Official Report 269KB pdf
Agenda item 3 is evidence on female offenders in the criminal justice system. I am pleased to welcome our first panel of witnesses. Dr Nancy Loucks is an independent criminologist and Dr Margaret Malloch is a senior research fellow at the University of Stirling. We have had apologies from Professor Gill McIvor, who cannot make it, so we have more time for both of you, ladies.
I thank the witnesses for coming. You highlight various negative consequences of the fact that female offenders are housed in a single institution, Cornton Vale. For example, family relationships are often disrupted because offenders are some distance from their family and home. Would it be preferable for female offenders to be held in prisons throughout the country?
You can fight over it.
It would be sensible for women to be housed in smaller, more local establishments so that they can retain access to local services as well as maintain family contact. Such establishments should be independent rather than being attached to male establishments. That has been attempted in the past, but unfortunately it resulted in the marginalisation of the facilities that were available for the women, much to their detriment. Ideally, women should be in relatively independent, local establishments.
I agree. The important thing is to have appropriate resources for women in those smaller centres. The positive thing about a centralised system is that there is an opportunity to develop a number of different programmes and support interventions. In developing smaller centres, it would be important to ensure that those were transferred.
Is there a minimum size for such prisons to be feasible? Does the smaller number of female offenders limit the number of small prisons that we could have, given the need to ensure that they have the necessary resources and interventions?
It is difficult to say what the optimum size would be. The important thing is that the resources are available. The 218 centre in Glasgow, which offers powerful support and services for female offenders, has only 14 beds. It works with a lot of women in the community. The problem that we have noted throughout the regions of Scotland is that, often, there are such small numbers of female offenders that services and support are not available. That is the case in the Highlands and Islands, for example. We need to take a rational approach, but we can still do things in a much more decentralised way.
Given that female offenders are usually in prison for less serious crimes, I presume that it would be possible to have a more open style of prison with less high security, which might make it easier to run such prisons. Is that a fair assumption?
That would be fantastic. A tremendous number of community interventions are available, but they are vastly underused. They could certainly be used with the female offender population very easily.
The specialist services are not available because there are fewer women offenders. The way to solve that, obviously, is not to have more women offenders. Why are the services not available? Does it come down to cost? Would a cost benefit analysis really show that it was cost effective not to have such services?
A distinction must be made between the short term and the long term. Spending in the short term with a longer-term perspective would lead to longer-term savings. There is an issue of rights that must be taken into consideration in making appropriate support available for women. The cost is sometimes a red herring, because it is so difficult to calculate the cost of the longer-term consequences.
In your submission, you note that the Correctional Service of Canada stated:
There are models around the world, not just in Canada, that can provide good examples of how those services can be developed. The 218 centre in Glasgow and the Asha centre in England, for example, provide models for ways of supporting women more effectively than could be done in a large, centralised establishment.
I will press you a bit further on that. There are obviously economies of scale in bringing everything together in a single institution, but there is also a geographical downside, in that the prison can be very far from the kind of informal support that the women need from their family and friends. How do we strike a balance between what Cornton Vale can offer as a catch-all institution and dividing the female prisoners up so they are nearer the informal support services of their family and friends?
The men's estate is set up so that there are facilities for longer-term prisoners who then move on to local facilities prior to their release. Cornton Vale does not offer that option. It might be useful to have a larger establishment for people who are serving longer sentences and who can take advantage of the services and support that are available over longer periods of time. They could then move on to local establishments as they are preparing for release. That would be another possibility.
Is there any evidence that, as I think your paper suggests, it is not just the support that is given just before a prisoner is due to be released that can make a sizeable difference to the outcome but the on-going support that they get as they serve their sentence?
Support would be available during a prisoner's sentence, but that will eventually need to be transferred outside. For example, support for people with addictions and survivors of abuse and support in relation to employment and training would need to be continued outside.
I was thinking specifically of family support. Is there an imbalance due to geographical location between the support that a male prisoner might get from family and friends and the support that a female prisoner might expect if she is quite remote from her immediate family?
All prisons need to focus more on the needs of families and maintaining family ties. Cornton Vale is very remote for people who are travelling from any part of the country. There is nowhere for visitors to wait and there are no facilities that would allow families to visit in a relatively normal environment. The facilities are very limited and need to be developed. That is especially true in Cornton Vale, where family ties are perhaps that much more disrupted, but it is also true across the entire prison estate.
It seems to be established wisdom that, as your paper states,
There are probably opportunities to do more, but the bigger issue is to consider why so many women are there on remand or for very short sentences, and what the purpose is of sending them to prison. That brings us back to the resources that are available in the community. We need to encourage sentencers to make use of the resources in the community that we know would be effective.
I agree that prison is overused for women on very short sentences. They do not benefit from support that might be available, which is focused—rightly—on people who are in prison for longer. That is not to say that nothing can be done for this group of women. For example, Cornton Vale prison has developed a modular women offenders programme that might benefit not only women on shorter sentences but women on remand. However, because resources are limited, the programme is focused on those serving longer sentences.
Is there any point in turning that situation on its head? Instead of putting all our eggs in one basket and focusing on long-term women prisoners, should we concentrate resources on signposting services and doing as much as we can to identify whether short-term prisoners have particular literacy, numeracy or addiction problems?
We could certainly identify the issues; the difficulty is addressing them.
