Women's Offending
I invite Professor McLean to join us at the table—you are very welcome to the Equal Opportunities Committee. Professor McLean is from the Institute of Law and Medical Ethics at the University of Glasgow. She is here to talk about how women fare in the justice system.
I am aware that you have produced a report that we will arrange to have circulated to the rest of the committee. I am looking forward to hearing your evidence this morning.
Professor Sheila McLean (University of Glasgow):
Thank you, convener, and thank you for the invitation to be here. I sent a copy of our forum's report to the clerks. I presume that not everybody has seen it. It might be helpful if I explain what we are trying to achieve. I do not want to take up too much of the committee's time chattering; unlike the standard academic, I shall try to keep it brief. I will be happy to answer questions.
My function in the inter-agency forum is very much as the chairperson. I do not regard myself as an expert in criminology or sociology. I took the opportunity to look at your website—I am sure that there are people in this room who are more knowledgeable about those subjects than I am, while members of my committee are undoubtedly experts.
The inter-agency forum came about as a result of the publication of "A Safer Way", which many of you may have seen. It was published by the Scottish Office—as it then was—in 1998. Several recommendations were made in the report; the one I am concerned with is the recommendation to establish a high-profile steering group in the Glasgow area. Its purpose was to consider not only women in prison—you must remember that the report followed the high number of suicides in Cornton Vale—but female offending in general. The Glasgow area was selected for the fairly obvious reason that it tends to produce the most women who enter the criminal justice system.
The forum was intended to come up with ideas that might improve the position of females in the criminal justice system, not least by keeping them out of that system wherever possible. It was also intended to bring together a variety of agencies—voluntary and statutory—that deal with women before offending, during the process of entering the criminal justice system and in the prison system. At the back of the report is a list of the organisations that are currently represented on the committee. They range from representatives of the sentencers—the judiciary and the police—to representatives of voluntary organisations, social work departments and those who are involved in housing, education, employment and training. It is a substantial committee and has on board many people with great expertise in this area.
During our first year, we met seven times. We have met two or three times since then. As you can imagine, it is easy to understand the problem but very difficult to ameliorate it. Our first task was to identify the kinds of situations in which the women we were asked to deal with would find themselves. It will come as no surprise to anybody here that one of the major difficulties we identified right at the beginning—and which had been identified in the report—was that the women share what we have described as three characteristics: addiction, abuse and anxiety and other forms of psychological distress. The women who are going through the criminal justice system, or who are at risk of entering it, come from abusing backgrounds—which can include emotional abuse as much as anything else—and often live what is called, in the jargon, a chaotic lifestyle.
It became clear to us that the solution to the problem—which would also help to relieve the problems at the other end of the system, in the prison service—would be to find routes to divert women towards what they might need in the community. The vast majority of women who are in prison are there for what, if you will forgive me, could be called trivial offending. I would like to return to that point, briefly.
We have developed two or three working parties within the framework of the forum, which are implementing three main ideas that came out of our first year of deliberations. The first relates to employment, training and education opportunities. We have tried to collate as much information as we can on the services that are available to women in relation to social work and other areas. It is hoped that we will be able to provide an up-to-date, comprehensive and thorough document to those who are dealing with women professionally as they go through the system, from the police to those who eventually have to sentence women.
A second idea that we are pursuing—they become more difficult to implement further down the list—is the possibility of having some kind of assessment process available for women at the point of arrest, or shortly afterwards. Many women end up in prison cells; we hope that, somehow, we can provide some kind of service to assist those who are caring for the women as well as the women themselves when they are arrested.
The third major strategy on which we are working is to identify whether there are ways in which we can streamline the court system. We would like to devise a pilot project with the magistrates court in Glasgow. There are clearly mechanical difficulties, and we are still working on the system—with the court's co-operation. We hope to produce a format in the court system that enables representatives of the agencies that are capable of providing diversion and additional support for these women to be available at the critical point when women appear in court. I recently discovered that there is already an informal protocol in the Glasgow area, which we might help to harmonise. When the women appear in court, the sentencers might not have as much information as they might want, and the women's needs may not be recognised.
