The adoption of neoliberal values by most of the major political parties in the UK since the 1990s has had profound effects on vulnerable and marginalised women who come into contact with the criminal justice system (CJS). More recently, austerity-driven cuts have accelerated the neoliberal policies that have had a devastating effect on women caught up in the CJS. This chapter focuses on two effects of austerity-led policies: the privatisation of Ministry of Justice probation services and the closure of HMP Holloway women’s prison to sell the land for private housing development. Without any long-term plan or strategy about the future of the prison population or provision for people in the community, those policies are generating harmful, and in some cases deadly, impacts. The chapter will demonstrate how those austerity-driven policies have resulted in the amplification of the violent and harmful conditions facing women in prison and serving community supervision orders, and have negatively affected the ability of women’s organisations to advocate for women in the CJS and tackle systemic injustices.
In 2016, a total of 22 deaths of women in prison custody in women’s prison estate was recorded. This is the highest number on record. Of this figure, eleven have been recorded as self-inflicted, four have been classified as not being self-inflicted and, at the time of writing this chapter, seven are awaiting classification.1 By comparison, the second highest number of self-inflicted deaths in women’s custody occurred in 2003, with a critically high number of self-inflicted deaths occurring at HMP Styal. These conditions led to the Corston Report,2 which primarily involved a critical examination of the CJS for women and an inquiry into how it can better respond to women’s needs.
The Corston Report recommended the funding of more women-led community centres and support services to provide specialist intervention for women in the CJS. The rationale for this recommendation was to reduce the risk of harm in the prison system. But recent austerity-driven cuts have led to the dismantling of these intervention strategies and the demise of specialist services set up to support women in the CJS. It is now abundantly clear that women’s needs as proposed by the Corston Report cannot be met by the Coaltion government’s ‘rehabilitation revolution’ which introduced a number of key reforms to the National Probation Service in England and Wales. As part of this ‘rehabilitation revolution’, the Offender Rehabilitation Act in 2014 legislated for the privatisation of almost all of the probation service in England and Wales. Other powers brought into effect under this Act include the extension of statutory supervision for people serving short-term and long-term sentences as well as the involvement of ‘private providers to be responsible officers for the supervision of offenders subject to such orders’.3 In brief, these new statutory supervision orders raise significant concern as they bring an additional 50,000 women under the statutory supervision orders, where supervisees will be held to account and potentially recalled to custody should they breach their supervision order. Even more disconcerting is that these new powers will be operated by a small number of private organisations that have little or no experience of probation supervision.
These reforms are said to ‘disproportionately affect women’. Campaign groups, such as the Prison Reform Trust, have raised key concern about the disproportionate number of women now subject to these new supervision orders, primarily due to the fact that women serve short-term prison sentences. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 71 per cent of all women entering prison in 2012 were sentenced to a period of less than twelve months, compared to 57 per cent of the male prison population. What is more, the government has consistently failed to demonstrate how this Act complies with equality considerations for women’s key requirements when setting community supervision conditions. The House of Commons Justice Committee even suggested that the statutory reforms were ‘designed with male offenders in mind’. Thus, without sufficient regard for the particular needs of women when setting supervision conditions, ‘such as caring responsibilities, domestic violence and mental illness’, it is highly likely that ‘women will end up in custody for breach [of a supervision order]’.4
Two years since the implementation of the Offender Rehabilitation Act with official statistics already showing an unusually high recall rate for women, figures released by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) show a staggering increase of 149 per cent of adult women recalled for breaching the conditions of their licence in the period between April and June 2016 in comparison with the same period in 2015.5 It is important to note that breaching a supervision order does not mean committing a new crime; it is a sanction for non-compliance, such as not turning up for a supervision appointment, not sticking to curfew times and/or not residing at the address stipulated in supervision terms and conditions. It is clear that women are being placed back into custody on an unprecedented scale for such breaches.