The ideal solution would be to identify the various issues and connect them with community-based resources. However, such work is incredibly resource intensive and, given the current level of overcrowding, the staff would find it physically impossible to take on such a responsibility.
So you contend that it is wrong to say that nothing can be done with short-term prisoners. If resources are available, useful work can be done.
I think that we would still need to look beyond the prison to address such matters.
I understand that but, given the current position and given that our ultimate aim is to ensure that these offenders receive the appropriate disposals, can anything be done with short-term prisoners?
Yes, but not with the current level of overcrowding and staffing numbers.
Your very comprehensive written submission addressed the five general questions that we asked. However, we are now looking for specific details to back up some of your comments.
It is very important to consider the issue on that basis. After all, as other countries such as Australia, Canada and even the United States have discovered, women have a distinctly different experience of the criminal justice system. That is an equal opportunities issue, because it reflects what is happening in the broader social and political context.
We should also note that the increase in the prison population does not parallel any change in recorded crime rates or levels of offending.
Why might that be the case?
There are many arguments as to why that might be. For example, support that used to be available in the community is no longer there. People with mental health issues might be remanded into custody for their own safety because there is nowhere else to put them, while others might have such a chaotic lifestyle that they simply would not show up at court. Looking at the current female population, I think that that certainly applies more to women than to men.
Prison fails to prevent reoffending and is likely to exacerbate problems such as lack of education and social isolation. Is that the same for men and women?
Both men and women are in similar situations, but I argue—I think that I can safely say that Dr Malloch would as well—that, because more women have child care responsibilities and women are more likely to lose housing and to be in poorly paid work if they are in work at all, a much higher proportion of women are in that circumstance.
Did you receive the written submission that we were given by the governor of Cornton Vale? Did you get a copy of it?
No.
It contained 15 suggestions on possible interventions for female offenders. I was going to ask you what your thoughts were on those, but if you have not seen a copy of the submission, I could not ask you about that. The suggestions are based around the 218 centre, which you have mentioned, and other services. Will you say a bit about other services in the community that could be of assistance? You have mentioned 218, but do you want to highlight anything else to us?
A lot of research that has been carried out over the past 10 or so years has emphasised the importance of linking women into gender-specific rather than offender-specific services. That seems to be highly beneficial. It is also important for being able to link women into broader social networks of support. The Routes Out of Prostitution intervention in Glasgow, which is a social network across the city, is important in making available a range of different services that women access so that one service is able to link into the rest. They are not all focused on responding to offenders; they are about responding to women's needs. That seems to be effective. Various international research studies have emphasised that as being important.
Are prisons designed for men?
Yes. Historically, that is the case.
I will ask a bit more about community service orders. Your submission—I make it clear that it is an excellent submission, but we are trying to get a lot of it on record and get it from you in oral evidence—does not seem to consider them as an alternative to custody for women and examines probation instead, but there is a problem with probation. Will you go into detail on that to try to flush out what the problem is?
Community penalties are being used increasingly for women, but their appropriateness is an issue. The difficulty is often that, because women come into the criminal justice system with a range of issues, they are put on probation to address them. The offence may not have resulted in custody in the first instance, but they may be unable to comply with the conditions of a probation order or another community penalty and end up in custody for a breach of the order. That is one of the challenges.
The 218 programme is a female-focused programme that is based on support, relationships and strengthening the women's ability to cope with the type of issues that they have to deal with. It is a different type of support. I understand that a similar type of programme is being developed for men, which is fantastic. At the moment, women appear to respond to that type of support much more effectively.
A significant point that is made in your paper is that probation may be intended to help women but it has resulted in much worse outcomes—almost certainly custodial outcomes—because there has been no support for many things.
Yes.
Do you have any more questions, Elaine?
No. I think that I have exhausted the topic.
As the committee requested, you have provided examples of where female offenders' experiences differ from those of male offenders. During your research, did you come across many instances of male offenders' needs not being met in which you could see parallels? Did you come across examples in which divergence in support for male prisoners was needed, or did you specifically focus on the female prisoner population?
I have focused more specifically on women's experiences, but I have certainly had contact with services for male offenders. Similar issues arise but, as we emphasised at the beginning, women experience some challenges to a much greater extent than men with difficulties do. It has always been expected that good practice could be developed from the difficulties that women experience and that that good practice would also benefit men in the criminal justice system.
Men with substance misuse issues and men who have been victims of abuse tend to experience difficulties that are similar to those that we have said that women face. Again, the proportion of women who have suffered from difficulties has generally been much higher, but if, for example, community service orders that are more focused on treatment and support rather than purely on punishment were imposed, men would also benefit from those.
I have an unrelated supplementary question. In the written submissions, Cornton Vale is mentioned as being used as a "place of safety" for women with mental health problems. In your research, did you explore whether there are other ways in which prisons are being used by prisoners as a place of safety? I am thinking about, for example, people who may have committed crimes in order to escape from an abusive relationship and who see being in prison—albeit with the obvious trauma that that entails—as a better alternative to their domestic or relationship situations in the wider community. Did you come across any evidence of prisons being used in such a way?
The 218 centre was set up exactly for that reason. The centre was originally called the time-out centre, as it provided an opportunity for people to have time out of their normal environment without having to spend time in custody. That is how it was used. It was not only for sentencers who had been put in a difficult position but for women who were trying to get some sort of escape. It provided the first respite that some women had had in years.
