Women Offenders and Older Prisoners

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I rise rather apologetically to my feet again, but taking the two reports together at least spares the Chamber a third speech from me this afternoon. I shall present the two reports in this speech. I do so with a heavy heart in one sense, because one or two Members who would have spoken in the debate are not able to do so, as they are at the funeral of our late colleague, Paul Goggins. He took such a close interest in criminal justice and had so much experience of it that I regularly tried to persuade him to join the Justice Committee, but he was already committed in a number of other ways, including as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Our Committee missed out on having the benefit of his considerable wisdom, which we would have greatly appreciated.

This debate is on two reports that we produced this Session on groups of people who are minorities in the criminal justice system, but whose circumstances and needs place particular demands on that system, which is really geared towards dealing with young men. We wanted to examine the extent to which policy and practice are responding effectively to the needs of women offenders and older prisoners.

Older prisoners are the fastest growing group in the prison population, and our inquiry focused primarily, but not exclusively, on their treatment in prison. In our inquiry on women offenders, we looked at provision in the custodial state, where there are 3,845 women in a total prison population of 84,000, and more widely, including community provision for offenders and ex-offenders, and for women and girls at risk of offending. The Minister, whom we are glad to have here, will respond to the debate and cover both subjects. I shall return later to ministerial responsibility, particularly for women offenders, because that has been an issue.

All this goes back to 2006, when Baroness Corston was commissioned by the Home Office to examine what could be done to avoid women with particular vulnerabilities ending up in prison. That was prompted by the death of six women in Styal prison. Her report, published the following year, identified three categories of vulnerabilities for women: those relating to domestic circumstances and problems, such as domestic violence, child care issues and being a single parent; those relating to personal circumstances, such as mental illness, low self-esteem, eating disorders and substance misuse; and socio-economic factors such as poverty, isolation and employment.

The Corston report made 43 recommendations. I shall not go through all of them, but they included improvements to the way in which the issue was dealt with at Government level, the reservation of custodial sentences and remand for serious and violent women offenders, and the use of small local custodial centres within 10 years. They also included improvements to prison conditions, making community sentences the norm, and improvements in health services and support for women offenders. The then Government accepted 41 of the 43 recommendations.

There is much common ground on policy on women offenders. There appears to be fairly wide, although not universal, agreement that the majority of women offenders pose a limited risk, or no risk at all, to public safety, and that imprisonment is frequently an ineffective response. That is not about treating women more favourably or implying that they are less culpable, but about how to respond appropriately to the kinds of problems that women bring to the criminal justice system, and about what action is required to be effective in addressing their offending behaviour. In many cases, that is different from what is required to achieve the same thing in men.

It should be recognised that important progress has been made on the Corston recommendations. As has been illustrated by reports from the Howard League, the Prison Reform Trust, the prison and probation inspectorates and the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system, that includes better prison regimes, the ending of strip searching, reduction of self-harm, the establishment of a network of women’s centres, and acknowledging the need for differential treatment. However, levels of imprisonment for non-violent female offenders remain high, as do levels of self-harm by women. A study published before Christmas showed that there is still 10 times more self-harm among women prisoners than among their male counterparts.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I wonder on what basis the right hon. Gentleman claims that the majority of women offenders in prison are either not violent or not dangerous. Let me give a snapshot of the prison population. There are 3,477 women in prison, and murder, manslaughter, other violence against the person, sexual offences, robbery, burglary, arson, blackmail and kidnapping account for half the female prison population. Which of those categories is he saying is not a serious offence and involves people who are not dangerous to the public?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I chose my words carefully. I said not that women were put in prison for offences that were not serious—courts would normally regard either the offence or the fact that they are repeat offences as a serious matter, underlining their decision to give a custodial sentence—but that many of the women, if they were not in prison and were otherwise effectively supervised, would not constitute a danger to the public. That is not true of them all, which is why there will always be some women in prison, some for very long periods, but those numbers will be relatively small.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The first report to which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) comprehensively referred surveyed the provision for female offenders within the system in England and Wales, with the particular aim of finding out what had happened since the landmark report by Baroness Corston in March 2007. By and large, the Justice Committee was disappointed to learn that the Government were still not investing enough resources in tackling the causes of female offending, as opposed to helping women already involved in the system. The Government have made progress in several areas, but the Committee warned that

“there is little to signal a radical shift in thinking”

about what generating a whole-system approach actually meant for tackling female offending.