This unprecedented recall rate does not suggest a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ but foretells of a rehabilitation system in ruins and the demise of a public service, replaced by a private sector service. Against the backdrop of violence, and self-inflicted death and self-harm facing women in prison (see also Chapter 21 by Joe Sim), recall is the worst possible outcome for women being supervised in the community. Given the harmful and violent conditions facing those women who are sent to custody, recalling them (when most were originally sentenced on a short-term basis) generates significant upheaval in their lives and damages community relations with their families and social support networks.
When the Offender Rehabilitation Act came into effect the government outsourced the operation and management of community supervision to 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) in England and Wales. The main companies running these CRCs are: Sodexo Justice (led by Sodexo in partnership with Nacro); Purple Futures (led by Interserve in partnership with 3SC, Addaction, P3 and Shelter); MTCnovo; and Reducing Reoffending Partnership (led by Ingenus in partnership with St Giles Trust and Crime Reduction Initiative).
One effect of this privatisation programme has been the systematic dismantling of women’s services originally set up to advocate on behalf of women in the CJS and seek alternative solutions to incarceration. Not only do these companies manage and carry out the main ‘community supervision’ duties but further dominate the specialist service provision ‘market’ where clients with identified needs (e.g. mental health, housing, education, substance misuse, counselling, domestic abuse, child care and so forth) are provided a specialist service. Currently, it is unclear whether these, often smaller, women’s organisations have a place in the rehabilitation revolution. Service contracts that were awarded to specialist services have lacked clarity and/or were unsigned a year after delivery started. Smaller projects, often with more therapeutic approaches, have had resources and organisational attention removed. Ultimately, these reforms bred competition and amplified the very power dynamics that many women’s organisations try to address.
Women’s Breakout recently fed key data to the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts that the development of the CRCs led to a decline in funding for women’s services.6 The result has been an increasing number of independent women’s organisations pulling out of contracts. Having tried to deliver within the ‘Offender Rehabilitation’ model, they now recognise that it conflicts with their ethos and approach to supporting women in the CJS.
Another move that could considerably worsen service provision for women in the CJS is the closure of HMP Holloway. In 2015, Michael Gove, the former Minister of Justice, announced that closing the prison would enable women to be accommodated in ‘more humane surroundings, designed to keep them out of crime’,7 thus invoking the rhetoric of ‘reform’ to dismantle and sell off part of the public sector. Using the language of ‘reform’, the government is trying to persuade the public that changes made to women’s prison estate are made in the pursuit of ‘progress’, to support the vulnerable, while at the same time masking the extension of market forces, freeing up the land value and commodification of the suffering of its prisoners.
The government now plans to sell the North London eight-acre plot of land for private housing development. The primary rationale for the closure of HMP Holloway appears not to be the provision of more humane surroundings for women but the generation of government revenue. Looking at women’s options after the closure of HMP Holloway, it is not difficult to see how this will in fact produce a more harmful environment and most likely intensify the violent conditions currently besetting women in the prison system. The closure of Holloway will see the removal of twelve beds providing specialist psychiatric care, thus resulting in some women being transferred to high security forensic hospitals. Also lost is the recently built day centre, which supported some of the most vulnerable women unable to manage in prison. Various highly skilled and established teams working within the prison were lost, including one of the most integrated psychological interventions teams, and a referral system with unusually good interdisciplinary communication. It is worth noting that prior to its closure, HMP Holloway received its best inspectorate report.8 Moreover, a recent study on the needs for psychiatric treatment in prison recorded that HMP Holloway met the needs of prisoners at a higher level than neighbouring HMP Pentonville.9 These positive developments and improvements in the treatment of women in the CJS were ignored as women were displaced to another prison.
The closure of HMP Holloway prison now increases the average distance that women are held away from their home communities by ten miles, from 50 to 60 miles. It geographically disperses them further from their children, families and local support networks and places an additional burden on families and support services to pay the extra cost and extra time it now takes to visit women in their new prison location.