Has there been time since the 218 centre was created to analyse the extent to which its use by women as a place of safety or refuge has had an impact on Cornton Vale and diminished its population?
We have not been able to do a follow-up study to show the centre's longer-term effects, but we have certainly been able to show that some women who have accessed it have had the same characteristics as women who would have gone into the prison. Therefore, we suggest that there has been an impact.
I would like to follow up on what Hugh O'Donnell said. Abuse and the prevalence of drug addiction mean that more women are entering prison. Is that increase correlated with recidivism, or is the prison population rising because a larger number of women find themselves in such situations?
A combination of both factors is involved. More women are using harder drugs, which is linked to patterns of offending. Sentences for drug offences are becoming longer, which also has an impact on the number of women who are in prison.
We need to link the increase to abuse issues, by looking at people's reasons for using drugs. Many women start to use drugs as a way of self-medicating, to block out much that has happened in their lives previously. So far, not much research has been done into the link between substance misuse and experiences of abuse, although there is much anecdotal evidence on the issue and some small research projects have looked at it. I am keen to explore the issue further.
It seems to me—it must seem the same to you—that some of the evidence has been known about for a considerable time. It would be good if it were known about more generally. You mentioned the gender duty as a hook that could be used. How can we make a difference, apart from by recommending as general reading the research that you have submitted to us?
There is an argument for making the public more aware of the background of people—especially women—in our prisons, and of the purpose of community disposals and supports and what they can achieve. There should be education in what prisons aim to do, but it is more important that people should be aware of what resources are available in the community. It is also important that sentencers should be provided with information on what different community disposals involve. Initially, sentencers were slow to make referrals to the 218 centre but, when they became more aware of what it was doing, they were much more enthusiastic about sending women there. There is an argument for public education in many realms.
I can suggest a couple of ways of assisting sentencers, in particular. We could argue in favour of the presumption that social inquiry reports should be required for women offenders. A feasibility study that was carried out 10 years ago indicated that the equivalent of one additional social work post for the whole of Scotland was needed to enable a social inquiry report to be produced for every female offender—no huge additional resource was required. It would also be fabulous if social inquiry reports included family impact statements, which show the impact of sentencing on the person to be sentenced. Such statements would apply to all offenders, male or female, but their impact would be greater for women.
Those comments are useful.
I have read your written evidence. Last night, I also read again the Circle report "What Life after Prison? Voices of Women of Cornton Vale". The word "vulnerable" comes up a great deal in evidence on women in prison. In your submission you say:
There have been previous inquiries. Baroness Corston released a report last year covering the whole of the United Kingdom. There was the Wedderburn committee in 2001, which covered mainly England and Wales. There was the report "Women Offenders: A Safer Way" in 1998 and the Cornton Vale research that I did in 1997, which keeps coming back. The ministerial working group on women's offending came up with the 218 proposal. Those types of reports seem to happen a great deal, so it is hard to know what will make an impact.
Given that the committee must prioritise its work, if we invested time in an inquiry and asked everybody else in the country from whom we sought evidence to do the same, would such an inquiry be necessary? Could it pull together the pieces of evidence and reports that you mentioned and would it be something useful for the committee and the Parliament to do?
It would be useful in the sense that it would be an opportunity to look outside the criminal justice system, which is the crucial point. Going right back to the turn of the last century, we can see that women were sent to prison predominantly for offences related to drunkenness. The same kind of vulnerability and social issues result in women being sent to prison today, and features of their experiences while they are in prison are the same. In Canada, a commission was set up to consider the prison estate for women, which produced a report and made significant changes in the organisation of prisons for women. It came up with innovative resources, including a healing lodge for women. However, the difficulties that are still experienceed in Canada are linked to the fact that the prison system for women is a small part of a bigger prison system for men, and the broader social issues are still not being addressed. Scotland is well situated to start considering the broader issues and to do something about them.
I can bring two members in again for questions, if they are brief. We are due to end this panel session at 10.40, and we have a tight schedule.
Do you think that the population generally has a higher expectation of conformity to social norms for women? Is that reflected in the severity of the punishment that is meted out when women breach such norms? Anybody can answer, or both—somebody anyway.
Again, research evidence suggests that that view is characteristic of how women are depicted as offenders and as victims of crime.
That was perhaps more so in the past than now, but there is potentially still an element of that.
On non-custodial sentencing, I do not intend to be flippant, but house detention for some women might make things worse than otherwise. Is the 218 project being promoted or rolled out across the country to give more options for sentencers in different courts across Scotland?
That is maybe more a question for the Government to respond to because it has talked about rolling out lessons from the 218 project, without creating identical services. We hoped to do a follow-up on what has happened, but we have not been able to do so yet.
There are certainly lessons that can be learned.
That brings us to the end of our questioning for this panel. I thank both witnesses, particularly for giving us the opportunity to put on the record some of the excellent but quite alarming material in your paper, which I am sure was an eye-opener for many of us. Thank you for attending—it is much appreciated.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome our second panel of witnesses. We have with us Dr Fergus McNeill, who is a member of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice; Netta Maciver, chief executive of Turning Point Scotland; and Jan MacLeod, senior development officer with the Women's Support Project.