As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, since the inquiry was announced the Government have appointed a ministerial champion for women in the criminal justice system, announced a review of the female custodial estate and published their priorities for women offenders. That is all to the good, except that we are now suffering a hiatus because the former member of our Committee who held that post of ministerial champion has moved on. I have no doubt that the current Minister will respond in due course to the points that the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has made. I say in passing that the Minister must have been a very bad man in a past life, considering all the briefs that he has had to deal with this week. I am pleased to see him in his place.

There is a fear that progress may be undermined by the reforms—here we go again—to offender management and rehabilitation in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, which is currently passing through Parliament. In the debate on Report on Tuesday evening, we had a short debate about Government amendment 7, which introduced the need to comply with the Equality Act 2010 and the need for the Secretary of State to identify anything in the arrangements that was intended to meet the particular needs of female offenders. As I said on Tuesday evening, I think that is all to the good. That triggered a response from the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) that stunned the Chamber into complete silence. He said, in effect, that he thought women were treated more leniently in the system than men.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will make his own speech, and we will listen intently to what he has to say, but I have to tell him that there is little support for what he says. He seems to have missed an important point, namely, that sentencing a woman to custody has profound consequences that may not arise in cases involving men. There are questions about housing and care for children; there is the possibility of children being taken into care; and, overall, a huge wave of anguish surrounds such families. It should be noted that those additional and serious consequences will present even when a woman is given a very short sentence. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, often that is the case, but the damage is still done.

I believe that we must treat women differently for those and other reasons. That was the basic ratonale for our research and report. We are seeking not necessarily the soft option but the appropriate option, which I for one would like to see implemented. I am sure that there are ways of doing it, and if we concentrate on the special problems that arise when women are sentenced to custody, I am sure that we will be able to improve the situation drastically.

I am not going to deal with the whole report, obviously, but I would like to highlight one or two issues arising from it. On trends in women’s offending and sentencing, the Committee agreed that women required a distinct approach from those who engaged with them in the criminal justice system. As I have said, we found that women tended to be the subject of shorter community orders and were less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to immediate custody, compared to 10% of males. That is partly to do with the types of offence commonly committed by women. Our report states:

“In the 12 months to June 2012, 81% of women entering custody under sentence had committed non-violent offences, compared with 71% of men.”

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I have here figures from the Ministry of Justice that were provided in a written answer to a parliamentary question I asked, so I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will accept them. Does he accept that for every single category of offence, a man is more likely than a women to be sent to prison? The figures on that point are laid out starkly by the Ministry of Justice.

[Mr Llwyd]

If the official figures show that, I am not in a position to argue with the hon. Gentleman, but does he accept that 81% of women entering custody under sentence have committed non-violent offences and are therefore not a danger to the community? Perhaps he will address that when he makes his speech.

[Philip Davies]

I will.

[Mr Llwyd]

Okay. Our report goes on to state that

“over half (52%) of women sentenced had committed petty offences”—

relatively petty—

“related to theft and the handling of stolen goods, compared with one-third (33%) of men. In addition, over a quarter (26%) of women sentenced to imprisonment had no previous convictions, more than double the figure for men (12%).”

The Select Committee agreed that the majority of women offenders posed very little risk to public safety and that imprisonment was usually an ineffective response. After all, women have a very different experience of custody from men. Unfortunately, in their response to our report, the Government said:

“there should be one justice system for all offenders who commit crimes.”

The Government would do well to recognise that one size does not fit all when it comes to tackling offending.

Since 2008, the gender-specific standards in custody have provided gender-specific programmes, recognising the fact that female offenders’ needs are usually very different from male offenders’ needs. For example, female offenders are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to suffer from anxiety and depression and are more likely to report having used class A drugs in the four weeks prior to custody. Female offenders are also more likely to have suffered abuse in childhood or in their adult lives.

Our inquiry found that the Government’s gender equality duty had not been implemented robustly enough and was not persuading enough commissioners to provide gender-specific services for women offenders. In their response to the report, the Government conceded that there were problems with the public sector equality duty.

