UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 520 -vii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

NORTHERN IRELAND AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

NORTHERN IRELAND Prison Service

Wednesday 10 October 2007

RT HON BARONESS CORSTON and MS JENNY HALL

Evidence heard in Public Questions 525 - 580

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 10 October 2007

Members present

Sir Patrick Cormack, in the Chair

Mr David Anderson

John Battle

Mr Gregory Campbell

Mr John Grogan

Mr Stephen Hepburn

Dr Alasdair McDonnell

Mr Denis Murphy

Stephen Pound

Sammy Wilson

________________

Witnesses: Rt Hon Baroness Corston, a Member of the House of Lords, and Ms Jenny Hall, Secretary to the Corston Review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system, gave evidence.

Q525 Chairman: Can I formally welcome Baroness Corston and Jenny Hall, who I understand was secretary to the group which prepared this report under your Chairmanship and your guidance. Thank you very much indeed for coming to meet the Committee formally and to give evidence. As you know, we are looking into prisons in Northern Ireland with a view to making a report and recommendations to the House - to the Secretary of State - well before the end of the year. As the issue of women in prison is clearly what we have to address, because that had been the subject of your report, which had been, in my view, widely reported, we thought it would be a very good idea to see you. Thank you for agreeing to come. Is there anything at all that you would like to say by way of introduction?

Baroness Corston: Do you mean a personal introduction?

Q526 Chairman: On the report.

Baroness Corston: Yes. What I would like to say, Sir Patrick, if I may, is something about the genesis of the report. It arose from the deaths of 14 women in the prison estate in 2003, six of them in HM Prison Style in Cheshire, and the calls then for a public inquiry. The then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, rejected the calls for a public inquiry because, simultaneously, Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, had been given the right and responsibility to carry out an independent investigation into deaths in custody, and Charles Clarke thought that nothing new would come from a public inquiry. However, I think he was exercised by the fact that there appeared to be some common factors present in the deaths, and he was also particularly influenced by a letter which he received from the coroner for Cheshire, Nicholas Rheinberg. I would like to just say what Nicholas Rheinberg said, which I think was so persuasive. He said: "I saw a group of damaged individuals, committing for the most part petty crime, for whom imprisonment represented a disproportionate response. That was what particularly struck me with Julie Walsh (she was the last woman to die of the six), who had spent the majority of her adult life serving at regular intervals short periods of imprisonment for crimes which represented a social nuisance rather than anything that demanded the most extreme form of punishment. I was greatly saddened by the pathetic individuals who came before me as witnesses and who, no doubt, mirrored the pathetic individuals who had died." He then went on to suggest that a far-ranging review of the circumstances of some of these women might be a good exercise.

Q527 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for that and thank you for being prepared to answer our questions. We have a division in the House at four o'clock, so we are going to try and encompass this session within the hour, which will be helpful for you as well rather than having to come back after voting. Could you just say a little by way of introduction in answer to my first question, as to how you set about doing the report? Who was involved with it?

Baroness Corston: Aside from the fact that I was fortunate that the Safer Custody group in the National Offender Management Service (?) called for Jenny Hall to help because she has a working lifetime's experience of these kinds of issues, I asked a small group of people to work with me as a review group. I did not want a large executive group because I felt, given the timescale of only nine months and the fact that the budget itself was quite small, that a larger group of people would not necessarily have been particularly helpful. So I had a group of 13 people who worked with me; people like the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, people from organisations like Women in Prison and Inquest - the organisation which represents the bereaved families of people who have died. I then had a large group of consultees, people who I saw face-to-face, like Ann Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, who I saw twice, and people like Frances Crook, the Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. I had about 40 meetings with people like that, generally in London but sometimes I travelled.

Q528 Chairman: These were mostly one-to-one?

Baroness Corston: One-to-one, yes, where I talked about the terms of reference and asked for their experience and what would be their prescription.

Q529 Chairman: When you saw these people did you have Jenny Hall with you to make notes?

Baroness Corston: Always. I learnt that there was nothing that happened during the course of the review when Jenny Hall was not present with me. We then had a programme of visits over the country to women's prisons in England, to the one women's prison in Scotland, by which I was extremely impressed, and to women's centres in Halifax, Glasgow and Worcester to see the kinds of provision for women who had offended or who were at risk of offending - because this, for me, was a very big category of women - and we also had, I think, five themed consultations on things like health and sentencing. I also held a meeting in Warrington, chaired by Nicholas Rheinberg, the Cheshire coroner, who very kindly ----

Q530 Chairman: The gentleman you have just quoted?

Baroness Corston: Yes. He very kindly brought together coroners and sentencers, both High Court judges, Magistrates and Crown Court judges to talk about sentencing - who puts these women in prison and why. So although it was over a short timescale I think that that kind of pyramid structure, if you like, at least enabled me to meet the widest range of people who could also make contact through our website. I also had the benefit of a huge amount of reading material, because this subject of women's incarceration has been exhaustively researched by the Home Office and others since 1971, and it has all pointed in the same direction. I have never come across such a body of evidence leading to so little action.

