Women Offender One-stop Shops

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

It is with great pleasure that I speak in this debate under your wonderfully impartial chairmanship, Mr Weir. I am pleased to see, yet again, my colleague from the Ministry of Justice, with whom I participated in a recent Westminster Hall debate on coroners. I hope that this debate on women in the criminal justice system is equally consensual, and that we reach a partnership in the same way.

I asked for the debate today because I am extremely concerned about the disconnect between the Government’s stated aims and policy on alternatives to prison, to which I am very committed, and the lack of sustainable and increased funding for the network of organisations that could help the Government achieve their long-term aim.

I have long felt that it is a national disgrace that we jail more women than any other country in the western world. The number of women in jail is increasing more quickly than that for men, yet the offences women commit are often petty, small in nature, requiring short sentences. In the past decade, the number of women entering prison has increased by 44%. The rise is not driven by an increase in criminality among women but by the courts, increasingly sentencing women to jail for minor crimes. My focus today is on the funding for women’s centres, the one-stop shops, which provide a cheaper and often more effective rehabilitative outcome as an alternative to prison for women.

The most common reason for women to be imprisoned is shoplifting, and 64% of women sentenced to jail are serving short-terms of less than six months. Female prisoners are much more likely to be serving short-term sentences than men, and are much more likely than men to have been imprisoned for non-violent, acquisitive crimes. To put it bluntly, if men had committed many of the offences that these women have committed, they would not have been jailed. All of the recent expert reviews of the criminal justice system, by Baroness Corston, Lord Bradley and the Fawcett commission, have come to the same conclusion: prison is not the answer. I am pleased that we also often hear that statement coming out of Government.

We need services providing interventions to help and support women in turning their own lives around, services such as those provided by one-stop centres for women offenders, which are also known as women’s centres. Building on the excellent work done by charities such as the Asha centre, the Calderdale women’s centre, Together Women and the women’s turnaround project in Cardiff, in 2009 the Ministry of Justice invested £15.6 million. There is now a national network of almost 50 women offender one-stop shops around the UK but, sadly, that is not enough: coverage is patchy, particularly in rural areas.

The way in which each such centre works is unique and the services available to women can vary, as the centres are often run by local or regional charities, with their own ethos and practices. Such centres work with women at every stage in the criminal justice system. What they have in common is that they will take women referred to them by the courts, police or social services who have offended or are at risk of offending, helping the women to take responsibility. The centres do not only contain them, they get the women to take responsibility for their own lives.

Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said to me that, when women are sent to prison, they do not have the opportunity to address the underlying reasons for their crimes. They are not encouraged to take responsibility for their everyday lives: for sorting out somewhere to live, paying bills, cooking meals or looking after their children. Prison takes women away from their lives, and refuses them the opportunity to take responsibility for themselves or to address their problems.

One-stop shops for women offenders operate as hubs, offering back-up and support to ensure that appointments are kept and that courses dealing with the issues taking women into the criminal justice system in the first place are completed.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this enormously important debate. Does she agree that, as a consequence of the comprehensive nature of the support from women’s centres, we are seeing dramatic reductions in the rate of reoffending? That is of benefit not only to the women, but to the children and to society, and makes the centres extremely cost-effective. If we look at the issue in the cold terms of cost per crime avoided, a concept that might be applied more generally in the criminal justice system, women’s centres are extremely good value, as well as the right thing to do.

[Mrs Moon]

Absolutely. That is very much the direction in which I am hoping to take the debate, demonstrating exactly those points made by my right hon. Friend.

In many cases, we find that prison allows women to opt out of responsibility; to opt out of the life experiences that have often brought them into the criminal justice system. The one-stop shops get the women to the stage of beginning to see what they want for their future, beyond coping with the moment. That is an incredible thing to do; to help people move on from coping with the moment to seeing a life and the potential in the future, not only for themselves but for their children.