Will you give us specific examples of where you think that women's experience of the criminal justice system differs from men's experience of it? I want you just to highlight some of the most important points.
It is hard to know where to start. My expertise is in working with women who have experienced violence and abuse, rather than specifically with women offenders, but there is an overlap there. I want to pick up the point that was made about social conformity. In both the civil and criminal justice system, we come across a lot of instances of where gender stereotypes and expectations of women's behaviour have led to inequalities in sentencing and perhaps even in arrests.
Before the other two witnesses answer that question, I want to follow up your point about the perception that judges may give harsher sentences because they are meeting some kind of social norm or socially expected standard. Does that apply equally to male and female judges, or is there a difference?
There are few female judges.
I appreciate that.
I do not know whether other panel members can answer that, but I suspect that the point applies to male and female judges, to an extent. We hear anecdotally that some female judges have slightly more sympathy, but we could not say that there are completely separate views among male and female judges. We need input to the criminal justice system on the links between the experience of violence and involvement in the criminal justice system and drug addiction.
Would the other witnesses care to comment?
I can pick up on one aspect. The previous panel made the point that sheriffs have engaged with the opportunities to use the 218 service. When they see the benefits of it, they use it intensively. However, a woman must want to go to 218, because they do not have a locked door there—every day, they have to choose to stay and face their problems. We should immediately flatten any perception that that is a soft option. The hardest option is for people to deal with the problems that they have carried through their lives. Each time that a woman chooses to stay in the 218 service, they become stronger. However, many women are not yet ready to deal with their problems and they are often the ones who say, "No thanks, I'd rather go up the road to Cornton Vale." So the issue is not just about how the judiciary deal with women; it can often be about the stage that a woman is at in dealing with her problems and what she is prepared to do.
To return to Bill Wilson's original question, the criminal justice system deals mainly with men, because men commit the majority of offences. The criminological evidence is that women's pathways into and out of criminal careers are different from those of men—there is a different shape to that journey for women. To be frank, the criminal justice system is not well designed to support men's pathways out of offending, but it is even worse for women, for a variety of reasons. There is no intention to frustrate the process of change and to make it more difficult for women to move on and stop offending, but that can be the consequence of the way in which they are handled.
I said to the previous panel that if the Equal Opportunities Committee were to conduct an inquiry, it would have a slightly different perspective from a Justice Committee inquiry. So I particularly want to ask this panel to what extent female offending is the result of discrimination and abuse faced by woman. Jan MacLeod touched on that in her answer to Bill Wilson's question.
I will start, because I come to the issue from a narrower perspective, which is my involvement with both direct support work and policy and partnership working across the range of issues related to violence against and abuse of women and children. That violence and abuse are found in two main areas. I have already mentioned prostitution. As well as the inequality of it being a form of exploitation in which the victim is criminalised, it is widely acknowledged that women who have been sexually abused as children and have suffered severe childhood abuse and neglect are overrepresented in prostitution. The other area is domestic abuse. I have on many occasions come across women who have come forward for support as a result of on-going domestic abuse. A huge percentage of women who report to the police suffer repeat victimisation, so they have learned the lesson that the criminal justice system cannot necessarily help them; 57 per cent of women who reported abuse to the police suffered repeat victimisation and 39 per cent of those involved the police more than four times.
Is it an issue about inequality and power relationships in society? In other words, is it an issue that the committee could legitimately examine?
There is a need to bring the issues together and to intervene. It is sad that women often do not get the help that they need until they offend. As Netta Maciver said, because women are suffering abuse and are not necessarily in control, they are not always ready for a community facility and sometimes need to be given custodial sentences. There is a lack of a gradient, particularly for women who suffer from very complex problems—I include in that category women who end up in prison because they have not paid fines that they have gathered for soliciting. We need to look more at such situations.
I want to pick up on some equal opportunities issues that arise from information that has come from the 218 project about women who presented during the past year. They were asked to identify the main problems in their lives: 12 per cent of them identified the risk of violence; 10 per cent identified emotional abuse; 8 per cent identified sexual abuse; 6 per cent identified domestic abuse; and 6 per cent identified violent behaviour. Obviously, some of them identified more than one of those. Nevertheless, that is quite a useful set of figures, which gives you an idea about some of the issues that you are discussing in relation to violence.
I will press you a bit further on the matter of postcodes. Are you saying that there will be different outcomes for two female offenders with different postcodes?
The people who come to 218 come from poor parts of Glasgow. We do not find people from G12 or the suburbs, for example, using the service. Primarily, women come from areas of deprivation. Focusing on equality of opportunity, I would also point out that women from other parts of Scotland cannot access the 218 service—it is available only to people in Glasgow, particularly if they come from a poor part of the city.
I would underline that point. The question of inequality lies behind the crime problem generally. That cuts across men and women, but women experience particular inequalities, which flow through into their involvement with the justice system. There are particular inequalities in the way in which the justice system deals with women.
I suppose that Jan was thinking about the public safety aspect in a very small number of instances.
I was really thinking about the lack of options. The point is a good one. I mentioned that, sometimes, women's experience of violence can lead to their committing serious crimes. I am not saying by any means that everything done by someone who suffers violence is excusable. I probably used the word "need" incorrectly. The issue is really about the lack of other options, because we are not able to provide the resources to catch the women at the point at which they are ready to interact.