Q531 Chairman: Just before I pass on to John Battle, your Committee as such met together how many times? The five themed sessions and?

Baroness Corston: Our review group, I suppose, met eight times.

Q532 Chairman: And a meeting would be what - three hours, four hours?

Baroness Corston: It was generally at least two. Sometimes it was a review of what we had done - picking their brains. There was somebody who was there from the National Institute for Mental Health in England, for example, and she did a presentation to us on mental health and then came to a prison with us to talk to prison staff and prisoners about mental health. So it was two things really; for us all to use their expertise and for them to advise me, and, at the very end, for them to have sight of a draft of the report for their input.

Chairman: You have obviously put a great deal into this and it is a very important subject. Thank you for what you have done.

Q533 Stephen Pound: Thank you very, very much indeed for the report, Baroness Corston. Can I say it is an unusual report in that it is passionate and it is also quite personal in some ways. I wanted to basically ask where the process is taking us to. You referred to another report that is to be published in this particular one. Do you feel that this is an indicative report rather than an analytical report, or do you feel it is part of the process? What is the direction that you referred to that everything since 1971 has been pointing to? Is it possible, for the record, to just actually put that down?

Baroness Corston: There are two parts to that. The direction of travel (to use a current phrase) of all of the research was that most of these women are troubled rather than troublesome. Most of these women are, if anything, a danger to themselves rather than to the public.

Q534 Stephen Pound: And should not be in prison?

Baroness Corston: And questioned whether it is an appropriate use of prison, the capital cost of which is £77,000 a year for a prison place; whether it is sensible to use those resources - never mind to destroy the lives of those women and their children in that way. I make no secret of the fact that many of the recommendations I have made have been based upon that research. On the second part of your question, or the first part that you asked, I intended that this - and, indeed, made it clear to ministers before I agreed to do it - would not be some kind of aspirational report, because I feel that most of these reports can be like that. I do not mean to be rude about academics but they are written from that kind of ----

Q535 Stephen Pound: Go on!

Baroness Corston: ---- approach. I wanted this to be a practical piece of work saying: "This is what I have found; this is how I think it could be improved; this is a blueprint, this is a flow chart and this is exactly how it could work", because I know from my own experience it is quite easy to say no to something when you are not given proper signposts.

Q536 Stephen Pound: The reason I actually mentioned that is that quite often you refer to expressions such as "I thought" or "most women" or "many women", which someone who was perhaps critiquing the report would see as generalist rather than empirically grounded. Was that conscious, as I am fully aware of the fact that you could have provided a huge amount of empirical data?

Baroness Corston: I felt that it was right for me to say, being as I was personally asked to do this, what I had seen, the conclusions I had drawn and why. If I talked about "many" I almost always meant the majority. If there was a contrary view to anything I would have said what it was, but I was astonished by the degree of unanimity there is as to what the remedy is and what the problems are.

Q537 Chairman: Before I bring in Mr Battle, you said you presented this draft report to your colleagues on the group, rather than committee. Was it unanimously endorsed by them?

Baroness Corston: They were given the opportunity to make any comment they wanted to. I think it is right to say that everybody was very happy with it - very happy with it. We had a thank you meeting after it had gone to Baroness Scotland, who was then the Minister of State, who commissioned it, and it was a very warm and jolly occasion. People were delighted with the report and felt that it said the right things.

Chairman: Thank you very much.

Q538 Sammy Wilson: Before we move off that point, I take the point you have made about not over-burdening the report with statistics, but - and this is the odd thing I find about it - now and again you do throw a statistic in and yet at other times it is a case of saying "many" or "most", or whatever. I just wonder, especially since some of the occasions on which the term "many" or "most" are used are fairly dramatic statements to make, I would have thought those were the times to throw in the statistics, but that is not when it happens. On other occasions (I noted down a few of them) you say that 30% of women were likely to lose accommodation while in prison, but then when it comes to much more dramatic things you refer to "many" or "most", or whatever. Why that kind of statistical ambivalence when it comes to those comments?

Baroness Corston: There is one whole chapter which I thought people complained about because it was over-burdened with statistics. I did not think I needed to keep repeating them. There is one chapter where sentence after sentence gives the percentage of women for whom particular conditions apply, or who have particular health problems, or who are likely to be remanded or who have children under the age of five or are single parents who have multi-drug difficulties - you name it. There was one chapter where I was criticised at one point for having too much of that. I saw no point in keep repeating it, because it was in there. From what I have seen, frankly, of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission report, there seemed to be quite a lot of similarities.

Q539 Chairman: Of course, you have not been to Northern Ireland. You have made that quite plain.

Baroness Corston: No. All I have seen is the report on Hydebank.

