Women: Custodial Sentences

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, on obtaining this debate, not least because it maintains the momentum on an issue that has been raised countless times on the Floor of the House but always seems to be marked by a lack of progress. I was interested that the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, mentioned the difference with men, because one thing that I shall never forget is finding on my initial inspection of Holloway that women’s injuries were recorded on a diagram of a man’s body, as there were no diagrams of female bodies available in the Prison Service.

I am afraid that I am going to sound a hobby-horse that I have been sounding ever since 1995 when I walked out of Holloway because I had found, among other things, that women were in chains while they were in labour. I found that there was absolutely nobody in charge of women’s prisons. I went to the director-general, whom I had never met, and said, “Please may I meet the director of women?”, and he said, “There isn’t one”. So I said, “Well, who is responsible for what happens in prisons in the selection and training of staff, and the organising of programmes and of making good practice somewhere into common practice everywhere?”, so as to make certain that what happens in Durham is the same as what happens down in Gloucestershire. He said, “There is a civil servant in the policy department”, but I said, “That’s no good. Who is responsible for overseeing that it actually happens?”. There was no one and there still is no one today.

In the two reports that I wrote on women in prison in 1997 and 2001, I recommended that there should be someone. The Prison Reform Trust recommended in 1999, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, has just repeated, that there should be a women’s justice board like the Youth Justice Board. The three reports of the Fawcett Society all recommended that there should be a women’s justice board or somebody in charge. All that was before the Corston report. Nothing has happened. After I had walked out of Holloway, the Government produced an action plan for that prison, which I supervised by annual inspections, to see how it was being maintained. That was fine while the action plan lasted but, after it had finished, there was nothing. So Holloway has zigzagged up and down, as have all other women’s prisons ever since.

Why have the Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice consistently refused to put people in charge of different types of prisoners and be responsible and accountable to Ministers for what happens? That is what happens in schools, in hospitals and in businesses, but it does not happen in the Prison Service and it is why nothing has happened. We do not need any more reports or lists of good practice. They are there in spades and have been coming out for years. What we need is action to put it together.

I include the women who are out of custody in all this because I am worried about the future under the new system of community rehabilitation companies. The previous Government’s proposal for custody plus failed because, among other things, people were concerned that magistrates and others would take advantage of the system and award short custody because supervision would follow. I know that this is a worry about men but to me it is much more of a worry about women because of the number of short-sentenced women. I say that because I am concerned about the content of the community service that is then required and what is actually done for the supervision. Many of these women come from a dysfunctional background and have pretty chaotic lives. What therefore ought to be done during the community sentence is management to enable them to live their lives better, to look after their children better and to prepare better food. Masses of things could practically be done in a proper community service that was aimed at preparing the women to live more useful and law-abiding lives in future.

There is therefore an opportunity but, again, I see it all going on as a sort of discussion point rather than an action point unless somebody is made responsible for ensuring that it happens and for driving it through. That somebody is not a Minister. I have lost count of the number of Ministers for Children and Ministers for Women whom I have met and who have all come and gone. They have produced a strategy and disappeared and nothing has happened. What you need is an official who is accountable to Ministers for making it happen. They should be held to account and, until that happens, I am afraid that I can see this debate being repeated over and over again.