Many women offenders are also the victims of crimes that have left them with enormous problems in their lives, so a prison sentence presents a unique problem and difficulty for women. Up to 50% of female prisoners have experienced violence in the home, and one in three has been the victim of sexual abuse; up to 80% of women in prison have diagnosable mental health problems; 70% of women coming into custody require drugs detoxification, compared with 50% of men; 16% of the female prison population self-harm, compared with 3% of men; and the rate of suicide is higher among female prisoners than male ones, despite the opposite being the case in the general population. Women prisoners are also less likely than male prisoners to have settled accommodation, qualifications or experience of working, and they are more likely to have been living in poverty. Because there are so few women’s prisons, they are often situated further away from their children, friends, families and support networks, so they receive less help and support during their sentences and when they leave prison.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue she is coming on to, how prison takes women away from their families and from contact with and responsibility for their children, is one of the ways in which prison does not work for women offenders, because it does not enable them to take those responsibilities in the future or to manage normal lives, which is what those women need to learn how to do?

[Mrs Moon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Even more devastatingly, prison sets up a future generation who, potentially, because of that trauma, will end up in the criminal justice system. That is the great failure we have to tackle.

In a lot of cases, many of the factors I have talked about—the sexual abuse, the violence experienced, the mental health problems, the drugs—are all experienced by individual women. It is not only a case of one woman having a mental health issue and one a drugs problem, with another having experienced sexual abuse: many will have all three combined. If they are to be rehabilitated, they will not be able to do it by themselves. Housing such women in a prison will not tackle those major issues, which is why we must deal with the problems that caused the offending if we are to look at rehabilitation and reducing reoffending. If we do not deal with the effects of these women’s life experiences as victims of abuse and suffering, we will not change their lives or the lives they are helping their own children to build. More importantly, we are doubly punishing those women, doubly victimising them—they are victims of abuse in their childhoods, then victims as adults in society.

Two thirds of women prisoners are mothers, and one third are lone parents. Only 5% of the children of women prisoners remain in their own home while their mother is in prison. Ninety-five per cent. must leave their home, to be looked after by grandparents or family friends, or to go into care. Eighteen thousand children live away from their home because their mother is in prison, setting up a future generation of damaged, disadvantaged and traumatised children. We could say, “Well, it’s only six months—such women mainly undertake short sentences,” but the sentence can be catastrophic for women and their families. The 2007 Corston report made the case for a completely new approach:

“a distinct radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach.”

I recommend watching a short film on the Prison Reform Trust’s website called “Smart Justice for Women”. It makes a strong case for alternatives to custody, and sets them out visually so much better than I can in words.

[Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the public need more confidence in community sentences, and that we must deal with the scepticism, and show that they are not fluffy options, but intensive interventions that challenge women to change their lives?

[Mrs Moon]

It is not just the public we must convince; we must convince the courts, and ensure that they know of the centres’ work, their success, and that turning a life around is a hard choice. It is much easier to remain in the victim status, and to live life in that way. We all know that. If someone has been the victim of sexual abuse, been physically abused, or has a mental health problem, or a drug or alcohol problem, tackling those issues is not a soft option. It is a hard option, and that is what we are asking the Government to make available—not a soft option, but a hard option. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention because it is crucial to get the message across.

The sort of work carried out by one-stop shops for women offenders is clear, as is the fact that they are effective at reducing reoffending and improving the lives of these women, and that they are cost effective. Evaluation in 2009 found that between July 2007 and July 2008, only four out of 87 women who accessed the Evolve integrated women’s project at Calderdale women’s centre reoffended. The rate of self-reported reoffending in the first year of operation of the Together Women projects was 7% in the north-west, and 13% in the Yorkshire and Humberside region. That compares with a national reoffending rate of 33%, and is a clear demonstration of success.

