Written evidence from The Griffins Society
(PB 09)
SUMMARY OF
POINTS
This submission is about the capacity of the Probation
Service to recognise the specific needs of female offenders in
its work. From our experience and research we believe that women
who are subject to probation supervision through post-release
licence and community sentences are disadvantaged. This is because
women are a small minority in a system that is designed primarily
for men, yet the reasons for their offending, and therefore the
interventions that are needed to help them avoid further offending,
may be very different to those of men. Women are particularly
badly affected by supervision that focuses primarily on risk management
instead of on providing help, support and guidance. The importance
of positive relationships for women's ability to engage well with
supervision tends to be overlooked by probation services, except
in probation areas where women's centres provide holistic help
and supervision for female offenders. It is likely resources will
continue to follow risk, so we argue that the role of the probation
service with women offenders should move from an exclusive preoccupation
with managing the risks offenders may pose to other people, to
the inclusion of the imperative to help offenders reduce risk
to self. This significant shift could be achieved through the
provision of holistic services that addresses all women's needs.
Such an approach would greatly increase the effectiveness of probation
work in diverting women from further offending. Rather than requiring
extra resources, it would save public money by reducing the prison
population and its associated heavy social costs.
1. INTRODUCTION
TO THE
WORK OF
THE GRIFFINS
SOCIETY
The Griffins Society is a charity that was established
in 1965 by members of the disbanded HM Prison Holloway Discharged
Prisoners' Aid Society. We research and promote effective practice
in working with women who are in prison or subject to criminal
justice interventions in the community. In partnership with the
London School of Economics, we provide the Griffins Research Fellowships
Programme, which enables people working with women in the criminal
justice system to research an issue of their choice about women
offenders. When they have completed their research, they write
a report about their findings. We publish it and we help them
disseminate their findings. We maintain the Women's Information
Network, a searchable on-line database of services to women offenders
and publications about women and the criminal justice system;
and we provide volunteering opportunities to women serving prison
sentences that help them to establish a work record before they
are released. The Society is governed by a Council that includes
academics and women who have served prison sentences.
2. FACTUAL INFORMATION
WE WOULD
LIKE THE
COMMITTEE TO
BE AWARE
OF
The Griffins Society often finds evidence that women
offenders are disadvantaged, in comparison with men, in their
contact with the probation service. This view is derived from
research findings and from our regular contact with women offenders
who are our volunteers. There are three specific issues that we
would like the Justice Select Committee to consider. These are
women as a minority in the criminal justice system, the impact
of probation risk assessment procedures, and the seemingly low
priority given to establishing constructive working relationships
between offenders and their offender managers. This submission
focuses mainly on women who are or have recently been in prison
because this is the primary focus of the Society's work - however,
much of the evidence we cite here is also applicable to women
subject to probation supervision via community sentences.
2.1 Women who have offended are a minority
in the Criminal Justice System
We suggest that there has been little pressure on
the probation service to establish effective means of working
with female offenders because their numbers are few. For example,
the male prison population in June 2010 was 80,700 while the female
population was 4,300 (Ministry of Justice 2010). Women therefore
comprise only 5% of people in prison and they are clearly a minority
in a system designed with men in mind. The same could be said
of community sentences. For both 2007 and 2008, men were approximately
five and a half times more likely to start a community order or
suspended sentence than women (Ministry of Justice 2010). There
has been only one accredited offending behaviour programme developed
specifically for female offenders. This is despite their different
needs and learning styles (Fawcett Society 2009). In some areas,
women's centres provide a holistic form of supervision for women,
and some services allocate women offenders to specialist offender
managers. We suggest that these methods are more suitable to women's
needs than mainstream supervision; but they are not available
in all areas. Funding of women's centres is insecure and it is
now vulnerable to public spending cuts. Yet, they can be highly
successful at helping women and enabling them to avoid further
offending. For example, the Together Women Project "TWP Plus"
programme, introduced in 2009 for very vulnerable women, has supervised
176 women: only one order was revoked for re-offending (Together
Women Project 2010). An interim evaluation of the Together Women
Project found that "gender-specific interventions must be
developed which take account of women's need to feel safe, their
need to feel empowered, and their different (from men) learning
styles" (Hedderman et al 2008).