One or two other issues came out of our report, which I would like to mention. They are not things that the inter-agency forum can do much about, technically, but they are matters that we have brought to the attention of the minister. Some women may end up opting for a custodial sentence rather than anything else as the UK housing benefit regulations mean that benefits can be paid only on one address. Although women might be offered bail with a residential condition, prison is preferable for some of them as it enables them to maintain their tenancy.
That seems a somewhat perverse result, but I am assured that that is the situation. The problem is caused by UK legislation. I am not sure that the Scottish Parliament or our forum can do much about it directly, but it would be possible to fund bail hostels differently, which may be a way around the problem. The legislation militates against the use of bail accommodation, although we could do with more beds in such accommodation.
There are other, straightforward, ideas that I am sure you have heard a million times before. Two things would decimate the population of women's prisons in Scotland: one is the decriminalisation of prostitution; the other is the transition of failure to pay television licences from a criminal to a civil matter. Although the inter-agency forum cannot have any particular impact on such issues, we raise them because they account for a substantial number of women in prison.
Finally, as far as I am aware, section 235 of the Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1995 has not yet been brought into force. That section would prevent the imprisonment of fine defaulters if they owed less than £500. In December 1997, Scottish Office figures showed that the average outstanding fine for people who are imprisoned for defaulting on payment is £256. As many women are in prison because they have failed to pay off fines, enacting that section would have a significant effect.
Although we need to deal with women who end up in custody, it is also imperative to find rational and appropriate mechanisms in the community to divert women from becoming engaged in the system or involved with offending. For people who become involved, we need the provision of adequate and appropriate halfway housing, which is lacking. As I have had letters from victims and the parents of victims—unsurprisingly—I should add that none of our suggestions ignores the plight of victims. In fact, I am sure that our task of minimising the chances of anyone becoming a victim of an offender of whatever gender is very similar to theirs.
We need a broad strategy that addresses how we prevent women getting into the situations in which they find themselves. Such a strategy must be part of a wider social strategy as well as being very much a part of the committee's social inclusion strategy. I have tried to highlight several short-term measures that we could introduce. As I said, our message is that we must divert women out of abusing situations, crime, prostitution, hopelessness and recidivism—and, I hope, out of prison.
Thank you very much. I will now open the session up to questions.
Thank you—that was very interesting. I was the one member of the committee who had had the advantage of already seeing your report. The last point that you made was interesting, because the work that was being done by the small reporters group to this committee related to women who are victims of crime and women as offenders, but you have drawn out a direct link between the two. In some cases, women who have been in difficult circumstances, who have been abused and subjected to the stresses that have been described to us at other times may, at a later stage in their lives, offend. It might be low-key offending, but they could end up in jail. It is interesting to see those issues in that way.
Where is the report in the Scottish Executive? Where is it sitting, and what is the next stage? Obviously, we hope that we can have a role in promoting some of the useful suggestions that you are making in regard to broader policy for the Scottish Executive.
I was supposed to meet Angus MacKay this afternoon, but that has had to be postponed, so I am hoping to meet him in the next couple of weeks. The report was sent to the Executive a couple of months ago, so it is waiting on the minister's desk.
Therefore, it would be for the Executive, with your group, to pull things from the report that you could then progress through the normal channels.
I would have thought that your committee could make progress simultaneously. The purpose of the meeting with the minister is in part to see what, if anything, in our report, can be done in the near future.
On the longer-term strategy, the forum is in existence for three years. It would be nice to think that we would not need three years, but unfortunately, as you will know, during our lifetimes the number of women going into prison has risen. Sadly, it appears that the same applies to the amount of more serious crime committed by women. In one sense, I suppose that you could say that we must be a dreadful failure, but I do not think that that is within our control. As I said, there are some strategies that the Executive might wish to look at now.