The SWAN project in Northumberland has achieved a 70% reduction in the rate of reoffending by women who have engaged with the project. The sort of intensive support that is provided in these projects needs specialist training and specialist resources. That is why, although there are huge savings to be made, they require investment. We cannot afford to lose the skills base in those centres. We cannot afford to see people moving away from working in those centres to other areas of the criminal justice system because of funding instability.

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. My experience of women who are released from custody and the associated costs is that it is often difficult to find accommodation for them. When I managed a women’s refuge, we would often take women released directly from prison, who may have had electronic tags or other reporting requirements. The difficulty is that when those women have a prison sentence behind them, many accommodation projects will find it difficult to accommodate them, and will refuse them, thus compounding the damage that can be done.

[Mrs Moon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and what is so sad is that when they go to prison, some of those women have accommodation where they can look after their family and children. Instead, they lose that accommodation, and build up debt, which makes them unattractive to landlords in the future. Their children go into care, sometimes at a cost of up to £30,000 a week per child. All that could be saved if, instead of a prison sentence, those women could stay in the community and tackle the issues that led them into crime.

It can cost £50,000 a year to keep a woman in prison. The cost to taxpayers and society through the criminal justice system, policing, social services and the benefits system of not addressing the problems that bring women into offending is enormous. Research has shown that intensive community order support costing £15,000 can save the public purse up to £264,000 over five years.

What I am looking for today is a consistent source of funding, so that projects can be established and maintained with the confidence that they are sustainable. Funding for most existing centres for 2011-12 has been secured through the Ministry of Justice and the Corston Independent Funders Coalition, and I am extremely grateful for that. The National Offender Management Service will be responsible for commissioning those services in 2012-13 if the centres are shown to be effective in diverting women from reoffending. But we do not have information about when and how decisions will be made, and what criteria will be used for assessment. The centres do excellent work, and the women who benefit from them need to know as soon as possible what measures they will be being judged against.

Prisons are not an optional extra in the criminal justice system, and we do not expect them to have to fund themselves year on year to keep going. Women’s centres should not be considered to be optional extras, or be funded in that way. They need to be part of the bedrock of our criminal justice system, with continuous funding guaranteed for those centres that are working well. I am more than happy for them to be judged against criteria. They should be inspected, and they should demonstrate that they work, but their funding should be assured within those parameters.

The recently announced national liaison and diversion service for mentally ill people in the criminal justice system should use women’s centres as a foothold to promote the agenda more widely, and not sideline them as an experiment. We have a fantastic joint commitment from the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health. Women’s centres should be used as a model to move forward, and they should be expanded so that we do not start from scratch in 2014, but have a bedrock and a base that we could be utilising now. The women’s justice task force, which was established by the Prison Reform Trust, is due to publish its findings shortly, and I hope that the Minister will read them carefully, and provide leadership, as my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) did under the previous Government.

The previous Government were quick to accept the findings of the review showing that intervention and support in the community is more effective than prison, but they were too slow in coming forward with sustainable, increased funding to put the policy into practice. The Justice Secretary bought a lot of good favour in the sector with his warm words last summer, but unless the Green Paper acts on those words he will have wasted a golden opportunity. Will the Minister take the opportunity today to detail how the network of women’s centres will be put on a sustainable footing with funding secured for the future so that they can expand, how the Government will provide leadership, how the network of centres will be made accountable to the Ministry of Justice with a system of assessment and inspection, and how the courts will be provided with more information about women’s centres so that they can use community sentences with confidence, and so that we do not carry on with the waste of human lives which is represented by the number of women and their children who are damaged by involvement in the criminal justice system?

Coroners (Recording of Suicides)

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I look forward to taking part in the debate this afternoon under your excellent, impartial and always fair chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I must admit that I have already had a certain amount of generous time offered to me by the Minister and his team to discuss some of the issues that I wish to raise. However, these matters are of such importance that I want to rehearse them again here, so that the Minister can hear them outside the meeting that he had with me in his Department with Professor Keith Hawton from Oxford university and Professor David Gunnell from Bristol university, both of whom are from departments of suicide studies.

