when it is the information is often not very transparent or reliable. However, in the USA,
approximately
54 per cent of the prison population are parents to a child under eighteen years old,
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resulting in somewhere between two and three million children with a parent in jail.
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Of these there is a huge racial difference with one in fifteen Afro-American
children
having at least one parent in prison, compared to one in 111 for white children.
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In New Zealand 47 per cent of female prisoners had dependent
children
and 35 per cent were sole carers.
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And in the EU 800,000 children are separated from an incarcerated parent on any given day of the year.
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And the data for the UK is amazingly depressing. The female prison population has increased hugely, partly because of harder sentences and also partly because women tend to break court orders – often given for offences that carry no custodial sentence in the first instance – and are then sent to prison. In many instances, the reason for breaking probation or curfew has tended to be
related to providing care for their children, causing them to miss their court or probation appointment. Of course, fathers also care for children but, as one ex-prison governor remarked, it was telling that it was overwhelmingly women who were taken to court for not paying the household’s television licence or for rent arrears or for their children’s truancy. And of the children affected by their mothers being in prison, only 9 per cent are in fact cared for by their fathers while their mother is away. At least one third of the women in prison with children are lone parents by comparison to only 9 per cent for the population as a whole. And the number of children affected is huge. Figures for 2009 suggest that during that year some 200,000 children in England and Wales had at least one parent in prison at some point during the year, and this compares with just 64,999 children in care in that year and 36,610 on the Child Protection register. In one year, more than 17,240 children are believed to have been separated from their mother due to the mother being sent to prison.
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But some countries are seeking alternatives and in the Netherlands the number of community service sentences more than doubled between 1997 and 2007, moving from 14,485 to 32,590. A 2010 study in the Netherlands investigated the rates of recidivism of those sentenced to community service compared with
short-term
imprisonment of up to six months and found that for different crimes, and over different lengths of time after the sentence had been completed, the rate of
reoffending
for those who served on community service was lower than those who had been imprisoned.
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The evidence from the UK paints the same picture:
community
services on average have lower rates of recidivism
and of course cost a lot less by comparison to keeping people in prison. Even if community orders produced similar reoffending rates to custodial sentences they would be worth it for the lower cost alone.
One solution to the problem of family separation proffered is to attach women’s units to men’s prisons. Campaigners I spoke to worry that the disadvantages of this drastically outweigh the advantages. There has traditionally been very little women-specific training for officers. In East Sutton Park we were sharing the officers with HMP Blantyre for men. It was obvious when new officers would come or relief officers would arrive to fill in when ESP was short staffed during holidays that they had no experience of women’s open prisons or of women themselves. They had little idea of the rhythms and specific needs of a group of
incarcerated
women. The example of Durham prison was mentioned to me by both a previous governor of a women’s prison and an ex-probation officer. A women’s unit was attached to Durham prison but women ended up being ignored and treated like second-class citizens. If there were staff shortages or trouble in the men’s units, activities for women were just stopped. The unit has since closed.
Women’s Breakout, a representative body of
forty-seven
women-centred services across the country which offer community alternatives to custody
specifically
designed for women, argues that in order to prevent and reduce crime committed by women, what works best are gender-specific approaches, which understand women’s specific needs and are delivered by women-only community-based organisations. To me that seems so sensible but the rhetoric from the government continues to be very much a male-centred
one not specifically designed for women or other ‘minorities’ – and women are a minority because of their small number in prison.
But what to do with women remains a real issue. The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (also known as the Bangkok Rules) and the Human Rights Act, which the Conservative Party have said they will abolish if they win the next election, both dictate that the courts should take dependent children into account when sentencing. The various pressure groups claim that this is rarely done and the evidence I collected while in ESP would seem to confirm that. Debbie Cowley, who runs Action for Prisoners’ Families, told me, ‘One of the really important things about families of offenders is that their needs for help are caused by the actions of the state that send the mother (or father) to jail.’ She argues that families are the main source of support for prisoners and cutting those ties makes little sense. Naturally, not all families are perfect but
acknowledging
the existence of the family unit and using it cleverly is something that should be duly considered when sentencing women offenders.
