Women in the Criminal Justice System

Key statistics

On 12 February 2016, the women’s prison population stood at 3,820.
Women account for 15% of the current probation caseload and 4.5% of the prison population.i
The number of women in prison has increased by 114% over the 15 years 1995-2010.
Over 30% of women lose their accommodation, and often their possessions, while in prison.
Six in ten women in prison have (on average two) dependent children.
30% of women in prison have had a previous psychiatric admission (compared to 10% of men), 49% of women in prison suffer from anxiety and depression and 25% report symptoms indicative of psychosis.
46% of women in prison have tried to kill themselves at some point in their lives – this is more than double the figure for men, 21%, and more than six times the figure for women in the general population, 7%.vi
Half of women in prison report having suffered domestic violence and 1 in 3 has experienced sexual abuse.
Most women entering prison serve very short sentences: in 2014, 58% of sentenced women entering prison were serving 6 months or less.
45% of women are reconvicted within a year of leaving prison, and this rises to 58% for sentences of less than 12 months.
Women released from prison are more likely to reoffend, and reoffend earlier, than those serving community sentences.

Brief summary of the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ reforms

‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ is the government's flagship programme which changed how offenders are managed in England and Wales. Major reforms introduced under the programme include:

The fee at the point of conviction which was introduced to make “criminals contribute towards the costs of running the courts system”. This has been abolished since the last forum due to widespread condemnation and the resignation of more than 50 magistrates in protest.

The maximum penalty for prisoners who fail to return from a period of temporary release increased from 6 months to 2 years in prison.

The 35 Probation Trusts have been replaced by a single National Probation Service, responsible for the management of high-risk offenders and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) responsible for the management of low to medium risk offenders. For the first time, those sentenced to less than 12 months in prison are subject to supervision in the community upon release. CRCs are also responsible for supervising these short-sentence prisoners after release.

60% of the probation service has been outsourced/privatised: contracts were put out to tender and from 1 February 2015 the successful bidders in the competition – for example MTCNovo, Purple Futures, Seetec and Sodexo (sometimes in partnership with charities) – took ownership of and began running the 21 CRCs.
CRCs receive funding in two parts: a fee for some services, including TTG services and delivering the court sentence and licence conditions. By December 2017 they will receive Payment by Results payments if they achieve statistically significant reductions in reoffending.
There have been accusations that these changes, despite the aims of the reforms, still focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. The Ministry of Justice’s impact assessment of the proposals acknowledges that, “given a limit on the overall level of resources available for probation services, and the need for sentences to remain proportionate to the seriousness of the offending, delivering top end community orders may cause a number of primarily rehabilitative requirements to be substituted for primarily punitive ones.”

Anawim’s experience

According to Anawim, a Women's Centre based in Birmingham, the reforms have had a nefarious effect on women’s rehabilitation.

Anawim estimates that at least £1,500 per woman is required to achieve effective rehabilitation; some of the private companies are attempting to achieve this for £200.
Under the new rules, women released from short-term sentences are given 12 months supervision from the CRC, but there is no extra money to fund this. The assumption was that those serving short sentences require the least support. In the experience of Anawim, the opposite is true. Anawim has observed a marked increase in breach rates and recalls.

Recalls mean that women repeatedly serve two-week sentences: each time they fail to attend a probation appointment as part of their supervision, they are sent back to prison, which results in a chaotic carousel and makes it difficult to establish some stability for rehabilitation.
Before the scrapping of the charges, women were building up debts from the charges and were pleading guilty as this was cheaper.
Charitable trusts are now more reluctant to invest in the criminal justice sector as they would be propping up private companies and helping them to make money.
To enable a woman to have her multiple needs met it is necessary to establish ‘one stop shop/hub’ approaches with everything under one roof; currently, help is available but delivered in a disconnected manner. The provision of TTG services under this agenda may not be women specific and thus will not effectively link in with women’s services across the whole country.
Anawim has noted that whilst a man can return from prison to a functioning home with his partner and children, women often lose their homes and personal belongings and, as they are often the primary caregiver, their children are put into care (only 5% of women prisoners’ children remain in their home once their mother has been sentenced to custody). Anawim has also noted that when a woman is rehabilitated, it is less likely that their children will reoffend and there is often an improvement in the male partner’s behaviour. It could be said, therefore, that in general women suffer more from being sent to prison and have much more to benefit more from positive and effective rehabilitation.

Possible asks

‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ should include rehabilitation programmes more suited to the needs of women. Anawim’s flexible, varied and holistic one-stop-shop service which responds to the individual needs of each woman is an effective model to be imitated – they have reduced the recidivism rate among participants to 1%. NOMS own Analytical Survey 2015 found “single-target programmes focusing only on reducing the effects of trauma do not appear to contribute to reductions in women’s reoffending”.
The rehabilitation system should acknowledge the huge benefits of rehabilitating women, as ‘the glue of society’. Alongside social benefits (keeping families together, avoiding putting children in care) research has shown that investing in women’s rehabilitation pays dividends as the costs to the Criminal Justice system of chaos, substance misuse and crime in women’s lives are high due to regular and repeated contact with public services including GPs, methadone prescribing, ambulances and the care system, on top of criminal justice agencies costs.
A fairer funding structure whereby 15% of funding is allocated to the 15% of offenders in the probation system who are women: Anawim estimates that £4 million of NOMS’ £3.3 billion budget is currently spent on women annually.