Prison isn't working for women - can it be fixed

[RethinkingLife]

Good piece with thoughtful contributions. All the contributors align on the reality that prison is inappropriate for the majority of the women sent there and serves no useful function.

So many quotable items and statistics. This summary is good.

If you're only thinking about working with women at the point at which they're sent to prison, you're starting too late. The real solutions are earlier upstream, where change needs to happen.
Women are being sent to prison essentially as a punishment for being poor and falling into debt - they are the shock absorbers of poverty. Survivors of domestic abuse are criminalised.
They often experience horrendous mental health problems. The list just goes on. The system is completely broken.
Labour‘s Women's Justice Board is welcome if it can really do something. In the long term, we want to stop women being criminalised for the discriminatory experiences they have.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c243650gj07o

Glad that this is being addressed with some nuance.

It's good to see the acceptance that most women prisoners are non-violent and non-prolific.

The statistics around the numbers who've a history of domestic violence is wretched. I've read before that an horrendous number have a clinical history of repeated head injuries that impacts them in so many ways.

I assume that any special consideration of non-violent, non-prolific offenders will need to be extended to everyone. Not my area, but that would make sense.

Prison doesn't "work" for almost anyone F or M.

Putting a bunch of criminals together under one roof where they become conditioned to violence and each other tends to make them less suited for fitting in to general society.

If you look at 90% of the prison population you find a history of childhood family dysfunction, poor education/attendance in education, mental health issues etc. im
not saying that the people who commit these crimes aren’t responsible for their actions at all but from a long term, economic view if we put more money into early years we might prevent some of the crime that leads to people being in prison.

Theres no appetite for that tho because that would mean some people getting “something for nothing”. Unfortunately this attitude leads (imo) to feeling disenfranchised and crime. If society doesn’t care for the individual, the individual sees no benefit to caring about society.

Theres no appetite for that tho because that would mean some people getting “something for nothing”.

Malcolm Gladwell's Million Dollar Murray explores this concept in an interesting way.

That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency. We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don’t give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn’t help every chronically homeless person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the supportive-housing program; it will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may never get one. There isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit—to observe the principle of universality—isn’t as cost effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don’t solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.
…
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.

https://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/A%20MillionDollarMurray.pdf

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray

Glad to see this, but it has been an issue for many years. Women rarely commit crimes but, when they do, courts judge them more harshly and sentence them more severely than they would men.

Good to see the BBC is doing more than reporting a headline, but looking at what's behind the headline.

See also https://womeninprison.org.uk/news/checklist-for-the-governments-newly-announced-womens-justice-board

Prison - like a lot of modern life - is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

There is fuck all point in wasting valuable intellect on pissing about with subjects like this until you take a step back and ask yourselves "What are we truing to achieve here.?". Which at the moment is clear as mud. This can be trivially seen if you are unlucky enough to catch "Question Time" and realise the 4 panellists have 4 completely separate ideas about "justice". Which considering one of them is in the government tasked with delivering "justice" isn't a great start to the day.

When you have worked out what you want the criminal justice system to deliver, you can then advance to the next step of "how".

Personally, I think the use of prison should primarily be to remove people from society who have shown they are a real danger to the public. This rarely tends to be women. Unless they are challenging the patriarchy of course. That cannot go unpunished.

Thanks for the Malcolm Gladwell quote, RethinkingLife. That makes the point - and illustrates the dilemma - very nicely.

I think that the problems relating to men and women in prison are different from each other, though there is some overlap. There are far fewer women in prison, for a start, so it's easier to treat them as a homogenous group. Most are in for crimes relating to poverty (shoplifting etc) or for drug offences, in some cases having been forced into those crimes by male partners. Many have a history of prostitution, many are from care backgrounds, many have histories of domestic abuse (I think that something like half of all women in prison have brain damage from domestic violence.) When you put a woman in prison, you remove her from her children - often she is put many miles away, because there are so few women's prisons. So the family is broken up and the child suffers as well as the mother. It's very hard to argue the case that prison is the right place for these women.

It's true that men in prison often have mental health problems and a background in care and so on. And probably shoving them in with a load of other male criminals isn't going to lead to ideal outcomes. On the other hand, men are a harder problem to solve, in my view, because so many are in for offences of violence or sex offending. What are you going to do with them if you don't put them in prison? Sentences for crimes of violence or sexual assault are already, some would argue, remarkably lenient.

