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Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse. So said former Home Secretary Douglas Hurd in 1991. Just three years later his successor, Michael Howard, had reversed all that and the mantra became ‘Prison Works’. That ideology has pretty much held sway – with the previous Labour government committing to a huge prison building programme – until now.
Under immense pressure to come up with his department’s 25 per cent savings, the new coalition Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, looks set on a massive rethink.
From the work we at FMWF have done with women’s prisons and charities that work with them, this is not before time. Whatever the headlines say, Clarke is not talking about allowing killers and other serious offenders to roam the streets.
He is simply looking at whether it is worth banging people up for short sentences – six months or so – at an average cost of about £48,000 a year only to have about two thirds of them re-offend within 12 or 18 months of release. Victorian, was Clarke’s verdict on this lack of improvement in those sent away for only a short time.
His words echo those of Sue Saunders, governor of Holloway Prison, when she spoke at a recent FMWF gathering. Six months, she said, was too short a time to be able to help the offender. The prison service can try to help those on longer sentences with education programmes, drug rehabilitation and, if they are lucky, back-to-work schemes towards the end of their terms. But, said Saunders, those who come and go within six months largely leave prison unimproved in any way, slipping easily back into a life of crime.
Giving community service orders instead of six months would have a major impact on the women’s prison population. The vast majority of women prisoners are inside for less than a year.
The cost of this – mainly for rather piffling crimes – does not just amount to the £48,000 average a year it costs to keep a prisoner inside. There are also the enormous financial and longer term emotional costs of taking children into care which is a far more frequent occurrence for women prisoners.
There is a problem, too, that women become rapidly institutionalised in prison. Compared with a lonely, grinding existance back on the outside as a single mum living in poverty, the comradeship and lack of responsibility of being in prison can seem appealing which actually encourages reoffending.
The sense of isolation of released prisoners is made worse by the fact they feel they have little other than their experience inside to talk about. Wendy, the former offender who was my co-guest on Women’s Hour not so long ago, said it was one of the hardest things when trying to rebuild a social life as she felt she lacked any small talk that didn’t keep bringing the conversation back to her time in prison – hardly the type of chit chat that an ex-offender believes is going to endear them to a new group of friends.
There is so much wrong with the way the prison system treats women. But Ken Clarke’s brave initiative in sparking a debate about doing away with shorter sentences is a thoroughly welcome step. It may be driven by the need to find cost cuts but it could end in one of the most radical overhauls of our prison services in modern times.
Tags: ex-offenders, Women in Prison, Women in Prison - Policy
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