Recall of Women to Prisons

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Wednesday 20th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on securing this important debate.

Recall of female offenders has gone up by 131%—an odd number, but dramatic—in the last 12 months, since the Government introduced mandatory post-custody supervision. The reasons for the dramatic increase in recall rates are complex, but there is a common theme: community support services, which were once a lifeline for recently released offenders, are no longer available.

Women offenders are far more likely to be convicted for non-violent offences, which means that the majority—72%—are serving sentences of less than a year. Despite the Secretary of State’s acknowledgement that short-term sentences do more harm than good, they are still being issued in their thousands. The startling figures illustrating the failure of the new post-custody system highlight the inability to join up vision and implementation. Too often, women who end up in prison come from a background of systematic violence. Current research suggests that 57% of female offenders have suffered domestic violence, and 53% have experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse during childhood. Furthermore, research suggests that prison is not an effective deterrent for women, with 61% of those who are inside for less than 12 months going on to be reconvicted within a year of being released.

Recent recall numbers illustrate how our system fails female offenders with backgrounds of trauma. In the Prison Reform Trust’s new research paper, 19 out of 24 women interviewed said that they received no support from support officers to address the complicated and interlocking issues they faced once they had left prison, including the struggle to find accommodation, as we have heard; to identify services to combat drug or alcohol abuse; to reunite with children who were taken into care following their mother’s incarceration; or to take other steps needed to rebuild a life.

The ideas behind the extension of post-custody mandatory supervision were sound. They suggested that the Government were interested in rehabilitating offenders, not just punishing them. However, those good intentions have been smashed to pieces by the consistent and deliberate refusal to fund the services that support people transitioning from prison. Many must wait weeks after release to start receiving benefits, and universal credit claims must be made online, which is not possible for most inmates.

According to Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation, one in seven short-term inmates leaves prison without knowing where they will sleep that night, and only a small proportion find suitable accommodation on the day of release. One woman recalled to prison and interviewed for the Prison Reform Trust said:

“Being a homeless woman is so degrading. They will send me out to no housing. It’s a big, ‘recall me’ sign on my forehead. I have no excitement about going out. I got no place to go and an ex-partner who is very violent.”

It is a bleak situation, made worse when we remember that two thirds of female offenders have dependent children and one third are single parents. Some 95% of the children of single mothers who are sentenced to prison time are taken into care, further perpetuating the cycle of neglect and trauma.

Although female prisoners make up less than 5% of our prison population, the dramatic increase in recall rates proves that our system is failing them. There is something clearly wrong with a system in which female offenders who have served short sentences for non-violent crimes end up being recalled for many more months because they have missed appointments with their support officers due to homelessness.

Centrally, that issue cannot be separated from the continued use of short-term sentences, which are destructive and do not work as a deterrent to crime. There needs to be a presumption against their use and an increased use of non-custodial punishments. If we as a society believe that our prisons should rehabilitate as well as deter, we must properly invest in support services. Leaving our ex-inmates to fend for themselves while imposing strict regulations on them greatly increases their chances of reoffending. Testimonies suggest that some ex-inmates deliberately reoffend to be readmitted to the system, where, crucially, they have a roof over their head. That cannot go on. We can solve it, but it needs political will and the right financial support.