This is a very serious issue. Every suicide is a tragedy for the individual who takes their own life and for their friends, family and community. More than 4,000 people take their lives in this country every year. Only heart disease and lung cancer are responsible for the loss of more years of life. Suicide is the leading cause of death among young men. The figures are shocking, but it is vital that statistics about suicide are recorded accurately in our effort to ensure that fewer people feel that they have to take their own life and fewer people lose a loved one in such a tragic way.

Accurate statistics help academics to understand the causes of suicides and the key groups at risk. They help local and national Government and health care professionals to decide what prevention strategies will work best and where to target resources. Statistics about causes of death including suicide are collected by the Office for National Statistics based on reports submitted by coroners following inquests. As I will explain, the increasing use of narrative verdicts by coroners and the variation of practice between coroners risk undermining the reliability of the statistics that we have and our ability to combat suicide.

Like any cause of death, suicide rates vary by age, gender, background and geographic area. More than any cause of death, the way in which the suicide rate varies across those demographic groups changes over time. Twenty years ago, men aged over 75 had the highest risk of any group, but they now have the lowest. Men aged between 15 and 44 have the highest rate of suicide of any group, but women within that same cohort have the lowest.

External factors can have a dramatic effect on the rate of suicide and can affect different demographics. Economic recession and high unemployment have a particularly striking effect on the suicide rate of working-age men. Different areas have different profiles of suicide victims, and those demographic profiles change over time. A paper by Bristol university’s Professor David Gunnell and others published in December concluded that in the past 25 years

“there has been a marked change in the spatial epidemiology of suicide”.

Such changes must be accurately recorded if our work to prevent suicide is to be effective. I will return to geographic recording in a moment.

There is also the question of the occurrence of so-called suicide hotspots and suicide clusters, where suicides occur more often than would be expected. Those areas of research can help to have an impact on suicide prevention in specific geographic areas.

University researchers have been able to use statistics to identify trends in suicide methods and increases in the use of a particular method. Professor Keith Hawton of Oxford university has produced work on the use of smaller packets of paracetamol and co-codamol, which reduces the use of those medications in suicides. The fitting of catalytic converters to cars reduced the number of suicides from car exhaust fumes, and the move from coal gas to North sea gas reduced the number of incidents of suicide by gassing. Such an approach does not just reduce the number of suicides by a particular method; it reduces the number of suicides overall because people do not tend to simply move to another method. Tackling and understanding the methods used is very important.

Information about geographic regions and suicide informs Government interventions and where resources need to be targeted to have the best effect. They also help us to understand the nature of suicide itself. However, the reliability of suicide statistics is being undermined by a significant rise in the use of narrative verdicts by coroners. In 2001, 111 deaths were recorded by narrative verdict. By 2009, the number had increased to 3,012.

Narrative verdicts were introduced to the UK as a requirement of article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which includes a duty to investigate and prevent deaths and a duty for the Government to take action to prevent further deaths. Narrative verdicts were intended for fairly limited use. Although they can provide more details about the circumstances of a death, they do not use a standard verdict to express the conclusions. That presents a challenge for coders at the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for collating coroners’ verdicts into usable data. Many deaths given a narrative verdict are likely to have been suicides, but they might not be identified as such by coroners.

The ONS uses international classification of disease rules, so it is not permitted to infer anything from the coroner’s narrative verdict. Coroners must use certain key words in their narrative verdicts for them to be properly categorised. Unless there is a clear reference to an intention to cause self-harm, the death must be recorded as accidental by the ONS, regardless of any other information given. Even a narrative verdict that gives a number of details surrounding a death could fail to specify the intention of the deceased.