The Government also refer to female offenders in their document, “Transforming Rehabilitation.” I was glad that they amended the Offender Rehabilitation Bill on Tuesday, but, as a member of the Justice Committee and a barrister of some years’ experience, I still have serious concerns about the potential effect of the proposals on provisions for female offenders, or the lack of them in future. I believe it is more likely than not that the private companies that win the contracts for supervising the under-12-month cohort will have little interest in investing time and resources in rehabilitative programmes, but we will wait and see, as no one has a definitive answer on that yet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). He is a good man. I cannot think of anything that I agree with him about, although I am sure that we would find something if we struggled long enough, but he is a good man who argues his corner very effectively. I guess that this is a subject on which he has been particularly effective in arguing his corner.

My sole purpose here in Westminster Hall today is to try to give people the facts, which often appear to be lost in these debates. People can make of the facts what they will, but it is important that we have the facts because there is no excuse for people being misinformed. Rather than the report on older prisoners, which I will leave for another day, I shall concentrate on the report on women offenders. I have been studying this subject closely for quite some time, and it is important that the House knows the background.

I take a close interest in justice issues and sentencing. I spend a lot of time on them, visiting prisons, and so on. I used to attend Justice questions month in, month out, to be told time and again how terribly and unfairly women were treated in the criminal justice system and how so many of them who were in prison should not be there. From questions and speeches that I listened to, this problem seemed to be particular to women. So effective was this constant—week in, week out, month in, month out—lobbying in the House that I became rather agitated by it.

I believe passionately in equality, in the sense that people should be treated the same, across the piece. I believe that, whether determining people’s pay or opportunities, or in this case the way people are sentenced when they commit a crime, everybody, including the courts, should be gender-blind, colour-blind, religion-blind and sexual orientation-blind. People should be treated equally, irrespective of any of those things. I believe in that passionately.

When I was steamrollered with all the information in Justice questions and debates about how terribly women were treated in the criminal justice system and how unfairly they were treated by the courts, I was so irritated that I decided that something should be done. I decided that it was terribly unfair if women were treated so badly by the criminal justice system, so I looked into it in greater detail. The Minister will confirm that, as will all his predecessors. I praise the Minister, because I probably bombard him with parliamentary questions, seeking out lots of information and the statistics on all these things. I must put on the record that, to my mind, the Ministry of Justice is probably the best Department for providing relevant information. Far too many Departments will say that it is too difficult or expensive to find information. The Ministry of Justice never does that; in my experience, it always provides the information that is required.

There are reams of statistics and information out there, so there is no excuse for anybody to be misinformed, yet it appears to me that many of my colleagues in Parliament go no further than reading briefings from the Howard League for Penal Reform or perhaps, at a push, sometimes, from the Prison Reform Trust. Those organisations have their own, perfectly legitimate, reasons for producing figures and statistics in a particular way. They have an agenda: they do not like people being sent to prison; they particularly do not like women being sent to prison. I do not blame them for trying to influence policy along the lines that they feel are right when the door is left open to them. What is not acceptable is the misuse of figures in the House of Commons when we are debating serious information, so I want to try to redress that balance today. I have tried to do it in the past and I will continue to do it in future.

Today, I feel that I have been making some headway, because the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd seemed to concede—the first time I have heard it conceded—that, yes, men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. That tends not to have been heard before. Listening to questions and debates in Parliament, people would be forgiven for thinking that that was not so. I am pleased that that at least has been acknowledged. The right hon. Gentleman set out why he thinks there are good reasons to treat women differently in the criminal justice system and not to send them to prison as often as men. To me, that is a perfectly legitimate point for him to pursue. I do not necessarily agree with it, although I may agree with him on certain points. I am pleased that we are at least starting to have that kind of honesty in the debate, with people saying that, yes, men are treated more harshly by the courts when being sentenced, but there is a reason for that. I believe that I am making at least some progress in this debate. I hope to make further progress later today.

The fact is that, at any time in recent history, about 5% of the prison population has been female. In 1900, according to the Library, 17% of the prison population were women, but since the 1950s onwards, it has hovered around 5%. Therefore 95% of the prison population is male. That might surprise many, given the focus on female offenders. What might be a bigger shock to people, if they follow these debates as I do, is that, according to the Library, in the past 10 years the female prison population has decreased by 3%, whereas the male prison population has increased by 24% over the same period. People could be forgiven for not realising that when they see all the reports and all the focus on the number of women being sent to prison, when men being sent to prison is never covered in the same way. With all the reports, action plans, working groups, campaign groups, strategies and special interest groups, who would have guessed that those were the facts about the numbers of men and women in prison and the trend over the past 10 years?