Q540 John Battle: Could I thank you for taking the initiative in the report. Since 1971, you have mentioned, there has been interest but perhaps not sufficient to join together to be helpful and useful. In that light I would like to try to draw out more of that focus on a distinct approach to women. I represent Armley Prison in Leeds and keep in regular contact with it; we had the highest suicide rate of young men in the 1980s of any prison in the world, apparently; so we have suicide, high levels of mental ill-health - 80% - programmes to get young men to work with their children and get them into the prison. So as I read your report I was inclined to say: "That applied in Armley - drugs and alcohol and people being abused as well". What is it that is distinct about women, given that we are looking at provision for men and women in Northern Ireland, that we should be focusing on? What is it about women's conditions and rehabilitation that we should really zone in on?

Baroness Corston: I think the essential message that I tried to convey is that prison is, if you like, a male construct. At the moment, in this country, there are 80,000 prisoners, and over 70,000 of them are men. The people who generally have run our prison service have been men, and the model of a prison is a male prison, where people are liable to escape, where they conceal dangerous weapons on their person, where there is a propensity for violence inside, a propensity for aggressive and violent behaviour, so therefore what you need is a secure border, you need to search people repeatedly, and you have to keep them locked up. Now, if that is the model and you treat men and women the same - I think we all know men and women are not the same. People who are in a married relationship know that their partner is not the same as them; we talk about women's needs and men's needs. The point I was trying to make, and I was amazed at how many people in the prison service accepted this, is that if you treat men and women the same the outcome is not equal. I give one example: if you look at most prisons the big challenge for prisons is seen to be purposeful employment when they leave prison; the best way of turning a prisoner's life round is to find them a job, give them some skills, get them to do an NVQ, get them to do a GCSE, or whatever. For most women, coming out of prison, the one thing they care about is somewhere to live with their children, because only 5% of their children are looked after by their fathers. Men can go into prison and they can switch off the home because there is someone to keep the home fire burning, whereas women try to run their families and their homes from within prison, and it does not work. What happens is they lose their children. 62% of women prisoners' children end up in prison, according to the Right Honourable David Hanson, who was the Minister of State at the Home office. I think that is a pretty staggering state of affairs. All I am trying to say is that, particularly in response to the Equality Act passed by both Houses of Parliament and coming into effect in April of this year, we have a gender equality duty. If we are in a situation where women are held farther from home because there are fewer prisons, where family contact is more difficult, where many of them have been sexually abused as children, and a lot of them have been victims of domestic violence, we lock them up, 80% of them are mentally ill, we lock them up and we expect prison staff to deal with these difficult issues, and do not acknowledge these difficulties in relation to seeing their children, 18,000 of whom, in the mainland every year, are affected by their mother's imprisonment, then it is no wonder prison becomes a revolving door. All I was saying was that a better way of dealing with these women would be to take an approach that tried to address the causes of their offending, so that they can turn their lives around to become purposeful members of society, because they will all be released and they do not make very good neighbours, some of them.

Q541 Mr Campbell: Chairman, I wonder if I could ask whether there is an equivalent figure for the children of male prisoners? You said 62% was the figure from David Hanson.

Baroness Corston: I do not know. This was a meeting that I spoke at with David Hanson where we were both speakers.

Chairman: We will get that figure.

Q542 John Battle: There are no men's children in prison.

Baroness Corston: Obviously, some women are allowed to keep their children in prison up to a certain age, but often women, particularly on remand, will have been sentenced to more than 40 days and 40 days is long enough to lose your children and your home, and you do not get either back because they can be taken into care or there can be disputes in the family. For most male prisoners they do not have to worry about their families because someone is looking after the children - usually within the family.

Q543 Chairman: You make the point very well and we will try and get those statistics so that we can answer Mr Campbell's very reasonable question. Accepting that the thrust of your argument is that the vast majority of women should be dealt with in non-custodial ways, we all of us have to accept that there is a small core who have to be dealt with in custody, both for their own safety and for the protection of the community at large.

Baroness Corston: Yes.

Q544 Chairman: Where is the distinct approach there that you would like to see?

Baroness Corston: I have never argued that no woman should be imprisoned. If I was going to get personal about it I could never say that Rosemary West should not be in prison, obviously, but what I was saying was that for women who are in prison and who do need to serve a sentence it strikes me as making much more sense to do the kind of thing that has been done in Glasgow, where you have a smaller custodial unit, and it is possible for women to be detained in a discrete part of an establishment where other women come in to serve community punishments or to be given the opportunity to turn their lives round, to develop some life skills and to start thinking about being useful members of society. So I was talking about smaller custodial units, better geographically dispersed, because if a woman in Cornwall, for example, is sent to her closest prison, it is often Bristol, and that is as far as it is from London to Carlisle. What chance is there for any continuity of family relationships?