The austerity-driven policies leading to the closure and sale of HMP Holloway undoubtedly have had a ripple effect on the wider prison estate for women, where overcrowding is a key concern. For example, the population of HMP Bronzefield in Surrey (a Sodexo Justice Service prison) is set to increase by 50 per cent10 and women in this prison are now ‘doubled-up’ in their cells since the closure of HMP Holloway. HMP Downview, originally a women’s prison, closed in 2012 to be converted to a men’s prison. But it lay empty and was reopened in 2016, to receive women from HMP Holloway. Women reported that HMP Downview was filthy on their arrival. These conditions fail to demonstrate ‘more humane surroundings’ but rather indicate a decaying and untenable situation. Without a plan in place to reduce women’s prison population, it is likely that the violence within the women’s estate will increase.
The neoliberal ambitions underlying the closure of HMP Holloway has led to the formation of ‘Reclaim Holloway’, a grassroots campaign designing alternative ways on how to make use of public land for the benefit of the local community, for women who were held in the prison and for the women’s organisations that served them. In this campaign we are seeing the emergence of a collaborative, cross-sector grassroots movement that is linking radical housing and anti-prison activists, with anti-carceral feminist principles at its core.
There is real hope that an effective campaign that foregrounds women’s needs will emerge from Reclaim Holloway. But on its own such a campaign cannot fundamentally change a CJS that is both increasingly marketised and violent. The safety net for many women caught up in the CJS is tragically being torn apart under conditions of austerity. It took years to build up an established network of women’s specialist organisations that advocated on behalf of those women in the CJS, which is now being dismantled. Women’s support organisations are swimming in a perpetual state of panic, fear and anxiety, of silence, paranoia, competition and surveillance. This involves the fear of contracts being terminated or lost, or worse, money being ‘clawed back’ or being fined for not delivering as planned. Project funding is short, often year-on-year, as experienced staff-level organisations are being deskilled, with little time for adequate training and resourcing of staff who are themselves in financially precarious positions. This begs the question, how can these organisations continue to support women in the CJS and act as ‘shock absorbers of austerity’, at a time when funding has been cut and organisations are being forced to remove their services or shutdown completely?11
Websites were last accessed 16 December 2016.
1. Inquest, ‘Deaths of women in prison’, 8 December 2016, available at: www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/deaths-of-women-in-prison
2. Home Office, A Report by Baroness Jean Corston of a Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System, London, 2007, available at: www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/corston-report-march-2007.pdf
3. Full details of the Offender Rehabilitation Act are available at: http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/RP13-61
4. Prison Reform Trust, ‘Prison Reform Trust briefing on the Offender Rehabilitation Bill’, 11 November 2013, available at: www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Prison%20Reform%20Trust%20Briefing%20Offender%20Rehabilitation%20Bill%20HoC%202nd%20Reading%2011Nov13.pdf
5. Prison Reform Trust News, ‘Prison numbers shoot past 85,000 as population goes up by more than 1,000 in under two months’, 28 October 2016, available at: www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/PressPolicy/News/vw/1/ItemID/375
6. Women’s Breakout, ‘House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts transforming rehabilitation report’, 26 September 2016, available at: www.womensbreakout.org.uk/news/house-of-commons-committee-of-public-accounts-transforming-rehabilitation-report/
7. Full speech is available at: www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prisons-announcement
8. A. Travis, ‘Holloway prison given one of its best inspection reports to date’, Guardian, 23 February 2016, available at: www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/23/holloway-prison-given-one-of-its-best-inspection-reports-to-date
9. Sharon Jakobowitz, Paul Bebbington, Nigel McKenzie, Rachel Iveson, Gary Duffield, Mark Kerr and Helen Killaspy, ‘Assessing needs for psychiatric treatment in prisoners: 2. Met and unmet need’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2016, DOI: 10.1007/s00127-016-1313-5
10. Howard League for Penal Reform, ‘Bronzefield prison: a good report but underlying concerns’, 13 April 2016, available at: http://howardleague.org/news/bronzefieldinspection2016/
11. F. Bennett and M. Daly, ‘Poverty through a gender lens: evidence and policy review on gender and poverty’, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, Oxford University, 2014, available at: www.spi.ox.ac.uk/uploads/tx_oxford/files/Gender%20and%20poverty%20Bennett%20and%20Daly%20final%2012%205%2014%2028%205%2014_01.pdf