The confusion arises because so many myths surround the debate about female offenders. I have mentioned some of these points before. The premise of the Justice Committee’s report seems to have missed the point about the reality of the situation. In fact, in recommendation 7, the Committee rather bizarrely states:

“We welcome NOMS’ intention to accelerate work on the specific needs of women, but we are extremely disappointed that over six years after the Corston Report there is still not sufficient evidence about what those needs are, or how best to address them.”

This whole debate and report seems to have been compiled on the basis that it is accepted that women offenders are a special case, that they have special needs and that something must be done to reduce the female prison population. This view is not based on any evidence that I have seen and this section of the report seems to suggest that no such evidence has been seen by the Committee, either.

[Nick de Bois]

I do not often take issue with my hon. Friend, which probably comes as no comfort to some Committee members, but he is concentrating on the numbers of people going to prison. Should we not be talking about whether measures that make it less likely for any offender—in our report, women offenders—to reoffend must be the greater prize than competing about numbers of people in prison?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will come on to that in a second, but the point is that surely that applies equally to male offenders, yet there is not the same focus on what matters to male prisoners and what will reduce male reoffending as there is on what would reduce female prisoners’ reoffending. That is bizarre, given that women make up only 5% of the prison population. If my hon. Friend is so concerned about reducing reoffending and reducing the crime rate per se, one would have thought, given the sheer weight of numbers, that he and his Committee, and the Minister and the ministerial team at the Ministry of Justice, would think it more important to get to grips with male offending and reoffending, but that is not what we hear.

[Nick de Bois]

My hon. Friend is, of course, well aware that we are concentrating on one specific issue that the Committee looked at. Of course, we have equally looked at the effectiveness of transforming rehabilitation and the great prize that we will win from that by bringing down reoffending. Is my hon. Friend really saying that, although he wants justice to be blind, it should also be stupid? If there are special points of difference, surely we should examine those, even if they are based on sex.

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept my hon. Friend’s premise that not sending women to prison—I will come on to why in a second—will make the kind of difference that he thinks it will. I want to examine the types of people who are in prison.

[Sir Alan Beith]

May I recommend for the hon. Gentleman’s bedtime reading a report that we published just before the general election—a long report, much longer than this one, called “Cutting crime”, which deals almost entirely with male prisoners?

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that I have already had it as bedtime reading, because I seem to have read almost every report going on these matters. We can have an argument on the effectiveness of prison per se at another time. I am a big fan of sending more criminals to prison: for example, each year some 3,000 burglars with 15 or more previous convictions are not sent to prison, which is a national scandal, and I suspect that most of my constituents think so too. We can discuss that on a different occasion, and perhaps the Select Committee might want to consider why so few persistent burglars are sent to prison. My constituents would welcome that.

One point that crops up time and again is the idea that women offenders are, by definition, more vulnerable than male offenders and therefore need special protection. I want to address that first because I believe that much has been made of the special case of women offenders, but next to nothing has been said about the problems that men face. I have been interested to discover that some of the facts show that much of what is being said could apply equally to men. The House of Commons Library, for example, says that almost the same proportion of sentenced male prisoners as of sentenced female prisoners ran away from home as a child—47% compared with 50%. The Library also states that, although a third of female prisoners were excluded from school, a larger half of male prisoners were excluded from school. A quarter of both male and female prisoners are thought to have been in care when they were growing up. Although about one third of female prisoners admit to hazardous drinking, it seems that the figure for men is more like two thirds.

When we talk about those figures, we have to bear in mind the overall prison population figures. For the record, as of last Friday, 10 January, there were 3,845 women in prison and 80,413 men. Clearly half of the male prison population is a very large figure and half of the female prison population is a relatively low figure, so if campaigners are really concerned about the personal circumstances and vulnerabilities of individuals, they perhaps ought to be clear that far more men than women are in the position they describe of being vulnerable prisoners. On sheer numbers alone, one would therefore think male prisoners would be given far more attention than women prisoners.