In some circumstances, measures such as the home detention curfew would be difficult to use. You would not want to make someone subject to such a curfew in the home in which they were being abused, because that would simply mean that they were being detained for abuse. Clearly, therefore, there must be more refuges or shelters. Is it possible to apply a home detention curfew to an individual in a shelter so that, if the court decides that someone should have a home detention curfew, it can be applied to a place in which they will be safe?
Technically, that is entirely possible. A device is installed in a given place and creates a radius in which the person can move without triggering the alarm. What you suggest would be possible, but whether it would help is another question.
Do you think that it would help?
I would be sceptical. Much would depend on where you were detaining someone. Your discussion with the previous witnesses about the nature of the prison establishments that we should have was interesting in that regard.
Does the organisation of the prison service reflect the particular needs and backgrounds of female offenders, or does it reflect a service that was, historically, designed for male offenders? While I was listening to the discussion, it occurred to me that the system might be a continuation of the tradition of punishing young women who have been abused—I am thinking about pregnant women who were taken away for a long time.
The discussion is interesting. Sometimes, we look at prison as a place wherein effective treatment and rehabilitation can be provided, but that is not its primary purpose. If we seek to reduce offending and improve the quality of individuals' lives, we should look at what gives the most effective outcome when we ask questions about prison or home detention. An effective outcome involves the relationship that a woman makes with a key worker, and the ability of that key worker to stay with that woman consistently throughout a programme, which could involve one-to-one work or group work. However, if that is what we seek to do, we do not have to do it within a custodial system.
An interesting question is whether a rise in the prison population—in particular among women, although this might also be true for men—is to some extent a result of a decline in other forms of institutionalisation. If we close mental health facilities and facilities that dealt with people who are on the border between being in what was regarded as moral danger and having mental health problems, do women find their way into the penal system instead, because we do not quite know what to do with them? As an historical analysis of part of the current difficulty, there is probably something in that.
This is not exactly a response to the question, but I want to pick up on the point about community facilities. In my work we hear good reports about how the support that 218 offers has made a difference for the women who were able to access the service. I am not sure about the benefits of house arrest—if I can call it that—at a hostel or refuge.
Would you welcome impact statements?
I am not sure.
Do other panel members have a view?
If you mean family impact statements in social inquiry reports, I favour the greater use of such reports. However, when social workers write such reports they are expected to address impact to some extent. Among the many other things that must be addressed, perhaps closer attention should be paid to the significance of the impact on the family and the impact of separation from the family on the woman. It would be good to bring such matters more closely to judges' attention.
I notice that fine defaulting is a category of offence for which 7,442 women were sent to prison in 2006. Is that an area in which family impact statements should be weighed up?
Absolutely. The imprisonment of women for defaulting on small outstanding fines is incredibly harmful for them and their families, incredibly costly to the public purse and, frankly, reveals a lack of imagination in the system when it comes to finding alternative ways of allowing those women to make good the debt that they owe to society. There must be a more sensible way of doing that than by sentencing them to short periods of detention.
Could I introduce some figures on children—
If you do not mind, I would like us to move on. You will have the opportunity to provide additional information after the evidence session, which the committee will consider in the context of the whole inquiry. We have a few more questions to get through and it is 11 minutes past 11.
I will be quick. The cumulative impact of the evidence that you have given us thus far has been to suggest that the focus of Government policy as regards equal opportunities should be the preventive stage. As is acknowledged not just by the committee, part of the problem is the inadequacies that exist in the provision of access for women across the country to the 218 project and the inequalities that result from that. However, from what Jan MacLeod and Netta Maciver have said, it seems that it is hugely important that we create services for women before they come on to the radar of the criminal justice system. Do you agree?
Netta Maciver's point about the need for women to have the chance to develop trusting relationships and to get access to information and support at an early stage is extremely important. Huge difficulties are experienced in cases in which women have complex needs, because there is a significant lack of resources. In many ways, the mental health services have failed to tackle women who are labelled as having personality disorders, which seems to mean that they do not get such services. That is a bit of a sweeping statement but, in my line of work, it is often the people who we think should be getting intensive services who seem almost to be banned from receiving them.
The greatest need is for services for young children. The bulk of the women with whom we deal are at the stage at which the abuse, the violence and the effects of a dysfunctional family have already kicked in. It is possible to have a reparative relationship with them, but if we want to engage in prevention, we need to focus on the youngest people who are being affected. I would never take away from the development of services for such women but, rather than develop such services purely for child care or other reasons, we should start at the beginning with the people who are being damaged.
I agree with that entirely from the point of view of reducing the level of involvement in offending and addressing the difficulties that are ultimately expressed in offending behaviour, but women offenders exist and there are inequalities in how they are processed. If you were to ask my view on a possible remit for an inquiry by the committee, I would say that there is evidence of inequality and unintended, indirect discrimination at every stage of the criminal justice process from policing to prosecution to sentencing and through into the prison system, and that that requires to be highlighted and addressed. I would not want the remit to be restricted to prevention.
If I said that perhaps the best way of reducing offending in this country would be to redistribute wealth so that the bottom 50 per cent of our population had a greater than 1 per cent share of that wealth, what would you say?
There would probably be fewer women in prison.
I do not think that it is just about money; I think that it is about the quality of the relationships with which people grow up. Although you can put money into communities, you have to put money into functioning families as well.
