Eighteen months after Baroness Corston submitted her detailed review to government in December 2006 setting out a blueprint for radical reform of the justice system for women, the Ministry of Justice has today issued a written ministerial statement revealing that progress towards implementing the review recommendations is painfully slow.

Maria Eagle, Minister for Justice, announced a set of small scale, piecemeal improvements including scope for conditional cautioning, forthcoming probation guidelines, a women’s centre pilot site in Bristol and a cross-departmental women’s unit to oversee change. There was no overall plan and no budget.

Commenting Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said:

'It’s clear that this government is so busy planning how to waste billions of public money on so-called ‘titan’ prisons that it cannot find the time or money to create a decent, effective justice system for women.

'A national network of women’s supervision and support centres would enable women offenders to beat addiction, receive mental healthcare, get out of debt and gain skills to work and look after their children'.

Notes:

The women’s prison population reached a record high of 4,505 on 13 June 2008.

• In the last decade the women’s population has nearly doubled. In 1996 the midyear female prison population was 2,305. In 2000 it stood at 3,355 and in 2006 it was 4,463.
• A total of 11,950 women were received into prison in 2006.
• Just under two thirds of the women who entered prison in 2006 did so on remand.
• At the end of March 2008 there were 895 women on remand, a fifth of the female prisonpopulation.
• Almost one in five (18%) women held on remand before trial are acquitted and significantly less than half (41%) receive a custodial sentence.
• An ICM public opinion poll commissioned by SmartJustice in March 2007 found that,of 1,006 respondents, 86% supported the development of local centres for women to address the causes of their offending. Over two thirds (67%) said that prison was not likely to reduce offending.

Background: THE CORSTON REVIEW

Following the publication of the Prison Ombudsman’s report into the deaths of six women at Styal prison, in 2006 the Home Office announced a review of vulnerable women to be led by Baroness Jean Corston. PRT director Juliet Lyon was an independent member of the review group.

Baroness Corston’s report, published in March 2007, concluded against imprisoning, at huge cost, vulnerable women offenders who pose no risk to the public. Instead, the report called for the closure of women's prisons over a 10-year time period replace these with some small custodial units for serious and dangerous offenders and, for the majority of offenders, a larger network of support and supervision centres in the community.

Based on existing successful community centres visited by the Corston review group, these centres would provide access to services to help women deal with addictions, mental illness, rape and domestic violence trauma and debt, while also helping them gain skills and take responsibility for their families.

One of the main set of recommendation in the Corston Review related to, what the report termed, the ‘yawning gap’ in the national structures that exist for meeting the needs of women who offend or are at risk of offending.  The report called for visible leadership and a strategic approach.

“Without the safeguard of strong, visible direction of issues relating to women in the criminal justice system, provision for women is likely to continue to be inconsistent and to depend on the level of priority and strength of leadership afforded locally and the depth of local understanding about women’s needs.” (page 6, The Corston report)

As well as a outlining the role of the proposed ‘Women’s Commission’, the report emphasised the need for ‘committed ring-fenced funding from within each of the departmental budgets specifically allocated to ensure delivery’ of the commitments made by ministers.

PRT believes the Corston review offers a blueprint for a system that protects public safety by making women less likely to re-offend and protects public money by concentrating on what will work in the long term to break the dreary cycle of crime.

CORSTON: THE GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE

On 6 December 2007, the government published its response to the Corston Report on women in the criminal justice system.

The government’s initial response to Baroness Corston's review was disappointingly insubstantial. Ministers agreed with the report’s analysis of the problem and nearly all of its recommendations but failed to support the key recommendations of dedicated funding and a ‘Women’s Commission’, with some degree of independence and authority, to drive things forward. 
In the written ministerial statement (6 December, 2007) announcing the government’s response to the Corston review, Justice Minister David Hanson said a new cross-departmental Criminal Justice Women’s Unit based in the Ministry of Justice would be established to drive forward work to produce a detailed delivery plan ‘within the next six months’ that will provide the mechanism by which ‘all of the commitments identified in the response will be implemented’.

On 13 December 2007, the Minister for Equality, Barbara Follett confirmed that this delivery plan would ‘look at alternatives to custody and review the future of the women’s prison estate’ and report in April 2008 (Oral Questions, 13 December 2007: col. 450).

Questioned by the Justice Committee on the lack of dedicated funding for implementing Corston, the Lord Chancellor replied that this money is ‘within the overall budget’ (Justice Committee evidence, Q441, 17 December 2007).

Given the number of women in the prison system is small, it is difficult to understand this reluctance to match words with deeds. PRT believes years of inaction to help some of the most vulnerable people in society is as unforgivable as it is inexplicable.

A HISTORY OF SLOW PROGRESS AND BROKEN PROMISES

In 2001, the government produced its ‘New Labour strategy on women offenders’ which noted that: “The best way to reduce women’s offending it is to improve women’s access to work; to improve women’s mental health services; to tackle drug abuse by women; to improve family ties and to improve the life chances of young women at school and in the community.”

Early in 2004 the Home Office published its ‘Women’s Offending Reduction Programme’. From this point government policy has been explicitly concerned with reducing the numbers of women in custody.  It recognises that women offenders are a different constituency from male offenders and that responses to offending have mainly been developed with men in mind. The extreme vulnerability of many women who end up in custody is clearly acknowledged. An action plan indicated a set of objectives and a timeline for achieving them.

In July 2004 the Spending Review contained an unusually specific commitment from the Treasury that the government will 'pilot radical new approaches to meet the specific needs of women offenders, to tackle the causes of crime and re-offending among this group and reduce the need for custody'.