Examination of Witnesses (Questions 525-539)
RT HON
BARONESS CORSTON
AND MS
JENNY HALL
10 OCTOBER 2007
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—and to the Secretary
of State—well before the end of the year. The issue of women
in prison is clearly one we have to address, and because that
had been the subject of your report, 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 Styal 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 appointed 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. 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.
| 