I want to raise a point that was raised with me elsewhere, about Glasgow's routes out of prostitution initiative, which diverts women from prostitution and supports them into employment. If someone has a conviction for prostitution, they are not defined as a schedule 1 offender, but it means that they are unable to work with young people—the offence would stay on their record—yet that is the area that we would hope many of those women could go into. Could those offences be rescheduled?
There are two ways forward. As I suggested, one way is to decriminalise prostitution. If decriminalisation is impossible, we might have to look at alternative ways of policing, as I know has happened in the Lothian and Borders police area in recent years. That would probably have the most dramatic impact on women's employability.
You are right: there is a paradox, in that many women who might be seeking employment might be looking for jobs in such a sector, and if they are deprived of that opportunity, there are difficulties. Nowadays, when we as a community have concerns about who is allowed to work with our children, I suspect that even re-categorisation would not be seen as sufficient to permit those women to take up such employment.
I am not speaking now on behalf of the forum, because I do not know the views of everyone on it, but I am speaking as an individual: it seems that our community's attitude to prostitution should be looked at again.
Many of the young women who are prostitutes are themselves victims. If drug addiction or abuse is taking them on to the streets, they are penalised through being unable to find a reasonable route out of that situation.
That is right. As I said, one of the major findings of the report was the discovery of the cycle of going from early deprivation of one kind or another, through the system, into drug or alcohol abuse, and then being unable to get out of that cycle. Women are not always imprisoned for offences, but even if alternatives such as fines are used, default is the next step down that line. Even supervised attendance orders do not necessarily help, because a default mechanism is still built in, and people get into a terrible cycle.
Before I ask Michael McMahon to speak, I should like to ask Professor McLean about section 235 of the Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1995. Have you had any discussions with the minister about lack of enforcement of that section?
No. That is one of the matters that I hoped we would be able to discuss this afternoon. As you know, legislation comes into force in stages and, as far as I know, it is just a question of that section not having been activated. It would make a difference to men, as well as women.
Recently, I talked to a doctor who mentioned the problems in Cornton Vale for women affected by opiate addiction. He commented that a number of the suicides—I am not sure about the exact figures—that took place there could be attributed to a lack of a support programme for women who were either opiate addicts or on methadone treatment programmes. Obviously, they were in prison in the first place because of an opiate addiction lifestyle. Did the forum examine that issue? Do you have any comments on that?
I will go back one stage further, to women in the community. One of the matters that we have been examining with Greater Glasgow Health Board has been the availability of support systems for women, such as methadone support schemes.
There are difficulties in the prison sector. Kate Donegan would be a much better person to answer that question than me. It seems to me that as long as the prison remains as overcrowded as it is, there is at least one difficulty with developing any kind of rational strategy—the sheer scale of the problem that the women are confronting, in surviving on a day-to-day basis. Developing the right approach to deal with women with opiate addictions might be easier when the prison system is able to give it the time.
There is also a different set of difficulties—this might be partly what was referred to by the doctor whom Michael McMahon mentioned. Many women in prison are on remand, so they are there briefly, or they are there briefly because of the nature of the sentence that they were given. That makes the creation of a stable regime to help them through the problem difficult for the prison staff. To an extent, that is as much part of the problem as anything else.
Members will know that there is a system whereby one of the voluntary agencies, which received funding to do so, will pick women up when they leave prison and try to bring them back into the community. Those people have expertise in working with women who are involved with drugs.
Small things can be done, but there seems to be a difficulty in building a real strategy when the prison population is so sporadic. When women who come out of prison do not go to a form of care in the community such as a supervised safe house—not prison in the community—it is difficult to break the chaotic cycle.
I do not know whether that answers Michael McMahon's question.
It does to an extent.