Of course, the favourite subject among some campaigners is mental health, which is also mentioned prominently in recommendations 1 and 2 of the Select Committee report, and it is addressed in the Government response. Of course the figures in the report are only for women offenders, so in the interest of ensuring that we have the real picture, and not the one that some would like us to be left with, I will compare female offenders with such problems with male offenders in the same position.

In 2011, two women committed suicide in prison. I do not know the circumstances of those cases, but one might conclude that they were clearly vulnerable individuals. In the same period, 55 men took their own life. That is a stark example of the most serious end of the argument and it shows why it is unbelievable that so much time is spent compiling reports about vulnerable women, yet so little time is spent considering the hard facts about the deaths of male prisoners.

Even more recent figures show an alarming trend of which I hear little mention. Although the number of female self-harmers decreased from 1,429 in 2005 to 1,065 in 2013, the number of male self-harmers increased in that period from 5,692 to 6,823. Perhaps more starkly, over the same period the number of female self-harm incidents decreased by half, from 12,014 to 6,236, while the number of male self-harm incidents increased from 10,109 to 16,741. Again, according to the Ministry of Justice, 145 female offenders who self-harmed in 2013 required hospital treatment, whereas 10 times as many male offenders who self-harmed had to be taken to hospital. If people are concerned—and it may well be a legitimate concern—that women are vulnerable in those circumstances, surely men in such situations must be of equal concern. If that is the case, why do we have Select Committee reports simply on female offenders? Why do we not have the same reports on male prisoners, which we never seem to get?

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is an intelligent man, but his last point is rather stupid. In our report we were considering the circumstances of female offenders. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) told him, there have been other reports on the male occupants of the prison estate. Saying that because we are considering the situation of women, we could not care less about men, is absolutely ridiculous.

[Philip Davies]

I am afraid we hear that time and again in the main Chamber. Questions focus on female offenders, female offenders, female offenders; there is never the same focus on either offenders overall or male offenders. All I am trying to do is introduce some balance to the debate. Actually, all of the things that people mention also apply to male offenders and, just because of the sheer numbers, in many more cases. I would like to see the same focus—arguably, a greater focus—on all of those issues in relation to male offenders.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend find it as surprising as I do that, whereas the female figure for self-harm incidents has been going down not just in total over an eight-year period but in every single one of those eight years, the male figure has been going up every single year? We might think that it is flying in the face of the facts to concentrate on females rather than males.

[Philip Davies]

One would have thought that, if the Select Committee was just considering the evidence, it would have wanted to focus on why the problem appears to be getting worse for male prisoners when it is getting better for female prisoners. Perhaps that would be a worthwhile thing to consider, but it appears that the Select Committee has glossed over that fact in its obsession with appealing to the politically correct lobby that wants to make out that women are treated far worse in prison than men.

One of the myths that I want to address is the idea that women are very likely to be sent to prison. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd gives the impression that many women should not be in prison, for reasons that apply only to women. He says there is a unique problem for women, and I want to nail that myth once and for all—I suspect that I will not, but I will give it my best shot.

Going back to my starting point, which is that I was appalled by what I was hearing about how women are treated so badly by the courts, I asked the House of Commons Library to provide the evidence that a higher proportion of women are being sent to prison. Not only could the Library not provide that evidence, but it confirmed that the exact opposite is true. I repeat that, for every single category of offence, a man up before the courts is more likely than a woman to be sent to prison. For violence against the person, for example, 35% of men and 16% of women are sent to prison; for burglary, 45% of men and just 26% of women are sent to prison; for robbery, 61% of men are sent to prison and 37% of women. It applies in every single category of offence: men are more likely than women to be sent to prison.

A Ministry of Justice publication called “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System,” which is produced to ensure that there is no sex discrimination in the system, states:

“Of sentenced first-time offenders…a greater percentage of males were sentenced to immediate custody than females (29% compared with 17%), which has been the case in each year since 2005.”

[Nick de Bois]

In all my hon. Friend’s bedtime reading of the report’s 150-odd pages, did he see that on page 7 the Committee does state that women are less likely than men to be sentenced to custody? It is there in black and white, so I am not sure what we are arguing over.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Mr Llwyd]

For clarification, I said in my speech that women are less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to custody, compared with 10% of males. I know that the hon. Gentleman is obsessed with his own argument and does not want to listen to the other side of the argument, but that was said, and it is on the record.

