Women Offenders and Older Prisoners

Karl Turner Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies]

It is there, but it is hidden away; it is never mentioned by any member of the Select Committee in their speeches. They would like to give the exact opposite impression. They know exactly what they are doing.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

I tried to stop myself intervening, but I am afraid that I cannot sit any longer. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that the question of whether someone is sentenced to prison is a matter for the judge of the sentencing court? The defendant’s personal circumstances will be considered and mitigation will be put forward. The reality is that women’s circumstances are often different from men’s. It is wrong for him to suggest that the figures in the report are in any way hidden; they are clear. If memory serves—I read the report late last night—it states that 10% of male offenders and 3% of first-time women offenders are sentenced to custody. The figures are not hidden.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Later, I will discuss whether it is justified for special circumstances to apply when deciding whether to send women to prison.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am delighted that the Chair of the Justice Committee is leading with his chin on this issue. He fails to acknowledge that the prison population in Texas is far higher, so it is starting from a much higher base. I would be delighted if we could agree that the prison population in the UK should be the same as Texas’s. If he is suggesting that we should emulate Texas in our criminal justice and sentencing system, consensus will have broken out in this Chamber. If that is the direction of travel that he thinks we should go in—Texas—I am all for it, and more power to his elbow.

At least the Chair of the Justice Committee had a bash at answering my question, for which I give him credit. He seemed to indicate that it was the 574 women in prison for drug offences who should not be in prison. That number includes 166 for supplying drugs, 113 for possession with intent to supply, and 140 who were importing or exporting drugs. They are the ones who he believes should not be in prison. I give him credit for putting his head above the parapet, but no one else who says that all these women should not be in prison is prepared to identify which should not be there. The reality is that these women are not in prison for minor offences, and it is an absolute disgrace that people try to suggest otherwise.

I want to emphasise how serious the offences are for which some female offenders are in prison. The argument is made that all these women are in prison for short sentences and perhaps should be serving community sentences instead. That is an absolute myth. According to the prison population figures, just under 16% of women in prison have sentences of less than six months. That is clearly quite a minority. If some do not class six months as a short sentence, I will be charitable and go up to a year; a further 6% of women are in prison for between six months and a year, so 22% of female prisoners are sentenced to less than a year in prison. Some 78% of female prisoners are sentenced to more than a year, and who can say that they are not serious offenders, when we already know that they are given shorter sentences than men? These are clearly serious or persistent offenders, and I hope that we can start nailing that particular myth too.

Sentences of more than a year mean that the magistrates court felt that the offenders’ crimes were so serious that they were not capable of sentencing them. They had to send the cases to the Crown court, otherwise the offenders could not have got those sentences. Let us end the myth that all those women in prison are in for short sentences and for not very serious offences.

[Karl Turner]

Will the hon. Gentleman at least accept that the needs of women in prison differ from those of men? He will be aware of the tragic case that was raised recently by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman), with the Justice Secretary. A woman prisoner miscarried in a prison cell and was apparently told by prison officers to clean up the cell afterwards. Does the hon. Gentleman want to comment on that?

[Philip Davies]

I appreciate that the shadow Minister has probably got a wasp in his trousers and is itching to get on with things, but if he bears with me, in a second I will come on to say why I do not necessarily accept his premise that women should be treated differently from men. As it happens—I have made this clear already—if people want to make the point that women should be treated more favourably by the courts than men, that is perfectly legitimate. I do not have a problem with that, so long as we are having an honest argument about what the facts and figures are.

If people are saying that the 2,789 women who are sentenced to prison each year for theft and handling should not be sent to prison—I suspect, given that they have been sent to prison, that they must be serious and persistent offenders—I presume that they think, though they never say so, that the 16,501 men who are sent to prison for that offence each year should not go to prison either. Perhaps that is what people secretly think, but they do not want to be seen to say, “We want to cut the prison population by the thick end of 20,000 each year.” No one ever seems to say that.

I want to move on to another myth, which I hope will deal with the point the shadow Minister raised. The myth is about how prison separates mothers from their children, which unduly punishes them. That goes to the point made by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd on why he believes it is right that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. I want to instil some seldom-offered facts into this side of the debate. It is said that 17,000 children are separated from their mothers, and that 60,000 women in custody have children under the age of 18. Those are the figures, as far as I am aware, and I am not sure that anyone would dispute them. As I have said before in a Westminster Hall debate, a senior Ministry of Justice civil servant helpfully confirmed that two thirds of the mothers sent to prison

“didn’t have their kids living with them when they went into prison.”

