Baroness Corston
Main Page: Baroness Corston (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Corston's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(8 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Faulks
The NICE estimate is that 90% of prisoners have at least one psychiatric disorder. Of course, the precise nature of a psychiatric disorder will vary. With many of them, prison may not be the correct place to treat them—although there may be other factors that make it appropriate for them to be there. NHS England has developed national specifications for health and justice services in English prisons and all prisons have clear commissioning models that focus on outcomes specific to custodial settings. All judges who sentence offenders will, or should, have adequate information to allow them to sentence appropriately. It then becomes a matter for the prison estate as to how best they are housed.
Baroness Corston (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister may be aware that there are about 82,000 men in our prisons and over 3,000 women. Those women are responsible for about 50% of the self-harm in prison. Furthermore, since my report published nine years ago this week, the number of women who took their own lives in English prisons last year was a record. Two have taken their lives this year already, in the first two months. What factors does he think underline the deterioration in the safety of women in our prisons?
Lord Faulks
On the positive side, the female prison population is now under 4,000—the lowest it has ever been. In the speech I referred to earlier, the Prime Minister made a particular point of the importance of finding alternative ways of dealing with women offenders, preferably avoiding sending them to prison altogether, which has been very much the trend with sentencing. Of course, there will be an irreducible number who have to be sent to prison. Although the noble Baroness is quite right that any suicide in prison is a matter of complete regret, and self-harm is equally concerning, we are in the process of modernising the prison estate to ensure that there are the best regimes and that women are held in environments that better meet their gender-specific needs.