Authors: Vicky Pryce
But although the data is there and campaigners go blue in the face repeating the facts about the
pointlessness
of locking up so many women, politicians have to be seen to be tough on crime whatever the outcome. But as Britain comes to grips with excess public spending perhaps better policy to protect the taxpayer can fuse with a more humane and smart politics on keeping women in prison. Ministers, if they are honest, know the money isn’t there anymore. The huge expansion we have seen in the prison
population
of both men and women is against international trends at a time when crime is falling – at least as it is calculated as such – and the money is no longer there to keep so many people in jail.
So, for the moment at least, and for those men and women who don’t pose a threat, community services
or other types of non-custodial sentences which still require the offender to fulfil all sorts of conditions would seem to make a huge amount of sense from every possible angle – costs, links with family and community, work, all reduce reoffending in many cases. But selling it to the public is the hardest part of it. In order to appease this quest for retribution the politicians feel the need to demonstrate that
punishment
is very much part of the sentence. And that may be the undoing of any good efforts to improve the system and allow more women to stay out of prison.
Helen Grant, the justice minister at the time of
writing
with a responsibility for women’s issues, talked in that same
Woman’s Hour
interview of the need for community orders in addition to unpaid work and supervision. In fact, tagging is already given instead of a prison sentence in some cases and the courts have the power to impose all sorts of restrictions on the movement of offenders and place prohibitions on what they can do. Magistrates’ courts tend to give community sentences and crown courts mostly custodial ones and there is a whole industry of organisations working on court diversion, i.e.
keeping
women in particular away from crown court and custodial sentences, which must be a good thing if it works. But I have been told of a number of instances where offenders (men and women) make it clear that they consider the community orders that might be imposed on them to be too onerous and they prefer to go to prison – whereupon the magistrates, if they think that the community orders are likely to be ignored, have no alternative but to send them to prison.
As Pat Carlen argues, because there are relatively small numbers of women in the criminal and penal
systems, there is a narrower range of non-custodial facilities for women.
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And whatever is imposed needs to be specific to individual cases. Curfews and tagging, particularly for vulnerable women, may mean that they cannot escape easily a violent or abusive man at night, adding to the chances of these women being recalled for breaching their community orders (only to escape their problems at home) and given a custodial sentence as a result for a crime that had not been considered appropriate for one in the first place. So the alternatives and guidelines given to courts will have to be thought out with care. It is very typical of policy makers to react instinctively to popular
pressure
without thinking of and assessing the unintended consequences of that policy.
Much will need to be improved to get to a better place in this area. As the
Woman’s Hour
programme pointed out, at least when the judge imposes a
custodial
sentence he or she knows that there will be a van there waiting to take the offender to prison and the judge is safe in the knowledge that a place will be found nearby. In handing out a community sentence there is no guarantee that a community centre will exist and, if it does, what it is able to do. Magistrates also say that if they had a clear
alternative
that they believed in they would use it instead of a custodial sentence.
Yet the message that community orders are an easy option is perversely encouraged by ministers in their speeches. Speaking in the autumn of 2012, the prison minister Jeremy Wright attacked community orders; as he put it, ‘one third of the orders have no punitive element included in them’. He announced a significant change in the guidelines to ensure that
this was addressed. Maybe that is needed to change perceptions but it is difficult to change that view among the public if the minister himself suggests that community service is a soft option. And as most organisations that deal with these issues tell me, women doing community service are already hugely challenged: they also have to cope with their families, social services, housing issues, often drug
rehabilitation
as well as the educational challenges put on them by a community centre in the form of numeracy and literacy classes, parenting skills courses, assertiveness training, employability skills and the like. The result therefore is likely to be a perverse one as the more conditions are set the more likely the chance of them breaching some of the orders they are given increase considerably. If you add to this the extra pressures from cuts in legal aid budget and in the probation service and the reduction in flexibility of the system in terms of reporting and reacting to breaches of any orders, women are immediately put at greater risk of being sent to prison. A former probation officer told me that women usually breach conditions of bail or probation or miss a court appearance because of their children taking greater priority as they are often sole carers. But this could still be the best compromise one could reach at least to improve the women’s lot and reduce the cost to society that normally wants
retribution
at any cost. Sadly we may not even get that far.
The public perception can be changed if the facts and the evidence are presented to them in an unbiased and reasoned way. A report produced in September 2011 on behalf of the charity Making Justice Work found that properly targeted community service orders made a huge difference. If they appropriately address
the causes of offending they can effectively replace custody for those offenders and achieve a huge cost reduction for the community. But more importantly in the introduction to the report Peter Oborne, a
political
journalist and commentator not generally known for his left-wing views, states that ‘I have always been uneasily aware that political correspondents such as myself report law and order issues in a false and often misleading way’. He acknowledges that one has ‘to be a brave politician to take a liberal view on crime and punishment’ but believes that there must be a deeper understanding of the truth about these issues, which are at present framed simply in terms of being ‘tough’ versus being ‘soft’ or ‘weak’ on crime. And one of the things that struck him first is that alternative options to prison, as they stood then, even before the planned changes announced by the current government, ‘are not a soft option as so often portrayed’. He describes how a number of the offenders who were involved in this inquiry said to the team that it would have been much easier to have gone to prison for three months. He argued that while it is true that prisoners cannot commit crimes while they are in jail (at least not in the community; they can commit plenty in prison) prison does little to stop them reoffending (as said elsewhere, it may in fact encourage even more reoffending as it becomes an acceptable part of life) but that based on what he had seen ‘they are far more likely to reoffend when they have served their term than those who have been given an alternative punishment’. He uses the example of a women’s project in Bradford where the reoffending rate is down to between 5 and 10 per cent and the cost of helping one woman over twelve months, despite the extra services and support and
intensive care given, is half what it would have cost to send her to prison for just three months.
