More than a quarter of all women in prison are being held there on remand, according to a new briefing from the Prison Reform Trust. This includes women who are ‘severely mentally unwell’ and should be receiving treatment in the community, says Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment.
The majority will have committed low-level, non-violent offences and almost nine in ten are assessed as posing a low to medium risk to the public, the trust states – in 2023, just 32 per cent of more than 3,600 women remanded by magistrates were eventually sentenced to a prison term. Some women who are considered to be in a ‘mental health crisis’ are remanded for their own protection or as a ‘place of safety’, it adds.
Women ‘tend to commit less serious offences than men,’ says the briefing, with theft from shops the most frequent offence – a crime frequently linked to drug use. Nearly two thirds of sentences given to women in 2023 were of less than six months, it adds, and 40 per cent of these were for theft from shops, ‘despite widespread recognition that short prison sentences are harmful and ineffective’. As well as being on short sentences, the majority of women in prison are likely to have ‘multiple, complex and often unmet needs’ and be primary carers of children, it says.
Recent analysis by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMI Prisons) found that women entering prison were more likely than men to report issues with drugs or alcohol, and more likely to report feeling depressed, suicidal or having other mental health issues. A separate HMI Prisons report from earlier this year found that the rate of self-harm in women’s prisons had ‘rocketed’ in recent years and was now more than eight times higher than in male prisons. The study also found ‘astonishing gaps in basic decency’ and an over-reliance on physical force to manage women who were in ‘acute and obvious crisis’.
‘With the establishment of a women’s justice board and the introduction of a mental health bill, the government has made some welcome progress in improving the treatment of women in the justice system,’ said Prison Reform Trust chief executive Pia Sinha. ‘However, the figures highlighted in this briefing show there is still much to do. We know what works to tackle women’s offending. What is needed now is sustained long-term investment and the political will to implement it.’
Report available here