Q545 Chairman: We are facing particular problems in Northern Ireland, as you must readily admit. Northern Ireland is not big enough to sustain a vast number of prisons, and there is one women's prison at Hydebank. It is adjacent to and shares a site with the young offenders' institution, and we have visited both. We have received a lot of evidence, both in Northern Ireland and here in this room, to suggest that this is not a very good arrangement. We have seen the facilities the women have, which are pretty good because they are cheek-by-jowl with the young offenders. How would you approach that?

Baroness Corston: To be blunt, it seems to me very similar to the situation at Peterborough, where there is one site and there is a female side and a male side, and the truth is (and I did say this in my report) that in Peterborough the whole culture of the prison is the culture that comes from the male prison. Women are treated the way men are treated. It would seem to me possible (I do not know) that at Hydebank the women there are treated the way these unruly young men are treated.

Q546 Chairman: No, I do not think that ----

Baroness Corston: I do not know. All I am saying is that the evidence that was given to me by the people who worked in the prison service (not everybody, but people to whom I particularly addressed the question) was that if you have a shared site you often have one culture running it. Sometimes somebody's interests are not served by that.

Chairman: In Northern Ireland I do not think it is a question of one culture but it is the juxtaposition of two and the fact that there is no complete physical divide between them.

Q547 John Battle: Shared space.

Baroness Corston: I could not comment on that. I do know that there are some women in prison who do feel very intimidated by the proximity of men in prison, for their own reasons.

Chairman: Can I bring in Dr McDonnell on women's health. I am sorry that neither of our two lady members is here today for reasons of indisposition, but we do have a doctor.

Q548 Sammy Wilson: Chairman, before we move on to women's health, can I ask a couple of questions about the difference in treatment? You have said that the kind of prison regime, the security, the searches, the cell arrangements, are not really suitable for women, but given the statistics which you have produced yourself, that 75% of women have taken drugs within six months before going to prison, that 58% of them used drugs daily in the six months before prison, and that 78% are showing signs of psychological disturbance, unless you are going to have an establishment which is rife with drugs because so many drug users will certainly try to get the drugs to supply their habits, that is one of the reasons why you do have the arrangements in prison that you do, not just because of the knife culture, etc. Why do you think that having a much more lax regime is not actually going to make life worse for those who are in custody, and, in fact, maybe, even have a detrimental effect on those who are not drug users?

Baroness Corston: I certainly, Mr Wilson, do not want a more lax regime, but what I was trying to suggest was a more intelligent one. Certainly, when women come into prison they are searched, and that is entirely right. What I was saying was that the routine and daily strip-searching serves absolutely no purpose. I have met prison governors who have said to me: "We are not daft; we know what is going on in our prison and we want to search on an intelligence-led basis." It has to be acknowledged, too, that over the recent past this Government has made huge strides in drug detoxification, which most women coming into prison do want. So there is now a far better, structured regime for enabling women to come off drugs. Of course, when we talk about drugs it is not just illegal drugs; some women go in with a poly-drug use; a huge use of prescription drugs as well as, perhaps, illegal drugs, and alcohol. The information that was given to me and the impressions that I got were that the prison service is much better at dealing with those issues now than they were (although not good enough) and certainly when it comes to psychiatric difficulties then there are problems with regard to women who are sent to prison who should be having mental health disposals. The essential point that I was trying to make was that you can exacerbate the situation by having an inappropriate regime. Most of the women who have taken their lives, if you look at the background, do so early on in their sentence, but the whole business of locking them up for long periods of time for no good reason - women who do not escape, women who are not a danger to anyone but themselves, women who have been searched - is pointless. Furthermore, women who have been victims of domestic violence and sexually abused find the process of being strip-searched deeply, deeply damaging. Prison staff themselves have said to me many times that they can see what it is. In fact, the conclusion I have drawn, Mr Wilson, is that as a society we are rightly exercised about paedophiles, but we give very little attention to what happens to their victims, many of whom end up in prison. For those women to be strip-searched on a daily basis and for them to be locked up for long periods of time when they are troubled rather than troublesome just strikes me as being pointless.

Q549 Dr McDonnell: Thank you very much, Lady Corston, for your comments so far, and I empathise with a lot of the positions you are taking. I was particularly concerned, in my experience of seeing people coming out of prison, and seeing people going into prison, about the mental health aspects and, also, about how health was sustained in there. What do you think the benefits have been from the transferring of health care from the prison cell to the NHS? Do you think there have been significant benefits?

Baroness Corston: When I visited prisons and spoke to health care staff they certainly found that there had been an improvement; that they thought that an entirely beneficial approach and that huge progress had been made. However, they were still very concerned about the fact that there were so many women in prison who should not be there, given their mental health needs - and, also, of course, as you must know, personality disorder is a huge problem in prison.

Q550 Dr McDonnell: You mentioned that some of these women prisoners were simply too ill for prison. How do you feel these people can be cared for in the community, and in what circumstance? What is the community alternative to prison?