[Philip Davies]

If the right hon. Gentleman is listening to my speech, he will have heard me say at the start that I thought I was making some headway because this debate is the first time that I had heard him acknowledge that fact. It is not that I am not listening to him; it is a question of him not listening to me.

[Mr David Amess in the Chair]

I am grateful, however, because we are starting to make some progress. Everyone appears to be falling over themselves to say that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. When I made that comment the other day and in previous debates, I have been told that that clearly is not true. Now, everyone is falling over themselves to say that what I am saying is right, and that they were there first. I do not want to be precious about this, and do not want it to seem that I was there first; if people want to claim the credit, I am happy for them to do so. I am just pleased that we are making some headway, and that the facts are for once beginning to rear their ugly heads.

The Ministry of Justice answered a question that I asked in September about pre-sentence reports and its recommendations for sentences in court. It was confirmed that probation staff are twice as likely to recommend custody for male offenders due to be sentenced in Crown court cases than for female offenders. For men, the figure is 24%, while it is just 11% for women. Even repeat offenders are more likely to fare better if they are women. For those who have committed more than 15 offences, pre-sentence reports recommend custody for 39% of men, compared with 29% of women. All that shows that it is wrong to say that women are more likely to be sent to prison than men. We seem to have agreed among ourselves that men are more likely than women to be sent to prison for committing exactly the same offence. That is the reality.

It is also true, however, that men will be sent to prison for longer than women. I refer again to the Ministry of Justice’s published figures, which state that women given an immediate custodial sentence for indictable offences receive shorter average sentence lengths than men. It is 11.6 months for women, compared with 17.7 months for men. That is not a minor difference. That figure shows that the average male prison sentence is over 50% longer than the average female sentence. That is something that those who allege that they are keen on equality may want to think about.

Not only are women less likely to be sent to prison and more likely to be given a shorter sentence, but they are more likely to serve less of the sentence in prison than men. The Ministry of Justice helpfully points that out in its offender management statistics:

“Those discharged from determinate sentences…had served 53 per cent of their sentence in custody… On average, males served a greater proportion of their sentence in custody—53 per cent compared to 48 per cent for females”

in the same period. It continues:

“This gender difference is consistent over time, and partly reflects the higher proportion of females who are released on Home Detention Curfew.”

Other published Ministry of Justice figures confirm that. In fact, there is quite a disparity. In the past few years for which figures have been published, women have had 50% more of a chance than men of being released from prison early on home detention curfew. I hope that we have finally nailed the idea that women are treated more harshly by the courts than men. Men are clearly treated more severely by the courts when it comes to being sent to prison.

The other myth that we hear—the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd hinted at it earlier—is that most women in prison are serving short sentences for petty, non-violent offences, and that they would be better off being dealt with elsewhere. Let us take a snapshot of the sentenced female prison population at a moment in time and look at the detail of all these “poor women” who are serving prison sentences and who should—apparently—be out and about in the local community. Which women prisoners do those who advocate reducing the female prison sentence want to let out? I asked that question of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has been good enough to come back again today, for which I am grateful. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd gave the impression—although he perhaps would not want to subscribe to this—that as much as 80% of women prisoners should not be in prison. That was the impression that he wanted to leave us with when he made his comments.

I have the latest Ministry of Justice figures on the female prison population, and I want to know which of these people the right hon. Gentleman and others think should not be in prison. Is it the 231 who are in there for murder? Is it the 61 who are in there for manslaughter? Perhaps it is the 73 who are in there for other and attempted homicides. Is it the 391 who are in for wounding? Is it the 52 in for assault? Perhaps it is the 56 who are in prison for cruelty to children, or the 85 who are in for other violence against the person. Maybe the 83 who are in there for sexual offences should not be in prison. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman has in mind the 328 who are in prison for robbery. Is it the 208 who were unlucky enough to be sent to prison for burglary? They must have been persistent burglars to have been sent to prison.