Although the Scottish Prison Service has a problem because of the nature of the women's crimes and the length of time that they will be in prison, that should not stop it trying to alleviate those problems. Is it trying to alleviate those problems effectively?
Yes, very much so.
I rambled on a bit in my answer because it seems to me that the problem that confronts the women who end up in prison is exacerbated by the nature of the system that puts them there and which does not deal with them when they come out. That is reflected, in my view, in the capacity of the Prison Service to offer the best possible strategy, but the staff in Cornton Vale are certainly examining every possible avenue to support those women. The drug problem is only one of the issues, but a big one.
Do you have any figures, or can you give us an indication of the percentage of women who would be in prison for the three things that you mentioned—prostitution, non-payment of television licence fees and outstanding fines of less than £500?
I am ashamed to say that I do not have those figures with me, but they are in the document, "A Safer Way", which gives a thorough breakdown of the reasons why women are in prison. It is a significant percentage.
You referred to the different methods of policing prostitution in this part of the world. That presumably feeds into differential prison populations in different parts of Scotland.
We presume that it does. We have had some discussions with Tom Wood at Lothian and Borders police. He has been helpful in explaining the system here.
We are not yet able to reach firm conclusions. It would be helpful for us to know what the Government's general response is to the issue of prostitution before we attempt to reach conclusions about policing, as there are strategies that can be adopted by people other than us. One of the difficulties that we experience—perhaps inevitably—in this type of forum is that although the groups that it involves are professionally responsible for the people we are discussing, they also have their own inter-agency relationships. The forum has a role to play in taking the agenda forward, but the activities that flow from that agenda might be the responsibility of someone else, such as the Scottish Executive.
I want to ask about the housing benefit issue to which you referred. Were you thinking specifically about bail hostels, or about alternative accommodation more generally?
I am thinking of any order to which women are subject that involves a residence order—that would include supervised bail, for example. Women's capacity to take up the accommodation that is available to them is limited, as many of them are single parents or have responsibility for children.
Are you saying that many people cannot take up the accommodation? Is there also a shortage of such accommodation?
There is a perceived shortage of appropriate accommodation. Bail hostels are one option, but in other countries throughout the world there are examples of halfway houses that are not linked directly to the criminal justice system. They are not policed, but they are safe and secure places. Most women are looking for a safe place to be. I do not think that Lady Cosgrove has finished her report on domestic violence, but I imagine that some of the things that she has to say will feed into this set of proposals.
We highlighted the housing benefit issue because of the perverse nature of the outcome. Women are choosing prison because there they can retain their tenancy. If they do not choose that option but choose one of the other options that are available with a residence condition, their housing benefit will be used to fund that accommodation. We cannot get round that legislation at the moment, but there might be other ways in which the Scottish Parliament or local authorities can use their money to circumvent the problem, so that women can avoid prison and retain their tenancy.
Thank you for your presentation. Yesterday I was trying to locate a report submitted to Glasgow City Council that attempted to explain why, in proportion to its population, Glasgow has such a high number of women offenders, particularly women offenders receiving custodial sentences. I remember that the main problem that was flagged up in that report was that, although a number of sheriffs indicated that they were willing to consider alternatives to custody, there was a lack of such alternatives. There is a great deal of fine talk about the need for alternatives, but they are not funded. The problem is that sheriffs have no option but to impose custodial sentences. Does your report bring that out and identify areas where alternatives are available and areas where they are not?
I would like to follow up the points made by Malcolm Chisholm. The Glasgow City Council report found that a high percentage of women were in custody because of non-payment of fines, and that a similarly high percentage of those fines related to prostitution. That was the result of a perverse situation in which women who were involved in prostitution had to continue with that illegal activity, as it was the only way in which they could pay their fines and avoid custody for non-payment. For that reason, I am glad that you have flagged up the way in which we deal with prostitution. I hope that in your report you make a firm statement on decriminalisation, which has been talked about for a long time but which the Executive has yet to get a grip on. At the moment, we are criminalising women for being victims.