Another report for the same charity, conducted by Matrix Evidence, part of the consultants Matrix Knowledge Group, touched on the cost-benefit of community service as against custody. It calculated the probability of young offender reoffending during what is known as Intensive Alternative to Custody orders (IACs), which combine community work and educational achievements with intensive probation supervision, to be 21.4 per cent. This compares with MoJ data that suggests that the probability of a young adult reoffending the year after they are released from custody is 58 per cent.
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As usual there are all sorts of issues with the data and the comparisons are not easy to make as there are differences in the data collection and the exact periods over which the reoffending is measured. One of the complications, as far as I can see, centres on the fact that community service data is collected on a case study basis and follows the offenders during the period that they are under their order whereas MoJ data looks at the probability of reoffending the year after release. Adjusting the calculations to be more in line with MoJ calculations of probabilities of offending in the year after release, using the MoJ compendium of reoffending statistics and looking at various different ways to adjust the data to be as consistent as possible with official statistics, Matrix came to the conclusion that community supervision orders probably reduce the reoffending rate by some 13 per cent and have used this to calculate the benefit.
Matrix calculates that providing intensive
community
orders for all eligible young adult offenders
instead of custodial services would save some £500m over five years, which is huge. (Compare this with the proposal to cut winter fuel benefits for 115,000 British pensioners living in the Costa del Sol and other warm parts of Europe announced with great fanfare by George Osborne to save at most £30m per year.) These savings would reflect both the lower running costs and also the benefits to society from less reoffending. Matrix calculates that of the total savings £177m would be in what they term reduced costs of interventions; some £69m in reduced costs to the criminal justice system that will have to deal with fewer crimes; £29m of reduced costs to the NHS, which has to deal with all the mental health and other health issues connected to crime; and some £225m of reduced costs to the victims of crime. These costs are what Matrix calls ‘real economic costs’ that are completely avoidable. But there are other costs, too, like a policeman’s time for example, which are called ‘opportunity costs’, in other words costs that will be no longer be required to be spent on issues connected with crime but can be spent more usefully elsewhere. Matrix estimates that the reduction in opportunity costs would save another £46m on top of the £500m.
We are of course talking here of a relatively small number of young offenders in prison, some 1,800. And yet the savings appear to be significant. If the majority of men and women on short sentences served non-custodial sentences, the savings could be enormous. And the indirect benefits in terms of all the other savings on crime and reoffending and families and employability would potentially be even greater.
In no way would I want to advocate that many men do not face similar issues to women. A number of
them currently in prison are no threat to society, need help and should not be in jail. And a certain number are also prime carers; even if not many, they still very much want to keep in touch with their children. And the children benefit if they do. But the chances of becoming antisocial and resorting to crime seem to be higher for those children separated from their mothers.
The literature on women’s vulnerability and the prevalence of victims among women offenders has been well documented in many reports, most
notably
in the Corston Report of 2007, which resulted in the funding of the first centre for women
offenders
and, in many cases, potential offenders. Women’s Breakout, a representative body of forty-seven women-centred services across the country, which offer specific community alternatives to custody specifically designed for women, argues that in order to prevent and reduce crime committed by women what works best is gender-specific approaches, which understand women’s specific needs and are delivered by women-only community-based organisations. Despite progress, funding for these centres in the future remains uncertain.
Indeed campaigners fear that the government’s proposals to transform rehabilitation services – dubbed ‘the Rehabilitation Revolution’ – may mean that the centres could come under threat as changes to probation and rehabilitation services are made. This is a very urgent concern, since the centres are in a stage of relative infancy in demonstrating their effectiveness, and could in fact be rolled out further in future if they survive. One problem in evidencing their importance is that each is locally specific in its impact, and indeed many areas have no women’s centre at all.
As such, the problem is not so much with
sentencing
law, but with the lack of alternative facilities and communication to those who pass the sentences about the benefits of gender-specific alternatives.
The recent report by the justice select committee on what has been done since the Corston Report argued that ‘whilst reducing reoffending is one
important
goal, upstream diversion from offending and reduced frequency and seriousness of reoffending are also socially desirable outcomes which need to be valued by the criminal justice system’.
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But they also argued that getting proper evidence of the impact of the centres is difficult because they are still so new. In addition to this, the committee concluded that ‘the Ministry of Justice has failed systematically to collect information required to determine effectiveness. Data from individual projects indicates a strong impact, but because they are not comparable results there is no ability to determine and disseminate best practice.’
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But the evidence, such as it is, is nevertheless encouraging. As Roma Hooper of Make Justice Work stressed in her submission to the justice select
committee’s
inquiry on women in the justice system: ‘There should be a greater use of robust and demanding community sentences as an alternative to short-term prison sentences for lower level offences committed by women offenders.’ In her view the government urgently needed to produce a strategy with the aim of reducing the number of women in custody, to ensure proper coordination across all government
departments
– not just the Ministry of Justice – with clear ministerial responsibility, accountability and a
timetable
for action.