People use the figures to say, “X per cent. of mothers are sent to prison.” Well, yes, they are mothers—no one can deny that—but in two thirds of cases, they are not looking after their children when they are sent to prison. Why should they become a special case at that point, when the children have already been taken away from them because the mother is presumably considered not fit to look after them? Why do we still consider them to be a special case, simply because they are mothers?

When it comes to the minority of mothers sent to prison who are still looking after their children, it is wrong to assume that they are all fantastic mothers. Many will be persistent offenders with incredibly chaotic lifestyles. Some, no doubt, will end up dragging their children into their criminal lifestyles, and some will scar their children for life along the way. Others will have committed serious offences. Sarah Salmon from Action for Prisoners Families said:

“For some families the mother going into prison is a relief because she has been causing merry hell.”

To most people, that would be a statement of the obvious. Why should those women be treated as a special case, when they are clearly not providing a great role model to their children or having a great influence on their upbringing? If anything, they are having a negative influence on their upbringing. Let us not forget those mothers who are in prison for abusing their children and being cruel to them. I am not entirely sure that anyone would think they should be a special case either.

If we are so concerned about the children of women offenders, what about the estimated 180,000 children who are separated from their fathers, because their father is in prison? In the age of equality, should we not be at least equally outraged about that? If we are not, why not? I thought there was a growing acceptance that a father was just as important to a child’s upbringing as a mother. Why are we treating mothers as a special case in all these cases? I do not see any justification for that when we know for a fact, thanks to the Ministry of Justice and the figures it produces, that two thirds of mothers are not even looking after their children when they are sent to prison. I hope we can nail the myth that that is a reason for treating women differently when they are sentenced in the courts.

Another myth is that women are generally treated more harshly in the justice system than men. Yes, we have now accepted that men are more likely to be sent to prison, but if we go underneath the prison regime, the myth is that women are treated more harshly by the courts before being sent to prison, but that, again, is not true. Even when they are not sent to prison, men are more likely to receive a community order than women. You would think it was the other way round, Mr Amess. So few women are sent to prison, one would think that most of them would get a community order, but no. We do not have any of that. Some 10% of women sentenced are given a community order, compared with 16% of men. The Ministry of Justice confirmed that the

“patterns were broadly consistent in each of the last five years.”

That is not all. The Ministry also points out that the average length of a community sentence is longer for men than it is for women. It said:

“For women receiving a community order, the largest proportion had one requirement (46%), whereas the largest proportion of men had two requirements (41%).”

So the pattern is complete: men are more likely to be sent to prison than women, they are more likely to be sent to prison for longer than women for the same offences, and they are more likely to serve more of their sentence in prison than women. Men are more likely than women to get a community sentence, and to have a community sentence that lasts for longer, and they are likely to have more requirements added to it. It is a full house; that is the picture of how men and women are treated in the courts and the criminal justice system.

I return to where I sort of began. Many of those who take part in these debates are the self-confessed equality issues addicts. They want equality in this, that and the other. It is a perfectly laudable aim; I believe in equality, too. People should be treated the same, irrespective of their gender, race, religion or sexual orientation, so why should that not be the case when it comes to sentencing people for committing the same crime? We are dealing with the “equality when it suits” agenda. The argument is that women and men should be treated the same, unless we can get better treatment for women, which we are all in favour of. That is not equality. It is very selective, and in my view sexist. Courts should sentence people on the basis of the crime, not whether they are a man or a woman.

The Select Committee would do well to consider the prison population as a whole and why the male prison population is so large. If it wants to strike a blow for the rights of women, it should argue for men and women to be treated the same by the courts, and that it is the crime committed, not gender, that should count. If we were considering the same phenomenon in relation to race, religion or sexual orientation, it would be considered an outrage. I consider it an outrage that women are treated so much more favourably in the criminal justice system than men. People may think it a good thing for them to be treated differently—some clearly do—but at least let us be honest about the facts and acknowledge them. I am pleased that some right hon. and hon. Members have begun to do that today, so we can draw our own conclusions. If we do nothing else today but set out the inconvenient—to many—facts, the debate will have been useful after all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. I am pleased to speak on these two excellent reports following inquiries conducted by the Select Committee on Justice. The two reports, “Women Offenders: after the Corston Report” and “Older Prisoners”, raise some important questions and make valuable recommendations about two distinct groups within our justice system. I will begin with women offenders.

