Criminal Justice System: Women

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. He has given us an extremely brilliant and articulate account of the prison system and the place of women in it. He has given us a wonderful start.

It is widely recognised that our prisons, as well as our entire criminal justice system, are designed with male offenders in mind. Their structure and practices, and the assumptions we make about who is likely to commit a crime and what the consequences of being in prison will be, are all based on a male offender being the central character. In recent years, women have been recognised as offenders, but that is more of an add-on to our larger thinking than a central or constitutive principle of our way of designing the criminal justice system. That is the point we are here to debate and talk about.

In recent years, the number of women in prison has increased. Broadly, the figures are as follows: there are 82,700 prisoners in total, of whom 78,900 are male and 3,800 are female. The most common indictable offence for both male and female offenders is shoplifting, but again one begins to see the difference with 17% of offenders being men and 38% women. If we look at the cases of self-harm in prison, which are very tragic and very disturbing, women are five times more likely than men to commit self-harm, largely because they are worried about their children, what will happen to the family and to their children’s education, and about the bullying and name-calling in school that their children might go through. As a result, they undergo a period of depression almost bordering on psychosis, which is what the Farmer report talks about and which I think is absolutely right.

In the light of all that, the questions we need to ask ourselves are threefold. First, how do we reduce the number of female offenders and prisoners? Secondly, how can their treatment in prisons be made more humane? Thirdly, how can they be integrated in the community? To answer these three questions and achieve these three objectives we have to think of female-specific needs. What needs of female offenders are peculiar to them and not shared with men? We need to address that and provide female-specific solutions to these questions. That is broadly what I intend to do in the next four minutes.

First, we should reduce short-term custodial sentences. Custodial sentences should be meant only for serious and violent crimes. For others, residential women’s centres or community management should be the answer. It is also the case that those who have been confined to residential women’s centres tend to reoffend far less often than those who have been sent to prison.

The second important thing to bear in mind is that women offenders should receive more family visits. This was stressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in 1991 and by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. Crime is never committed in isolation. An isolated individual is a trigger through whom an entire social process is crystallised and explodes into a crime. Therefore, the answer to crime is to recognise this social embeddedness and the importance of relationships to the offender. This is very important. It has also been shown in the reports of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that people in prison who have been allowed more visits are 39% less likely to reoffend.

The third important female-specific factor has to do with female judges and sensitivity training for male judges. I could cite many cases where, for example, a prisoner is brought before a judge who then makes assumptions about how an ordinary person in her position would behave and judges her on those grounds, but the judgment turns out to be totally wrong because it is a woman who does not meet these assumptions. Therefore, it is not quite female jurisprudence but female-sensitive jurisprudence and female-sensitive judges that are extremely important.

In that context, it is also important to bear in mind that there are female-specific or gender-specific applications of law. Take a simple case, which happened in the United States: a Muslim woman was asked by her father-in-law to carry drugs from the United States to the UK. She was in no position to say no. Quietly, she carried them; she was arrested at the airport and given lighter punishment. A man in her position would have been treated differently. He is expected to stand up to his father-in-law and to behave independently, whereas in this case the woman had long been trained to obey, and if she dared to disobey it would have made no difference at all. Her father-in-law would simply have compelled her to do what he wanted her to do. In this case, one needs to tweak and adapt the law to the individual situation.

There are two other important factors to bear in mind. One is what is sometimes called a personal circumstances file. There should be a file for each offender, to ensure that sensitive information is easily available when it is needed. This file could be carried through the entire criminal justice system and include all the relevant information about a particular individual and the way that various factors trigger that individual’s behaviour in certain ways.

Secondly, and most importantly, the entire culture of prison needs to change. If one looks at prison, it is a macho kind of place; it is authoritarian, highly disciplined and force based. There is no sense of community. If one looks at our society, it is more informal, more sociable and warmer. Prison is a totally different picture; it is a totally different world. It is important to recognise that in prisons there could be a warmer relationship among prisoners themselves and between prisoners and wardens; it could become a community, where people are able to talk freely about their problems and solve them.

My simple suggestion is that a better understanding of the typical problems that affect women, of the circumstances under which they function and of the way in which various factors can influence their behaviour is quite important in tackling the position of the woman in the criminal justice system.