Baroness Corston: On one visit I made to a prison I mentioned an interest in mental health, and, indeed, had a mental health expert with me, and I was taken to see a woman prisoner. This was a woman sitting in the corner of her room, as they called her cell, with a prison officer on guard over her. She spoke to me, but I was deeply shocked at what was evidently a hugely disturbed psychological state. This woman was desperately ill. People like that, often, have to wait in prison and they are not sectioned until a bed is found, which is something which is pretty deplorable. That is not unusual. I then took evidence from and spoke to someone who had been a magistrate in that part of the world, and she was not talking about this particular woman prisoner but she said that what worried her was that she had women coming before her who she could see were seriously mentally ill and she could not think of anything to do with them but to put them in prison. Of course, some magistrates will tell you that you can send a woman to prison as a place of safety, which I think is not appropriate, or "for their own good", and of course some people are sent to prison to await psychiatric reports. That seems to me to be not doing things in the proper order.

Q551 Dr McDonnell: Have you any suggestions as to how we could handle it better in the community? Are you talking about a hostel?

Baroness Corston: The Department of Health has its own women's mental health strategy. It may be that the Committee would like to take up with the Department of Health its implementation of that strategy, because I do not think it has happened adequately. The implementation of the Department of Health's women's mental health strategy would go a long way to dealing with this issue, and those women would not end up being cared for by prison officers who are doing their very best, with the best of goodwill. Given the tremendous effort and care that goes into looking after these women, prison staff are not equipped to deal with people who are mentally ill.

Q552 Dr McDonnell: What do you perceive as the best way of handling people with personality disorders? It is not a term I like, it is a ragbag, it is a catch-all for those who defy diagnosis.

Baroness Corston: For myself, I was very pleased that the Mental Health Bill acknowledged personality disorder and, it seems to me from the evidence we have taken - I am sure if I have got this wrong Jenny will remind me - that so many people who have personality disorders do not need drugs. I had very powerful testimony from a woman magistrate in the North East of England whose daughter got into the wrong company at the age of 13. I will not go through this young woman's history but it was chaotic, dreadful. She ended up working as a prostitute and she was diagnosed with a personality disorder and nobody - nobody - would give her a room or give her any treatment in the prison system. Finally this woman found a small charity that just provided talking therapy. This woman had to go in every week and talk through all these issues. This magistrate said to me, "My daughter is now a normal member of society with a family". She said, "It seems to me for young women like her, locking up and saying 'you've got this personality disorder and therefore you are never going to function effectively as a human being' is personally damaging and in terms of society quite chaotic". She saw evidence that her daughter's life was turned around by being given the opportunity to be treated as a human being with particular needs rather than a psychiatric disorder or a personality disorder. I do not know if I have made that clear?

Q553 Dr McDonnell: How do you feel we might deal with self-harm or issues around that in prison?

Baroness Corston: I do not know the statistics for Northern Ireland but I do say repeatedly in the report that women on the mainland in England and Wales constitute 6% of the prison population but 55% of self-harm. There are about 50 women in the prison estate in England and Wales whose self-harm is truly of mind-boggling proportions. Once again, in prison sometimes it seems to be taken as a given that if you go to work in a women's prison you will be dealing with self-harm. There are some prison programmes which I saw, one in particular which tries to deal with these issues and, it seems to me, there is not the proper dissemination of this information. But the roots and causes of self-harm are very complex. I was struck by how many statistically disclosed that they had been abused, particularly as children, and I think felt a sense of lack of self-worth, that they were never thought of as responsible members of society, that they self-harm to block it out and for them it became the thing that they did. Now, once again, I think it is inappropriate to expect prison staff to deal with this because some of the self-harm is not the kind of thing you would ever want to talk about in polite society. It is truly astonishing where usually women, sometimes men, because men self-harm --- John Battle will know.

Q554 John Battle: Fastest rising problem in British prisons.

Baroness Corston: --- men do it too but proportionately it is women. They do some terrible things. I have even heard of a woman opening up an abdominal operation scar with her bra hook and emptying her abdominal cavity. Now you imagine the effect on women in adjoining cells and the staff who have to go in to deal with that. It is not just pushing - not just pushing - a biro into a vein, which is a routine thing, it is not just pushing a cross stitch needle into a particular part of your body.

Q555 Chairman: It tends to be a problem with young women too, does it not?

Baroness Corston: Well, generally the women who are in prison are younger women, yes.

Q556 Chairman: The younger section.

Baroness Corston: Yes. Whether it is growing within society I do not know. It is certainly more talked about now than it ever was but I do not know whether it means that it used to happen and people did not talk about it or whether now it is acknowledged, I really do not know.

Q557 Mr Campbell: You have touched on the issue of the inappropriateness of custodial sentences for women. In terms of alternatives to women being in prison, have you looked at a multiplicity or have you analysed what would be a better way of dealing with women?