The right hon. Gentleman probably does have in mind the 508 women who are in prison for theft and handling stolen goods, but maybe it is the 574 who are in for drug offences; perhaps they are the ones who he thinks should not have been sent to prison. Maybe it is the 86 women who are in prison for arson, the 24 for criminal damage, the 12 for blackmail or the 37 for kidnapping. Maybe the right hon. Gentleman has those people in mind when he says that these women, who apparently pose no danger to the public, should not be in prison. When those numbers are added up, they make up far more than half of the female prison population. Let us hear which ones should not be in prison. I would like to know.

[Sir Alan Beith]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

The Chair of the Justice Committee will tell us.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I have a suggestion for the hon. Gentleman. I would like him to take a trip to Texas to meet some right-wing Republicans who have decided that there is no point in spending so much money on putting so many women in prison on short-term sentences for drug offences when they could be got off drugs and restored to a decent life through methods in the community. It is right-wing Republicans who are saying that.

[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.

[Mr David Amess (in the Chair)]

Order. I am minded to start the winding-up speeches at 4 o’clock, which will leave half an hour for the two Front-Bench spokesmen and the Chairman of the Select Committee to make some closing remarks. I think there are three or four hon. Members who want to catch my eye, so perhaps they can share the 40 minutes between themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Nuttall]

I am sure that that is absolutely right: the first thought of any victims of crime would be that they do not want anyone else to suffer in the same way. That brings me to my next point.

[Philip Davies]

If we all agree with that point, presumably the best way to ensure that someone is not a victim of crime is to ensure that offenders are in prison, because while they are in prison they cannot go out and commit another crime.

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend leads me nicely on to the point I want to make about a concept that is rarely heard of—we have hardly touched on it in the debate—which is punishment. We have hardly heard anything about punishment. Sentencing is also about imprisoning people as punishment for the crime that they chose to commit—whether a man or a woman, they chose to commit the crime. That goes to the heart of the matter.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I apologise that I was not here for the start of the debate. I was speaking in the debate on Bangladesh in the main Chamber. As a member of the Justice Committee, however, I have taken part in all the inquiries, and I invite the hon. Gentleman to consider for one moment that societies that obsess solely about punishment end up with large prison populations and a very high rate of reoffending. Countries that go in for a combination approach, including a rehabilitation process, often end up with smaller prison populations, less reoffending and less crime.

[Philip Davies]

Garbage.

[Mr David Amess (in the Chair)]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Nuttall]

I entirely accept the reason of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for not being present earlier in the debate. That matters not; it was appropriate for him to be speaking in the other debate in the main Chamber. I also accept that, as a member of the Committee, he has spent some time looking into the subject, but I was not suggesting that rehabilitation should play no part in the justice process. Clearly, rehabilitation will have a part to play in most cases, although some cases are so heinous that offenders will not let be out of prison. If I had my way, of course, we would see the introduction of capital punishment—that would go some way towards dealing with the number of older prisoners in our prison estate.

[Philip Davies]

And with reoffending.

[Mr Nuttall]

And with reoffending, for that matter.

I am conscious of your guidance on time, Mr Amess, so I will not digress too much, but does it really matter whether someone is young or old, or male or female? A victim of crime who has suffered wants to see someone punished for that crime. The facts show, however, that male offenders are more likely to be sentenced to immediate custody than a female offender. Taking robbery, for example, 61.7% of male offenders but only 37% of female offenders are sentenced to immediate custody. Furthermore, when they are sentenced, the average sentence length for men is much more—34.1 months on average, compared with 25.5 months for female offenders. That is the same across the board, whichever sector we look at, for all offenders: thus, for burglary, 44.9% of men receive immediate custodial sentences, but only 26.6% of women.

Whichever category we look at, therefore, we see the same result—that cannot be right and it cannot be excused. We should not be looking for all sorts of socio-economic reasons to explain why people have committed crime. The introduction to the report on women offenders mentioned categories that should be taken into account, including a variety of “personal circumstances” and

“socio-economic factors such as poverty”.

I grew up in straitened circumstances and I find it extremely insulting when people suggest that people living in poor circumstances should somehow be excused for committing crime. That is simply not right. I was brought up in difficult circumstances, but we were all taught the difference between right and wrong; that it is wrong to commit crime, to steal from a neighbour or to hit someone else. We need to get back to a society in which, from an early age, people are taught the difference between right and wrong and that offenders are punished, and punished severely, so that they do not want to commit more crime or go back to prison. That is how we will cut crime in this country.