I would have some sympathy with your proposal only in the sense that there is a great weight of criminological evidence to suggest that the issue is inequality, not poverty or disadvantage per se, whereby people share the same aspirations, which come to them from the mass media and from every direction in society, but the opportunity to fulfil those aspirations is blocked in a variety of ways. The blockages are, to some extent, different for men and women, and there are different social pressures on men and women. Inequality is a critical factor in driving and motivating offending behaviour.
My question is about equalities as human rights. Netta Maciver referred to the difficulties that non-English speakers have in accessing 218. Do specific groups of female prisoners face particular difficulties? I am thinking of, for example, black and minority ethnic prisoners. How are they provided for? Some services are sensitive to religion, such as those for Muslim women, and there is a range of people who constitute minorities within the prison population, including older and younger offenders. Are they well catered for or are they not catered for at all?
I have information only on those who come to us as an alternative to going to prison. However, I have heard staff in the prison service talk about catering for the walking wounded, which includes all categories. I include people with learning disabilities in that; it is probably not possible to cater well for their needs in prison.
I do not know a great deal about the subject. I am sure that the next panel will be able to address the question more directly. However, there are difficulties with the present system's capacity to manage foreign national prisoners effectively and sensitively—that is based on contact with colleagues down south, rather than direct experience or knowledge of the situation in Scotland.
That seems a good point on which to end. I thank the panellists for a comprehensive and insightful evidence session, which the committee will take a lot from when we consider the evidence that we have received. Thank you all very much for coming.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I am pleased to welcome Elish Angiolini and Ian Gunn. Elish, the Lord Advocate, needs no introduction. Ian Gunn is the governor of Cornton Vale. We will kick off with general questions, starting with Bill Wilson.
I ask the Lord Advocate to summarise what she thinks are the main differences in the experiences of men and women in the criminal justice system.
It is difficult to say that there are stereotypical differences on the basis of gender. An earlier witness emphasised the fact that the courts have to treat individuals as individuals, whatever the outcomes are. Each case that comes before a court is identified by its special facts and circumstances; it is not a question of processing cases rigidly. An assault might be similar to another assault, but there will be differences in the circumstances and vulnerability of the victim, in the circumstances of the accused or in the locality where the offence took place. If it took place in a hospital or had a racist element, or if the victim was an elderly person, the case would be aggravated by those features and it would be more serious because of the victim's vulnerability. The courts have to base their approach to each case on the individual facts and circumstances, and part of the difficulty is that a vast range of circumstances occur across the realm of offending.
The trend seems to be that two-thirds of the women who go before a court end up on remand. Is that a bigger proportion than for males?
Evidence shows that there has been an increase in the number of women remands. I suspect that that is largely due to the profile of the female offenders who are coming into the system. Many of them have mental health difficulties and severe addiction problems that result in chaotic lifestyles and an inability to obtemper the court's orders. If a female offender is placed on bail and then goes out and shoplifts again, she will come back before the court in breach of bail. She might get bail again but if she commits another offence, the result will be that she will be kept on remand because of her inability to obtemper the court's orders. That is also a feature of male offenders' behaviour, where drug addiction is prevalent across the board. However, the acute rise in the number of women who are incarcerated, generally as a result of acquisitive crime—dishonesty, fraud, robberies and muggings, some of which are linked to addiction problems—is a result of their inability to come to court or to respond to the court's orders.
So it is not the case that when a female offender and male offender have more or less the same circumstances, the trend is to consider remanding in custody more women for their own safety.
That would not be the prosecutor's position. A prosecutor has to follow set guidelines on bail, which were issued with the recent legislation. There is a presumption in favour of bail under the European convention on human rights. The decision has to be related to the seriousness of the offending, and factors such as a substantial schedule of previous convictions for dishonesty, breaches of bail, attempts to pervert the course of justice or interference with witnesses are taken into account.
I will answer from a prison perspective. I have been a governor in three prisons, two of which, including Cornton Vale, have female prisoners. Male and female offenders can be victims of abuse and can suffer from mental health problems, substance abuse and self-harm. However, those problems affect a much higher number of female prisoners and can be coupled with the fact that female prisoners are their family's main carer, which means that the family's lifestyle is very chaotic. If a man whose family's lifestyle is chaotic comes into prison, he can usually leave the care of the family to a woman, whereas a woman generally cannot do that. Women face complex issues, rather than the one or two issues that men face.
I was going to ask the previous panel about the idea of a chaotic lifestyle. Will you tease that out for me? There is a tension if women do not turn up to court because they are supporting children. We explain behaviour by saying that someone has a chaotic lifestyle, and yet women offenders seem also to be able to support partners and children.
If someone is engaging in persistent offending, such as stealing, that is part of a chaotic lifestyle. If someone has reverted to mugging old ladies or committing fraud in order to feed their addiction, that is a sign of disorder in their life. A common feature observed by prosecutors is that female offenders can become aligned with an individual who has a significant influence on them, such as a male partner who supplies them drugs initially and thereafter dominates their lifestyle. Many such women are forced into prostitution to feed their habit. While they may maintain children, it is certainly not at a level with which anyone else would be content. There is a certain hierarchy of priorities for those women. Matters such as seeking help with their addiction and dealing with their health and mental health problems are not among those priorities because of the chaos that reigns in their lives and because of the basics that have to be dealt with. Court is not necessarily high on that agenda, either. It is difficult for them to see a lawyer or to seek advice on debt. As a result, although they are looking after children, their problems accelerate. Offending is a core part of the dysfunctionality that we see among many female offenders.