In a powerful article in the
New York Times
in August 2013, Piper Kerman, who herself served eleven months for a drug-related offence in prison, argued that women convicted of such offences should not be sent to prison. The immediate spur for her article was the decision of the American Federal Bureau of Prisons to close a women’s prison facility close to New York and send women prisoners a thousand miles south to Alabama. Ms Kerman talked of a new programme under development called JusticeHome, which was
started by the Women’s Prison Association in New York City. It is aimed at allowing women offenders to stay in their homes with their children while under close supervision and receiving help from case
managers
in relation to jobs, education and parenting. It is estimated that this costs about $15,000, hugely less than it would cost to put them in prison for a year. It not only assists women to rehabilitate but also keeps the family together.
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It is encouraging to read such sensible arguments in the
New York Times
even if the cynic in me says that the chances of changing US penal policy are not high. But there is a strong argument that most women should not be in prison at all. I was pleased to hear Sir Alan Beith MP, the chair of the justice select committee, acknowledging on that
Woman’s Hour
programme on 19 June that community sentences requiring women to attend community centres were a good alternative for women, who in general receive very short prison sentences because their crimes are usually petty. How many MPs or voters know that 50 per cent of female offenders have committed a crime on behalf of a partner, which is not at all the characteristic of a male offender? What is more, as we have seen, the benefits to society of not separating mothers from their children are immeasurable. In
addition
there are serious issues about the mental health of the women who end up losing their children, which in itself becomes a cost to society and to the economy.
Children are rightly seen in a social context. All prime ministers pledge ‘family friendly’ policies and since most are parents of young children their
inclination
to care for the most vulnerable in society should be well intended. Of late, there have been court cases
involving celebrities accused of paedophile incidents. There have also been well-publicised court cases about gangs of men grooming young girls for
prostitution
. And one fact emerges again and again: it is children in care who are most at risk. It would seem logical to do all in our power to reduce the number of children taken into care yet every time a judge sends a mother to prison the statistics show that the chances of the children left parentless being taken into care are high. The court system is not divorced from wider society. A modernised system would invite the police and judges to consider the costs – both financial and social – when giving women either custodial or
non-custodial
sentences, and the resulting impact upon the children of those sentenced.
Alan Beith accepted that most women serving short sentences received no benefit at all from going to prison. They were given no education, no drug
rehabilitation
; they went straight back to the community from which they came with no money, often homeless; and they were likely to reoffend. He added that very short prison sentences do not help women whereas if you work with them in the community that can have an impact.
There is therefore a real reason to look at women as victims as well as offenders. As I have shown before, although a significant percentage of men report having been physically and emotionally abused when they enter prison, the percentage of women is far higher. But women are a minority – there is a relatively small number of them in prison, and the fear is that there will be less emphasis given in the future on their specific needs as they matter less in direct cost terms than men. But that, of course, misses
the point. The indirect costs of keeping women in prison are immense. Ignoring women’s needs makes no sense. Not surprisingly campaigners point to the lack of a legal requirement currently in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill to take the interests of women fully into account and have concerns that if this is still the case when it finally becomes an act there will be no guarantees at all that women’s special needs will be recognised and properly addressed.
The Prison Reform Trust argues that since only 3 per cent of women prisoners are assessed as being a serious risk to the public the rest shouldn’t be behind bars as it serves no social purpose except to appease populist demands for retribution. Indeed, in a pamphlet published by Lord Ashcroft, the
influential
Conservative donor and peer, entitled ‘Crime, Punishment and the People’, one reads the depressing assertion that ‘even short sentences, though
offering
too little time for proper rehabilitation, give the public respite from the prolific offenders who commit the most crime’. Giving the public what they want not what they need is the mark of populist politics. The pamphlet makes the point that ‘community sentences, the alternative to prison, command woefully little public support’.
This is hardly surprising if tabloid populism rather than rational policy drives the agenda. The zeal for retribution misses the point that most women
offenders
are victims as well as offenders and they have often offended precisely because they are victims. Former governors who spent most of their careers in men’s prisons and then went to run a female prison spoke to me of their astonishment at what they found. Women in prison were vulnerable, in need of support,
rarely the instigators of the offences they were alleged to have carried out and imprisoned because of the men in their lives. And the system had let them down by failing to recognise this.
The Women Offender Substance Abuse Programme (WOSAP) in Canada adopted a gender-specific
strategy
to help women with substance addictions and a moderate-to-high need for intervention. It was adopted in 2003 and by 2008 was shown to lower the likelihood of returning to custody. It was felt that this was particularly strong because of its
multi-targeted
approach and continuity of programmes. Post-release support (Community Relapse Prevention and Support) had a particularly pronounced effect showing that for those who received it there was only a 5 per cent return to custody, compared to a 38 per cent for those with no contact with the post-release programme.
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