Baroness Corston: Yes, and I came to this with a blank sheet or an open mind but the evidence I saw convinced me. I visited three women's centres, one in Glasgow is used by the sheriff's court as a disposal. Every day staff from the centre are in court, they speak to women who are coming before the sheriff and then they speak to court officials about the kind of programme that they feel would be appropriate and very often now their advice is accepted. This does not happen in England and Wales. May I give an anecdote. I went to the Asha Centre in Worcester which was set up at the behest of somebody who was very senior in the Probation Service for Hereford & Worcester who had seen from her own experience of 30 years that they were not getting anywhere with women offenders. I met this woman and she was 41. Her life had started to go wrong when her mother set up home with another man and I think everything started off with the stepfather's treatment of this girl being inappropriate. That was the start, as she saw of it, of what happened in her life. The consequence was from the age of 15 to the age of 41, when I saw her, she had been in and out of prison all the time. She had lost her eldest child who had been free for adoption without her consent; she hardly ever saw her second child and she occasionally saw her third. Like every woman I ever met in prison, I used to say, "What do you want with your life?" and they all said the same things, "I just want somewhere for me and my children" or if it was in Scotland they said, "me and my wanes". This woman said that to me so I said, "Well, look, you have been in and out of prison since you were 15, I know the difficulty with getting accommodation on discharge, ignoring that, why has happened and why are you here now?" She said, "Well, some magistrate ..." she did not say enlightened, perhaps that is a description I would give, "... gave me this chance". I said, "What has this place done for you?" and she said, "Every time I have ever been in prison I have always been able to blame someone else. It was 'if my stepfather hadn't done that; if my mother had protected me; if the father of my first child hadn't knocked me around; if I hadn't been homeless; if I hadn't got into drugs'; it was always someone else's fault'". She said, "This is the first time in my life when nobody has thought about my offence but they have looked at me and said 'This is your situation, how are you responsible?'" She said, "This is the first time in my adult life that I have had to stop and think, 'how did I get myself into this mess'". I think that is the right approach actually. It is not easy. I said to her, "Are you finding this easy?" and she said, "It is much harder than prison because I am really having to challenge myself and I am being helped to do that".

Q558 Mr Campbell: That is quite a powerful position to put. I suppose, going on from that, the public would be saying "Well the test or the criteria for the success of such an approach, could that be best judged by the re-offending rates?" Has there been sufficient work to determine if that is a criteria by which you can judge?

Baroness Corston: I am grateful you have asked me that question, Mr Campbell, because there is an organisation called Smart Justice. They commissioned an opinion poll earlier this year, I think it was February. I think it was done for them by ICM. They interviewed a random sample of 1006 adults aged 18-plus in the UK between 9 and 11 February. The consequence of that was that overall when people were asked the question: "Do you think local community centres where women are sent to address the root causes of their crimes, like drug addiction, mental health problems and domestic violence, where they would have to do compulsory work in the community to pay back what they had done, should they be set as an alternative to prison for females convicted of non-violent crime?" 86% of the public responding agreed with that statement. I think people are probably a bit more reasonable about this than we realised. I think they realised sending women or perhaps young people to prison for crimes of social nuisance is pretty pointless and sometimes either gets them into inappropriate behaviour or becomes a learning opportunity for inappropriate behaviour.

Q559 Mr Campbell: Thank you for that, although that is more an analysis of those who were surveyed about their attitude to the centres.

Baroness Corston: Yes.

Q560 Mr Campbell: What I am really trying to determine is, is there any data available of those who went through the centres and then determining their re-offending likelihood in comparison with those who have gone through prison and their re-offending likelihood?

Baroness Corston: All the evidence that I had, looking at the revolving door of prison, was that the evidence was that prison itself did not work, never mind whether anything else did. Certainly the women's centres I went to in Halifax, Worcester and Glasgow were inspirational when you spoke to women about their lives and why they had gone there, and what the difference was, the difference it had made to them. Apart from anything else, prisoners do not have, many of them, any of the skills that everyone in this room takes for granted. We know how to have a conversation. We know how to work as part of a team. We know how to speak appropriately to people, we know how to co-operate. None of these people do. They do not have any of those skills, they have utterly chaotic lives.

Q561 Mr Campbell: I understand that but I am trying to get at the hard, raw data. I suppose it would be possible for us to get the number of females who have served a prison sentence in the past five years throughout the UK.

Baroness Corston: Yes.

Q562 Mr Campbell: And from that draw a conclusion about how many were readmitted to prison as a result of re-offending after their release. Are there similar figures for the females who have gone through the community centres that you have visited in terms of their re-offending?

Baroness Corston: No, because none of them is on the kind of statutory basis where those figures could be capped with any certainty.

Q563 Chairman: You are saying they have not been convicted of an indictable offence?

Baroness Corston: They are not necessarily accepted as disposals by the courts in general. You will get some magistrates who will use them and some who will not. The one place where I think you will find there will be evidence is in Scotland because the 218 centre in Scotland is financed by the Scottish Parliament and they are in the process of doing an evaluation exercise to look at the correlation between women serving community sentences under the supervision of the 218 centre and then subsequent re-offending rates.