Let us consider the following hypothetical example, which is used by the ONS to illustrate the problem. I apologise if this description causes distress to anyone, but it is hypothetical. Mr X, after being found hanging in his cell at X youth offenders institution on date X, died on date X at X infirmary. It was a serious omission by X young offenders institution not to have informed X’s parents on each occasion that X had self-harmed. The jury’s verdict was that X died from hanging, which caused his death. In that example, there is evidence of intent to self-harm because previous instances of self-harm are mentioned in the narrative. However, there is no mention of intent surrounding the initiating act that caused the death. Therefore, the death is classified as “accidental”.

The ONS has estimated that such examples could have resulted in the suicide rate being underestimated by at least 6%, which is a third of the target for reducing deaths by suicide established by the last suicide prevention strategy. If the use of narrative verdicts increases, the gap between actual suicides and those reported will rise further, thus making it difficult to estimate any progress that is being made in reducing deaths by suicide.

The Ministry of Justice was unable to provide me with information about the number of narrative verdicts given by each coroner’s district. However, narrative verdicts made up around 81% of the verdicts classified as “other verdicts” in MOJ figures in 2009. In one very large district, Birmingham and Solihull, more than 48% of the 962 verdicts were classified as “other”, compared to a national average of 13%. In contrast, there were four districts, each one recording dozens of deaths, in which no narrative verdicts were given. Almost a third of coroners’ districts used “other verdicts” less than 5% of the time. That is not a criticism of the way that any coroner practises. However, there is clearly a lack of consistency in the way that narrative verdicts are used and therefore in the records that can be collected.

At the root of the problem is the coroner system itself. In 2003, a review of the system concluded that

“the coroner is a law unto himself.”

Inquest, which operates a free advice service for bereaved people, has described coroners as operating

“as a fragmented, non-professional assortment of individual coroners who operate with no compulsory training and little accountability.”

The system, or the lack thereof, creates a lottery in how deaths are recorded. There is no consistency and no guidance on how narrative verdicts could be presented, so that they could include the information that is required by the ONS. Narrative verdicts vary from a couple of lines to a couple of pages.

The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 contained a provision to create the office of chief coroner. Under that Act, the chief coroner would have responsibility for driving up standards in the system through training, and they would issue guidance and set national standards of service. The performance of the system would be monitored and there would be a consistent way of operating, which is the point most relevant to the debate today. In addition, differences between coroner areas would be kept under review.

The Government have determined that the function of the chief coroner can be carried out by others. I served on the Public Bill Committee for the 2009 Act, and I must say that we need a senior legal officer who oversees the coroner operation and ensures consistency in coroners’ courts. That is my preferred option, but a second option is to issue regulations and clear guidance to ensure that all narrative verdicts contain all the necessary information, with clear direction that any narrative verdict must include a statement on the intention, if any, of the person who has died. That would allow the accurate recording of the information that we need.

I want to mention briefly a third option, which is discussed in a paper by Lucy Biddle, a researcher at Bristol university. It is to remove suicides from the coronial system altogether. I will quote briefly from her paper:

“Indeed, suicide requests seem to be more to do with tradition than functional necessity, since their origins relate to when suicide was a crime and the property of those committing the offence was forfeited to the state. The suicide case is a misfit that presents today’s coroner with something of a contradiction in practice, since it still hinges around establishing intent and attaching a moral classification to the cause of death.”

The primary recommendation of the British Isles suicide research group’s report on good practice and changes to court procedure in 2006 was that in non-complex cases, where the facts are not disputed and the family agrees, coroners should be allowed the discretion to process suicides without a public hearing. I hope that the Minister will at least agree to consider that option.

Finally, coroners’ offices are part of the judicial system, but they also play a vital role in assisting health services and researchers, so they should be considered as part of our health system, as well as part of our legal system. In the past, the MOJ has perhaps focused too narrowly on the judicial aspect of the coroner system. It has failed to recognise the importance of coroners’ work in the health care system and thus failed to ensure that coroners are provided with guidance and training that reflects that role. I hope that we can have a commitment to take a more proactive approach to the issuing of guidance and regulation. Anything that we can do to prevent further tragic deaths from suicide is vital.