From the point of view of the report, will you comment on why the proportion of women who are committed to prison for prostitution in Glasgow—and in Strathclyde generally—is so much higher than it is elsewhere in Scotland? I suspect that the answer will, in part, be to do with the way in which Lothian and Borders police treat prostitution. If that is the case, should not we try to encourage uniformity of treatment throughout Scotland, to prevent women from being committed to custody? I would like to hear your comments about funding and alternatives to custody and your recommendations in regard to the way in which prostitution is treated.
I agree that uniformity is necessary throughout the country in respect of the management of prostitution. We are interested in the experiments by Lothian and Borders police, which seem to have reduced the number of women who are being arrested and charged with prostitution. I understand that that also allows some women to continue to work in relatively safe places. That safety issue is something that we must take seriously.
I cannot speak about this on behalf of the forum because we have not reached a conclusion, but I favour any measure that increases the safety of such women, some of whom will continue to practise as prostitutes and many of whom do not like to be seen as victims, as I am sure you are aware. We must recognise the social and practical reality of those women's lives and we must not aid their progress further down the path of criminalisation to the point at which they end up in prison.
Another problem related to prostitution is that such women might have drug habits that need to be fed—we highlighted that at the beginning of the report.
On sentencing options, we have had representations from sentencers to the inter-agency forum. One of the first things that we identified was that those people do not—as Tommy Sheridan said—know what is available. They are confronted with people about whom they must make disposals and they are not sure what options are available beyond the obvious mainstream options. The first task of the first working group that we set up was to identify the alternatives to custody that are available.
Interestingly, the picture is not, perhaps, as bleak as we first thought. There are many very good agencies that work with women who find themselves in those situations. I have said publicly from the beginning that, if there are funding implications, I will not hesitate to present them to Parliament. The good news is that—even if the question of funding must be raised—there is a bundle of services that the forum might be able to help in harmonising. There are things that the forum can achieve through its structure that individuals in organisations that are concerned with the matter might find more difficult. We can bring to each other's attention the various people who are involved, as well as to the attention of those who process women at any stage of their passage through the system.
There might be funding implications—if there are, I will ask Parliament to examine that. I hope that, in pulling together the various agencies, we might be able to pool resources in a way that would also streamline the system. Does that answer your question?
Yes, definitely.
I also enjoyed your presentation and found it to be informative. I would like to ask about employment and training for those who are in custody or leaving custody. There is an issue about gender equality in lifelong learning—women who are not in custody face many barriers.
The Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee—of which I am a member—has been carrying out a local economic development review. That committee will soon examine guidance and support in lifelong learning. Are you aware of any examples of good practice with people, particularly women, who are in custody or leaving custody?
There is nothing that springs to mind, although the committee might want to get hold of Alex Blackwood, who is a member of our forum and has been fronting the strategy on our behalf. We have just had a successful seminar and we hope to have more. He is from the Glasgow education business partnership and he might be worth speaking to, as he is critically concerned about that matter.
We are trying to identify the best mechanisms for gathering relevant information about what is going on and what might be doable. That precedes the good practice question. We are considering how we might then provide the best possible means of dissemination, because there are user groups that we would have to target. We are contemplating whether a website might be built around that kind of information; there are questions round ownership of the website, but we are working on that.
How does having children impact on women? I am not well clued up on this at all, but how does the fact that women have young children affect their treatment in the criminal justice system?
There is a criminological answer, which suggests that women have been dealt with historically rather more leniently because of their child-bearing capacity. Members of the committee may disagree with me about that. However, once women deviate and step out of the model that they are supposed to conform to, their child-bearing capacity becomes another reason for punishing them.