Q564 Chairman: We will pursue this because I think Mr Campbell's question is very legitimate. If you are seeking to advance the case for non-custodial punishments of one form or another, I am personally with you on that, we do need to be able somehow to answer the question he has asked. I will ask our clerk to contact people in Scotland. Do you have information there?

Baroness Corston: May I read this section?

Q565 Chairman: Yes, please do.

Baroness Corston: "An independent evaluation of 218 in February 2006 for the Scottish Executive Justice Department, which recognised that the Centre had not been operating for sufficient time to provide meaningful reconviction data, reported that, 'Interviews with sentencers and prosecutors have shown that they make use of 218 and value it as a resource. In individual cases, referrals to 218, such as through diversion from prosecution or direct bail, often successfully prevented female offenders from entering custody, at least in the short-term. Quantitative and qualitative data indicate that women who have engaged in services at 218 have been actively involved in offending and that they fit the profile of female offenders in custody. So it is likely that women who engage with services at 218 are avoiding custody in the short and longer term.'"

Q566 Chairman: May I ask you one question before I bring my colleague in. We have already done a report, this Committee, into community restorative justice. Now of course there are very special applications in Northern Ireland, and you will understand this.

Baroness Corston: Yes.

Q567 Chairman: Running through my mind as you were talking was the thought would an application of community restorative justice, in your view, be an adequate and sensible way of dealing with many of the women who otherwise would come before the courts and have custodial sentences possibly? Have you looked at that aspect of it?

Baroness Corston: Yes. I think in a way that is the sub-text of a great deal of what I say. It was certainly something which was reinforced for me by prison governors who said that they thought that was more appropriate. Some prison governors tried to provide a regime which almost replicates that kind of thing because they want to have women ready to lead what we would call purposeful lives when in prison and is particularly true in Cornton Vale, the only women's prison in Scotland, where I was extraordinarily impressed by the approach taken by the then governor, Sue Brooks, who I think has now gone to work at the Scottish Prison Service headquarters. The regime that she introduced after a scandal in Cornton Vale with high numbers of women taking their lives was inspirational.

Q568 Mr Murphy: Baroness, your vision in your report is basically of two types of unit, one to deal with lesser offences, I think you suggest from perhaps six to 12 days, and another one of up to 30 beds to deal with obviously more serious offences and people who have longer sentences to serve. How would the 30 bed units in reality differ from a small prison, if people indeed have to serve more than two years and some of them are serving life sentences?

Baroness Corston: They would be like small prisons, there is no question that they would be like small prisons, but I would hope it would be run in a way which is appropriate to the needs of the women who are in those prisons. I would expect all other women who come before the courts or are at risk of coming before the courts to be dealt with in community centres. I understand that there is such a centre either built or being set up in Northern Ireland.

Q569 Mr Murphy: Could you ever see a situation in the current prison system, the regime changing to not needing 30 bed units, in other words a change in the current regime within women's prisons? Would that not suffice for people who are serving longer sentences?

Baroness Corston: Yes, it probably would, because of course those women who are serving sentences also have families, they have children who have a right to see their mothers without travelling 200 miles. I do not see a difficulty with that and, indeed, the fact the Government is now talking about investing £1.5 billion in this programme it seems to me is the perfect opportunity to use some of that money to start setting up small geographically based units for women and thereby over time, I am not suggesting this would happen quickly, freeing up some of those bigger prisons for the male prison population so we do not have this situation of police stations and people being held in court cells.

Q570 Mr Anderson: Can I go back to the point about resettlement. You spoke about the different views of men and women coming out of prison. If a man comes out, hopefully he is into work; the women quite rightly into the home and family. How is that being addressed now and what do you think needs to be done to address it properly?

Baroness Corston: I do not think it is being done now. There are increasing efforts by prison staff who are responsible for the care of women. I stress that is how they put it, they talk always of the care of women in prison. There are increasing efforts to secure accommodation. I have been to prisons where there are staff who have dedicated tasks of helping women at risk with resettlement. They come up against sometimes an intentionally homeless rule where you will get very unsympathetic housing staff who will say, "We are not accepting responsibility for two reasons. One, you went to prison so you therefore declared yourself intentionally homeless by going to prison. Two, you say you have got children but they are not with you so we are not going to accept responsibility". They go to social services and say, "I want my children back" and they say, "You cannot have your children back, you have got nowhere to live". That is what leads to this vortex where they end up leading these chaotic lives and living on drugs and when I say drugs it is not just drugs, it can just as easily be alcohol. That was the sub-text to what I was saying. I think I have recommended that the intentionally homeless rule should be abolished because I feel that is an essential pre-condition for these women.