Agreed, RoyalCorgi.

Fixing prison seems to involve overhauling not only criminal justice and understanding how best to protect society but also fixing the care system, education, domestic violence, and a host of other wicked problems.

online.mason.wm.edu/blog/what-makes-a-wicked-problem

Yes, this.

Also, I seem to recall there's some research, but it might be US-led, that often these relatively petty crimes that women are over punished for, are often directly as the result of poverty, caring responsibilities and/or abusive relationships - shoplifting food for example.

Prison needs to be reserved for violence and abuse ,murder ,causing injuries .
Burglary,...a lot of what people are put in prison for could be delt with by community service, putting back in to the community..and curfew,more use of ankle tags .

But how can private companies make money out of that ?

Think these things through !

Why do they need to

Because that's how things work. Wherever you turn, someone has to make a profit somewhere.

Education.
Justice
Medicine
Transport
Social care
Housing
Water
Energy
Childcare
ect

will never progress until you have clearly identified who is going to be making money out of it, and how much.

Or so I have seen these last 45 years or so.

Regarding men in prison. 25% of them come from a background of being in care. Bouncing around from foster home to foster home to children's home, and then effectively spat out of the system aged 18 is deeply destabilising and traumatic. I have genuine sympathy for people who then end up getting sucked into petty crime, drug dealing, drug addiction, burglary and end up behind bars. Even violent criminals with that sort of background (although the public still need to be protected).
Which makes all the more reason to keep children out of care where the alternative isn't worst. And that goes right back to not imprisoning mothers where it isn't absolutely necessary. I'm the short term it's not fair to men, but it's not fair to children to put them in the care system for no good reason. And 50% of those children will grow up to be men....

A complete overhaul of CMS might work wonders, for a start.

And all the men in the room go "that won't happen"

I'm not sure I believe that all or maybe even most other crimes can be dealt with by having people in the community with ankle tags.

You know, I work in a town library, near a homeless shelter, where there are significant drug issues. I see a lot of guys who have been in the criminal justice system every day. I also know something about their backgrounds because this isn't a big place and most of them went to school with people who work in my library, or their kids. Many of them, most of them, come from backgrounds of abuse or lack of care, many of them have mental health issues, many of them have trauma as adults, a lot I suspect have brain damage of one kind of another, a lot are mentally slow and easily led. That's by no means limited to women.

Absolutely better care in the early years would be good but it's also very difficult, not just because of lack of money.

But the number one issue that is behind the problems these guys have now, and their crimes, and their violence, is drugs. They are addicts and it underlies everything they do. It's behind the fact that they can't maintain a place in housing and destroy their environments. It makes them incredibly vulnerable as well, and destroys their health and minds ever further.

I don't see how, that being the case, we can put people convicted of drug crimes in the community. The "war on drugs" approach might not have worked but the ignore it and let it carry on approach has been as bad or worse IMO.

The "war on drugs" approach might not have worked

It's only been 52 years. Have some patience.

There are a number of studies that show that drug abuse is more a symptom rather than a cause. People “turn to drugs” as a result of poor mental health. Instead of treating drugs as the problem, look at what causes people to use them.

It's complex, isn't it? From PPs you can see there are multiple intersecting factors: the care system, homelessness, mental health problems, drug addiction. And the reason children end up in care is usually because their parents can't look after them, for the same reasons (drug addiction, lack of adequate housing, poor mental health). So you get an endlessly repeating cycle of poor parenting leading to children in care leading to mental health problems/drug addiction leading to more poor parenting. You have to somehow find a way of tackling the problem at root.

Some parents will always be awful and some children will always be better off being taken into care.
For the rest - not slashing programmes like sure start, mental health support etc to pay for a banking crisis caused by some of the richest in society would have helped. As would supporting care leavers and prison leavers better. (I can think of a case where an 18 year old care leaver was given a room in a hostel right next to a drug addict recently released from prison. Both of those people need support. But housing them together almost guaranteed that ex prison guy will become vulnerable 18 year olds boyfriend
18 year old will support his drug habit through prostitution, probably her kids will be born in awful circumstances. Cycle repeats. But this is common policy.) Changing it might involve doing things that don't feel "fair" (letting care leavers queue jump housing lists, supporting drug addicts even though that's rewarding bad behaviour).

Agree 100%, biscuitandcake.

I think this is less useful than one might think, as a way to prevent drug use.