Six years after Baroness Jean Corston’s report, which made 43 recommendations to drive improvements in the women’s criminal justice agenda, I and the Justice Committee are concerned that we do not have strong leadership in the Ministry of Justice. That must be an issue. In their response to the Corston report, the Labour Government accepted 41 of the 43 recommendations and set out to implement them under the strong direction of my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), the then ministerial champion for women and cross-departmental women’s policy unit. However, as the report rightly identifies, leadership has weakened in the Ministry of Justice since 2010. It also identified a two-year hiatus in efforts to implement the Corston recommendations. During the first two years of this Government, there was no designated Minister responsible for women in the criminal justice system, and I remember raising the issue on a couple of occasions with the then Lord Chancellor.

I agree with the report that it is

“clear that the matter of female offending too easily fails to get priority”

in the system

“in the face of other competing issues.”

A much-delayed strategy was published in March 2013 by the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), whom I commend for that. It was welcome, but I submit that the six-page document was a vague strategic objective. I think that the Select Committee was right to say that it was produced in haste with insufficient thought. Despite the Minister’s creation of an advisory board, the report states that

“without wider ministerial involvement”,

it will not

“constitute a sufficient mechanism for high level cross-departmental governance arrangements of the sort that Baroness Corston initially proposed”.

Without such ministerial leadership, the board would not have the authority to bring about integrated strategy and co-ordinated service provision.

I also note concerns that the Government’s “Transforming Rehabilitation” agenda may pay little regard to the needs of women offenders. I believe that there is now general agreement that women should not be dealt with in the criminal justice system in the same way as men. Women end up in prison for different reasons than men do, and women often find themselves in prison for non-violent criminality. There also seems to be general agreement that although prison is absolutely right for some crimes committed by women, for the majority of women offenders, imprisonment is frequently an ineffective response. The very personal story told by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) hits the nail on the head in that regard.

The report states that such recognitions are not about treating women more favourably or implying that they are less culpable, as hon. Members who have spoken in this debate have pointed out; rather, they are about accepting that women face different hurdles from men in their journey towards a law-abiding life, and that the justice system needs to respond appropriately. Again, I fully support those views. It is therefore worrying that the report has found little evidence that the equality duty has had the desired impact of systematically encouraging local mainstream commissioners to provide gender-specific services, tackling the underlying causes of women’s offending, or consistently informing broader policy initiatives within the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service.

The report identifies further failings and states that progress on the NOMS segmentation work, which aims to separate out groups of offenders to understand risks and needs and target resources accordingly, has been far too slow. It is fair to say, and I am sure that people would agree, that the last Government made good progress on the Corston agenda, which has fallen by the wayside, to be perfectly honest, under this Government.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman is slightly overstating his case. What we actually said was that under the previous Government, it took a significant effort, not least by the present deputy leader of his party, to bring together a group of Ministers—women Ministers, as it happened—to get cross-Government signing and implementation. Most of those things were not lost in the first two years of this Government, but further progress might have been more rapid and productive if some kind of similar leadership group had been got together.

[Karl Turner]

I accept that point from the Chairman of the Select Committee, but I think it is absolutely fair to say that during the first two years of the coalition Government, there was no Minister responsible for this area. I respectfully submit that that has been a factor. The governance structures built by the last Government seem to have been pulled down, and the consensus of the majority of witnesses to the inquiry was that progress appears to have stalled under the coalition Government.

In evidence to the Committee, Baroness Corston referred to the previous Government’s abolition of routine strip searches and praised the fact that dedicated funding had been made available to establish community-based women’s centres. Again, I and other Opposition Members are concerned that those centres, which are making a difference in our communities, have suffered funding cuts under the coalition Government. There are now serious concerns about funding to local authorities, which use some of their moneys to fund other centres. I can think of one in my constituency, the Purple House on Preston road, which has done a lot of work with women offenders. It has done a massive amount of work, saving the taxpayer vast amounts of money by preventing people from going into custody.

Like the Committee, I remain unconvinced of the extent to which the approach set out in the Government’s strategic priorities for women offenders is truly integrated across Departments. The Chairman just intervened on me to say that the damage is probably less than I was suggesting, but that is a matter of opinion, and frankly, I disagree. It seems that work on the Corston report’s key recommendation—improvements to high-level governance and cross-departmental working for women offenders—has stalled and is in fact being dismantled. Six years after Corston, we still have far too many women in our prisons, and we need to reduce that number significantly.

In addition to driving the Corston review forward, we look to emulate the success of the previous Government’s Youth Justice Board, which presided over a halving in the number of first-time offences by young people, and a fall of a quarter in the number of young people locked up. Targeting specific groups and tailoring an approach to offenders’ unique circumstances have been shown to work. Using the Youth Justice Board as a blueprint for a similar board for women might have the same impact. Will the Minister consider that?