Q571 Sammy Wilson: I just want to go back to the alternatives to prison. It really, I suppose, ties in with the point Stephen Pound made right at the start about the evidence for some of the recommendations. In your report you say: "I and many others believe that community centres will help women to stop re-offending in a way which prison has manifestly failed to do so". You then quoted the report which has been done on the Glasgow one. I noticed the terms which were used were "often" or "it is likely", there is no evidence there either.

Baroness Corston: Sorry, can you be specific about what you mean?

Q572 Sammy Wilson: What I am saying is it really follows on from the point Gregory Campbell was making. You are saying you believe that this will happen, that re-offending will be less likely, but all I am asking is what evidence is there. The only evidence you have produced is the report on the centre in Glasgow and the terms used there are "often" or "it is likely that" people will be less likely to re-offend but you really have not got any evidence that this is the case. This is a fairly fundamental recommendation.

Baroness Corston: About the community centres?

Q573 Sammy Wilson: Yes.

Baroness Corston: Well, I have just quoted the Scottish Executive ---

Q574 Sammy Wilson: They have not produced any figures either.

Baroness Corston: --- from February 2006. It may well be in the body of their report what they do, I am quoting from it. What I was charged with doing was looking at this issue in the round, talking to people and coming up with statistics where they were available. I think if you read the whole of the report you will find it is full of statistics. Indeed, there is a huge bibliography at the end which gives the sources of the assertions that I make. Where I have seen something which works or where I have spoken to prison governors who have consistently said the same thing to me, I make no apology for saying, "Most people have said to me". I am not going to name individual prison governors, it would be invidious, but it is only right for me to represent in the public domain messages which come repeatedly to me from professionals whose expertise is greater than mine will ever be. I cannot make an apology for that.

Q575 Sammy Wilson: I am sure you will appreciate that given the implications of this, a report based on anecdotal evidence like that is hardly the basis for making firm recommendations.

Baroness Corston: If you are talking about the reality of people's lives, there is always a place for anecdote because anecdotes are illustrative. It does not mean to say that they apply to everybody, they can illustrate situations, they can illustrate the failure of particular procedures. I maintain, Mr Wilson, that my report gives as much statistical evidence, in the body of the report, not in the summary, as can be achieved.

Q576 Sammy Wilson: You have mentioned all of the services which women prisoners need and the very deep problems they face. How do you believe that those services can be provided in units as small as you are suggesting, 12 bed, 30 bed units? Have you done any costings - since there are not likely to be economies of scale there - on providing services on such a basis as those kinds of units?

Baroness Corston: Yes. Looked at from the lowest base, if we are talking about the woman that I spoke about earlier on who I met in Worcester, she was at that time at the Asha Centre. A place at the Asha Centre costs £750 a year, the capital cost of a place in the prison service is £77,000 a year, and I was just saying which I thought was the best value for money. Other centres like the Calderdale Centre are supported institutionally and by NGOs although they are independent and have similar costs to the Asha Centre. At the base, and the women's centres I am talking about, then the benefit is obvious. As to the cost of a smaller unit, I cannot for the life of me imagine, although I do not think any work has been done on this in the Home Office or in the Ministry of Justice, that the capital costs are going to be more than the £77,000 a year that currently represents one person.

Q577 Sammy Wilson: No, I am talking about the servicing costs but obviously if you are providing services for a larger number of people then the cost per person is going to be much lower.

Baroness Corston: The £77,000 represents all costs of a place in prison for a year and £750 represents all costs for a place at the Asha Centre. It is like with like.

Chairman: That is the point.

Q578 Stephen Pound: Can I endorse what you said about Smart Justice. I am working with them in actually placing members in schools in my constituency.

Baroness Corston: They are very good.

Q579 Stephen Pound: The point I want to make is the Secretary of State made an extensive statement this afternoon at 12.30 about cognitive behaviour therapy in particular, and the increase in resources for that form of therapy, both in preventative and post crisis stages. I assume from what you said that you feel that therapy has a crucial role. Do you feel it has a role outside prison, inside prison or both?

Baroness Corston: Well, Mr Pound, I am sorry to say that the people to whom I spoke in prison and who knew about this said they thought cognitive behaviour therapy was extraordinarily effective with male prisoners but they did not think it worked with women. Women have different problems and different challenges, different kinds of thinking skills.

Stephen Pound: That is interesting.

Q580 Chairman: What you have told us has been extremely helpful. I do not want to be guilty of putting words in your mouth but the substance of your argument is that having looked at this following these tragic incidents of suicide, and having worked with those who have themselves worked over a long period with women prisoners, you believe that, by and large, women who are in prison are disturbed individuals, many of whom have committed offences which could be more adequately dealt with by other than a custodial sentence, and where a custodial sentence is imposed you believe it is absolutely essential to look after those people with the sensitivity which recognises that women are different from men. That would be a fair summary, would it?

Baroness Corston: Yes it would.

Chairman: Thank you very much. We obviously will be reflecting on the evidence you have given us. It may well be we will like to check one or two things with you and our clerk will be in touch. We are most grateful. Thank you very much indeed.