Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  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.171

  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.172

  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 hard
est 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.173 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.174

  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 Osb
orne 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.