It is difficult for me to generalise, but most of the women whom I speak to do not just tell me about one problem—they give me a whole host of reasons why their life is chaotic, including their housing and the fact that they do not have a job. Sometimes they are caring not only for children but for people in their family who are disabled. They may not have a family at all; their chaos is therefore caused by having nowhere to live and no support. There is the issue of abuse as well. As a member of an earlier panel said, these women do not have a G12 postcode. You can identify almost straight away where they have come from.
When I began as a prosecutor at the tender age of 23, I had a vision that people who committed crimes were the accused but that victims were a separate and distinct group. Of course, there is no such dichotomy.
As I said to previous witnesses, we are the Equal Opportunities Committee so our perspective is necessarily different to what you might find in the Justice Committee. One of the questions to which we hoped to get a general answer is about the extent to which female offending is the result of discrimination against and abuse of women. You have touched on that. When I looked at earlier evidence, I noticed that the word "vulnerable" was used an awful lot to describe women. Is female offending the result of discrimination, abuse and inequality?
There is no conscious discrimination in the approach to prosecution, although that is not to say that there is not indirect discrimination. An example of that is wireless telegraphy offences—or not having a television licence. For many years as a young prosecutor, I noticed that the subject of reports of such offences were predominantly women. Huge bundles of such cases came to us, and thousands of the people who were prosecuted and therefore brought into the criminal justice system were women. Over time, I made inquiries about why that was a feature. It became obvious that the inspectors attended people's houses when women were at home with young children. Their husbands, who were equally guilty of the offence, were at work, so it was predominantly women who came into the criminal justice system. That indirect discrimination was a result of investigative practice that took place at a particular time of the day. New methods of paying for a television licence resulted in far fewer such cases coming to the courts: we have found a way of diverting people away from the system.
In Cornton Vale we see a number of vulnerable women who behave bizarrely at times. Our staff know how to cope with such behaviour, so its repercussions for a woman in the prison setting are completely different from what they would be outside. When anyone behaves in such a bizarre way in the street, they are likely to end up in the criminal justice system. Those women do not know how to behave in a way that we would consider normal. When they go before the court, it is likely that their bizarre behaviour will be seen for what it is—they will not necessarily be seen as vulnerable women who have mental health difficulties and who do not know how to behave differently. When they get to us, we can take the time to address those issues. We know that we are not dealing with people who we think should behave normally; we realise that they do not know how to behave differently. That is one of the main issues for me.
Perhaps we should take a step back. I understand the issues within the criminal justice system, but perhaps we should have asked the police for evidence.
It depends how you define violent crime. An assault is a straightforward example of violence. However, violent crime might also include abductions and threats, such as malicious or threatening letters to individuals, although the threats might not be carried out. Carrying knives is not a violent offence per se, but it is preparatory to violence and is therefore embraced in another group of crimes. However, the fact that people carry knives more liberally than they did in the past is a manifestation of something sinister in society.
My general question is about the organisation of the Scottish Prison Service. Does it reflect—indeed, is it able to reflect—the particular needs and backgrounds of female offenders or the fact that the service was historically designed for male offenders and, perhaps, continues to be designed for them?
The problem is that Cornton Vale is a central prison that takes almost all female prisoners. It was built as a female establishment some 30 years ago and is significantly different in design to most prisons.
Does the Lord Advocate have anything to add?
No. Prisons are obviously not part of my portfolio generally, but I agree with Ian Gunn.
What Ian Gunn just said about the need for a critical mass for provision of services seems to suggest that the economic imperative takes precedence, as far as the Scottish Prison Service is concerned. As he said, the service has a small unit in Aberdeen and one, I think, in Inverness, which is not currently being used.
The Inverness unit is open, but the Aberdeen one is not.
Is there, as far as the Scottish Prison Service is concerned, an economic imperative for critical mass in provision of services?
I know Aberdeen prison quite well. It has a house block that could be used for females, but the number of male prisoners there is significantly higher than it has ever been—there are way more than 200 prisoners in the prison—and it is better to keep all the male prisoners in that area. We would probably have only 10 women from the Aberdeen area at the moment, if that, and fewer than 30 from the northern community justice authority area. As far as I am concerned, it is far better to give the services that we have at Cornton Vale to that small number of women than it would be to spread them around the estate as it stands. When we changed the use of part of Greenock prison, it did not significantly change the cost of running the establishment; it was just a reconfiguration of its population.
Would there, however, be a cost implication for the SPS in delivering the services beyond Cornton Vale if you were to do that for a small group of women prisoners with the expectation that, although they were not located in Cornton Vale, they would have the right to access the facilities that you have there?
Yes, there would.
Given that fact, given the profile of female offenders—who, by and large, tend to be on shorter sentences—and given the SPS's role in reducing recidivism, to what extent do prisons provide adequate services and treatments, some of which are long-term programmes, for female prisoners?
As previous witnesses have said, a lot of women are with us for short periods. I will correct something that was said earlier. Very few women now come into Cornton Vale for non-payment of fines—the problem is almost non-existent now. Offenders may come in for that and another offence, but not many come in specifically for non-payment.