The criminal justice system must pay attention to the nature of what is being done. Its obligation is not to be sympathetic to women and/or their children; it is to ensure that we have a community that feels safe. Where women are a threat to the community, there is no question but that they must be punished in the same way as men would be. On the other hand, it could be argued that many women in the criminal justice system do not pose that sort of threat. Nevertheless, the facilities and services to permit them and their families to be adequately taken care of do not exist either.
Judges may be more reluctant to imprison a woman with a young family but, in the long run, if they run out of options, it will happen. Part of our task is to ensure that we do not get to the end of the options, except in those cases where there is no choice.
Do we have sufficient women-specific drug projects? Our picture of a drug addict is probably of a young man who may be causing problems in the community because of his addiction. The justice system may be more likely to find ways of diverting male drug-using offenders because they are creating a greater problem. Is there enough support in the early stages for women who have a drug problem to avoid them going further down the line where their problem may lead to offending?
We have a number of extremely good organisations, such as Turning Point, which is represented on the inter-agency forum on women's offending. I suspect that the people who run such organisations would say that much more money needs to be spent, as there are limitations to what they can produce. Glasgow's drugs action team has an innovative and proactive drive on at the moment to consider drugs. I know that treatment of drug offenders of both genders in the courts system has been raised in Parliament by Angus MacKay among others.
The health boards, voluntary bodies and social work departments are working closely with other centres, such as the Douglas Inch centre, whose remit is to deal with mentally disordered offenders, but which tackles wider issues. The question of resources is one that could probably be better answered once we have been able to get to the root of what is available and how those provisions can integrate and overlap. It may be that services are being underused. For example, there is a feeling that the outstanding services that are offered by the Douglas Inch centre are not used as much as they might be. One of our ambitions is to bring such matters to people's attention so that services can be used appropriately. When we reach that point, I suspect we will find that there are considerable shortfalls, but until then, we cannot speculate how big they might be. We are also rather cheered by everything that is going on, even if it is not being done in the most structured way.
We have been examining the budget process and the gender impact assessment of the budget. It would be interesting to know the extent to which money is being directed toward women offenders and women with drug problems. Engender says that dealing with the issue in a mainstream, non-gender specific way means that the money is directed toward men.
If it does nothing else, that justifies the existence of the forum. As you can imagine, when the creation of the forum was announced, I had to give many media interviews explaining why it was not sexist. There are sound reasons for considering women, because they form a fairly discrete group in the offending population. I suspect that they share more characteristics than men do. It must be said that, in the same way that we do not anticipate that this group will make more people victims, we hope that lessons that are learned from the study of that discrete group will be translatable into the wider prison population.
I think you are right that women have tended not to have as high a profile because, by and large, they do not do quite so many dreadful things. They form a smaller percentage of the offending population and the crimes that they have committed, traditionally, are not high-profile crimes. Many structures that go back as far as the prison system and the criminal justice system are, in essence, patriarchal in nature and may not have been able to be sensitive enough to women in the past.
The information that you have given us has been extremely thought provoking and useful. We should reflect on how we take the issues forward. You seem to have identified a number of priorities in your report with which the committee could assist, such as the issue of section 235 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 and when that will come into force. Perhaps we could ask the Minister for Justice about that as well as about decriminalisation, the options for funding bail hostels differently, and safe houses. We could ask the minister to seek the thoughts of the UK Government on the penalties for non-payment of TV licences. Are you happy that we should make progress on those issues by seeking the thoughts of the Minister for Justice? Perhaps the committee can discuss his response.
We would be very grateful if you did that.
We intend to invite the Minister for Justice and the minister with responsibility for equality. The gender reporters group thought that, at some stage, it would produce a report with recommendations to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Clearly, we also want to know what is being done now. We can certainly do both things. Ultimately, the group wants to highlight specific justice issues that the Justice and Home Affairs could promote at some time.
Both those things can be done together. There are some pressing questions on which we would like to know the minister's thoughts, and we should seek those thoughts as soon as possible. The report to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee would be a useful follow-up to that.