I congratulate the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), on his new job. He will be responsible for this area, and I know that he will take that seriously. I hope that he will look carefully at the report and implement some of its recommendations.

I turn to older prisoners, who were mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). This debate is timely, given the report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons that states that an 84-year-old immigrant detainee suffering from dementia died in handcuffs while in detention. That is a matter for the Home Office, but it is shocking and underlines the fact that the needs of older prisoners and detainees in our prisons and detention centres must be recognised.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

On our visit to Dartmoor prison, we saw a high level of care and concern for older prisoners, but the facilities were appalling. However good the care and support for individual prisoners, the building is simply not capable of dealing with wheelchairs, among other things. I left the prison thinking that that was not the best way of treating people, and I question the value to anyone of keeping some of those elderly men in prison.

[Karl Turner]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point that was made in the report of the Committee, of which he is a serving member. The idea of elderly prisoners trying to clamber into bunks to sleep is clearly unsatisfactory, but there is no magic wand, and we must address the issue. We must accept that the prison population is getting older and deal with that. Society generally has an ageing population, which is making us reassess health and social care provision, end-of-life accommodation and older people’s living needs. Although it will not be popular, we must also reconsider the needs of older people in prison.

We welcome this inquiry, and the resulting excellent report, which highlights the exact issues facing older prisoners. It makes some key recommendations about how to address those issues. Prisoners over 55 are the fastest-growing age group in custody, and in the last eight years, there has been increasing evidence of the needs of older people in prison. That has led to a developing awareness among prison staff and prisoners of the difficulties facing older people, and a greater understanding that the response is often inadequate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, it seems that prisons are ill-equipped to meet their needs. There are various reasons why our prison population is getting older. Prisoners are serving longer sentences, and they may even be convicted and sentenced at an older age for historical sexual offences; a number of cases of that kind are being reported on in the media.

There is some debate about what age constitutes an older prisoner. Some people argue that due to the early onset of health issues in prisoners, that should be defined as anyone over 50. Others, including the Government and the Justice Committee, argue that it is not sensible to impose a rigid age classification, whether we are talking about those who are 50, 60 or 65. It is worrying that the report states that many older prisoners are being held in establishments that simply cannot meet their needs. We accept that for operational and practical reasons it is not always possible to allocate older prisoners to entirely suitable prisons, but we support the view that NOMS should, as a rule, not allocate such prisoners to an establishment that cannot meet their needs.

The report also raises concerns about fragmented provision and barriers to health care for older prisoners, which is particularly worrying. I support the view that cancelling hospital appointments because of lack of communication between health care providers and prison officers is entirely avoidable; that issue must be addressed urgently.

Mental health care needs are also widespread in prisons with higher levels of depression among older prisoners. It is reassuring that services are being commissioned to address mental health issues in prisons, and that organisations such as Age UK and the Alzheimer’s Society are running specific dementia services in prisons with large populations of older prisoners. However, clearly we need to do more, and awareness training in prisons should be increased. We should consider integrating training packages into standard prison officer training.

The report was damning about the provision of social care for older prisoners:

“The lack of provision for essential social care for older prisoners, the confusion about who should be providing it, and the failure of so many authorities to accept responsibility for it, have been disgraceful.”

Those words describe the position appropriately. The Committee found evidence suggesting that current provision is sparse, variable and sometimes non-existent. It found some areas where social care was provided by charitable organisations or by prison officers, but it clearly highlights a fragmented and failing service.

Another concern is the release of older people to no fixed abode. It is deeply worrying when older prisoners are released to face homelessness. Around 85% of prisoners who are released find, or are helped to find, somewhere to live on release, but 15% do not receive help. That is not good enough. Release to no fixed abode undermines any progress that has been made towards resettlement, and will do nothing to help older prisoners to reduce reoffending.

I support the view that older prisoners who are frail and vulnerable should not be released to no fixed abode because there has been no housing referral, or because it has been delayed. I agree with the suggestion in the report that NOMS should ensure that all prisoners who require accommodation are referred to housing agencies in good time. Older prisoners have needs that are distinct from those of the rest of the prison population, and the Government should look seriously at the growth in the older prison population. It is disappointing that they do not agree with that view. I agree with the report that

“It is inconsistent for the Ministry of Justice to recognise both the growth in the older prisoner population and the severity of their needs and not to articulate a strategy”

to deal with the problem. I urge the Minister to look again at the report, and to consider a national strategy for the care of, and an appropriate regime for, older prisoners.