It was suggested that a modular approach that can be continued by agencies outside prison, following release, is more helpful for short-term prisoners. Would it be a good idea to apply to male prisoners the good practice that has been developed for women prisoners in Cornton Vale? I hope that you are in a good position to answer that question.
Across the SPS, there is much sharing of expertise between the people who research, put in place and deliver interventions. Lessons that are learned from programmes that have been developed for women can be applied to men, and vice versa. We have tried to adapt some of the programmes that were delivered specifically to men, with greater or lesser success. Marlyn Glen is right to suggest that we should not have gender-specific programmes, but we need to take into account the different learning styles of men and women. My five years at Peterhead prison, in charge of sex offenders, indicated to me that the intensive and confrontational way in which we deliver—for specific reasons—the Peterhead sex offenders programme would not work with female offenders. I know that there is only a small number of female sex offenders.
I suggest that programmes should be transferred mainly from Cornton Vale to other prisons, rather than the other way around, in order to break down the undeniable machismo in such environments.
Are women still going to prison for breach of probation?
In my experience, the number of such prisoners is quite small. I examined the issue in February, when I was looking into why so many women are in prison on remand. I was surprised—although I should not have been—at how many women are in prison for breaching bail not just once, but many times. I suspect that the number of women who are in prison for breach of probation is not as high. Separate warrants are not often used unless a charge is very serious. With many acquisitive crimes, a bundle of charges appear on one or several warrants.
Is the marked drop in the number of prisoners who are fine defaulters a result of the new summary justice legislation, or was there already such a trend?
The trend already existed—the number of fine defaulters in prison has been falling for some time.
The national roll-out in September 2007 of supervised attendance orders is contributing to the fall in numbers of such prisoners. The orders were piloted in several areas, in particular Glasgow, which brought the figures down. Now that the orders have been rolled out across the country, the number of fine defaulters in prison should continue to fall.
What kind of support is given under the fines in time disposal? How does that work?
It has not started yet. The disposal comes from the new legislation and will be piloted in four procurator fiscal areas. It will be based on community service but will be much more straightforward. It will require fewer hours and will involve direct action in response to offending. It is intended to take individuals out of the system and to prevent the escalation that inevitably results in their going to prison. Such community penalties—I think that the formal title for the fine on time is a work order—would be carried out close to when the offence was committed.
That is helpful.
My first question is for the Lord Advocate. Are sufficient alternative remedies to prison available for people who have mental health problems? We heard that many people who end up in Cornton Vale display bizarre behaviour patterns, which might be because they are mentally ill.
I suspect that we need to increase the armoury of alternatives to custody. Very few people believe that the number of people who are incarcerated in this country is the right number. A very high number of people are in prison, of whom a significant number have short-term sentences. As Ian Gunn said, little can be done in the short term other than restoring a person's health to an extent. Short-term work on rehabilitation or encouraging people to address their offending behaviour has a limited scope.
I have.
There we are: only one member has seen it. When I ask audiences of 200 or 300 people that question, one hand will go up. Community service is happening, but if we do not see what the criminal justice system is doing to ensure that those who offend remove graffiti from walls, people will not have much faith in community service. It is important that community service becomes visible, that it is robust and that it is seen as a substantial alternative to custody and not as a soft option. We must build confidence about the alternative remedies.
The SPS takes seriously its equality and diversity responsibilities. The prisons directorate, for which all governors work, has a structure in place that prisons are now replicating and which enables us to address the cultural and religious needs of all minorities. In Cornton Vale this month, there are 32 women who do not describe themselves as being white Scottish, including 11 women of Chinese origin, three women from the Caribbean and two black African women. The prison therefore contains a range of nationalities. Two chaplains are employed as part of our families team, and we have access to a Muslim chaplain who is employed by the SPS. We try to deal with all the various issues that arise and all the problems that are caused as a result of women not being able to speak English, for example, and we try to promote other cultures—not only to ladies who do not come from Scotland, but to our indigenous prisoners—to make them understand the problems of other cultures.
The witnesses have covered many of our specific questions in answering our general questions. Members may now ask questions on any issue that has not been covered.
The purposes of this meeting are to ascertain whether it would be legitimate to inquire into female offenders in the criminal justice system, and to ascertain whether the committee would want to prioritise such an inquiry. Baroness Corston's "The Corston Report: a review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system" has been mentioned. The report on that inquiry mentions the new gender equality duty, which has arisen in this session—I think that Elish Angiolini mentioned it in the context of the new community penalties. Baroness Corston's report states:
Consideration of that in the Scottish context would be well merited. The committee has spoken to witnesses who have recently produced papers on women offending, but there is a paucity of research. We do not have a great deal of information on what has happened historically, how things are developing and what the trends are, so such information would be helpful.
I see no reason why such an inquiry should not be carried out. I want to make a plea on behalf of my colleagues who run male prisons. Similar issues arise about the number of men who come to prison for short periods and who have mental health and substance abuse problems. The issue is not simply about gender; it is more about why we send so many people to prison for offences that could be dealt with in the community.
That brings us to the end of the evidence session. I thank the Lord Advocate and Ian Gunn for their valuable evidence, which has given us a practical insight into the prison experience and the prosecution service. Thank you very much for attending.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
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