Where no women-specific provisions are available,
women's supervision can be very unsatisfactory. Furthermore, some
probation officers have been reluctant to refer women to women-specific
provision (Hedderman et al 2008). For example, we know
of a woman who had served a fourteen year prison sentence. She
secured employment before she was released and she did so well
that she received a national award for her work. She reported
regularly to her "offender manager" but she had frequent
changes of officer, without any personal handover taking place,
so she had to start again on several occasions with a new offender
manager, each of whom seemed to know very little about her. Despite
being in full time employment she was instructed to attend a daytime
offending behaviour programme. She was not aware of any recent
assessment of her offending behaviour having taken place, and
the programme seemed unrelated to the specific offence for which
she had been convicted. Worse still, all the other offenders on
the programme were men and she felt very uncomfortable in the
group as a result. Another woman spoke of the embarrassment and
discomfort she felt when waiting to report to her probation officer,
as she would normally be the only woman in the waiting room among
a group of men, most of whom were young and often rowdy. One of
our volunteers was recently released from prison on licence. She
had served a four year sentence. She received counselling in prison
and she had found this to be very helpful in enabling her to resolve
some of the personal difficulties that she believed had contributed
to her offending. However, the counselling had to stop on her
release. Her offender manager has not offered to help arrange
for the counselling to be resumed. The woman struggles to see
any benefit in her weekly reporting at the probation office. It
is surely highly unsatisfactory that a positive intervention that
was helping a woman overcome her offending behaviour is discontinued
on release without the probation service being able to offer anything
of equivalent helpfulness. This is especially deplorable in view
of Baroness Corston's finding that "mental health problems
are far more prevalent among women in prison than in the male
prison population... up to 80% of women in prison have diagnosable
mental health problems" (Home Office 2007: 19).
2.2 The effects of prioritising risk management
in probation
The second issue that we would like the Committee
to be aware of is the way in which the probation service's preoccupation
with risk management (or, as it seems to us, the unrealisable
pursuit of risk elimination) effects women disproportionately.
Resources follow risk, and that means that probation work with
the majority of women who have complex needs but who do not pose
a high level of risk to the community is accorded minimal attention,
despite the fact that many women who offend are a risk to themselves.
Our 2009 Griffins Fellowships research project Double Invisibility—Recalled
and female, and forgotten in the criminal justice system? (Deedes
2009) was a small study of the experiences of seven women
who had been recalled to HM Prison Downview for breach of their
automatic conditional release licences. None of the recalled women
had been assessed as posing any significant risk to the community
and only one had been accused of re-offending. They had been recalled
because they had failed to comply with, mainly, the reporting
requirements of their licence. Most of the reasons for non-compliance
were centred in their chaotic lifestyles rather than wilful refusal
to comply.
The research noted the recent large increase in the
number of recalls is due to recent changes in legislation, government
attitude, pressure from the media, changes in probation culture
and ethos, and greater emphasis on risk avoidance. Yet the level
of interest in this subject is low. Accurate data and information
about recalls is hard to obtain, for male and female offenders.
Offenders, who are chaotic, addicted, socially excluded, and disadvantaged
are more likely to find it difficult to comply with their licence
conditions so they are returned to custody more quickly than offenders
who are more organised and have stronger support structures. Chaotic
offenders do not necessarily pose a risk to community safety.
Offender Managers are less likely to address directly the welfare
needs of these offenders because of recent changes in ethos. They
are less able to respond to particular difficulties offenders
face during the transition from prison to community or their general
resettlement needs. Women with complex needs are thereby disadvantaged,
particularly because they are so much in a minority that most
offender managers have little experience in supervising women
and they may therefore lack understanding of women's routes into,
and out of, offending.
It was also found that there were inconsistencies
in the way women on licence were managed. Some licence conditions
are highly subjective, especially "to be of good behaviour".
Some of the women Deedes interviewed seemed to have not understood
their licence conditions and the consequences of non-compliance.
The Parole Board specified that one woman in the study could only
be re-released to a hostel, but it is hard to secure approved
accommodation for female offenders and her release was delayed
for months because a suitable hostel placement could not be found.
Women may experience frequent changes of offender manager. While
for women in particular, a trusting relationship between offender
and offender manager may contribute to the successful completion
of a licence period, there seem to be practical and emotional
obstacles making it more difficult for some women to establish
this kind of relationship. Few data are collected by NOMS on the
reasons why offenders are recalled, and the specific characteristics
of women's offending are overlooked. Therefore, recalled women
seem to be "doubly invisible" within the criminal justice
system.
2.3 Supervisory relationships
The importance for women offenders of a positive
working relationship with their offender manager is the third
issue that we would like the Committee to consider. The significance
of personal relationships to women offenders is recognised (Home
Office 2007) yet outside the women's centres, probation supervision
seems to pay little attention to the value of human relationships.
Indeed we would argue that many male offenders too might benefit
from more attention being given to the quality of the supervisory
relationship. Research by Plechowicz (2009) explored the
benefits of the attention given to relationships in the supervision
of women at The Women's Turnaround Project (TWTP), a women's centre
in Wales. Women offenders commented favourably on the warmth and
personal concern shown by their key workers. All felt these qualities
enabled them to engage in supervision and benefit more from it
than from the comparatively sterile relationships they had with
their offender managers. Plechowicz concluded that "if the
probation service wishe(s) to work more productively and effectively
with its female clients, major changes will need to be made to
current high caseloads, and less emphasis placed on current targets,
to allow offender managers to have the time required to develop
positive relationships with their cases" (Plechowicz 2009:
46).
Significantly, an evaluation of TWTP by the University
of Glamorgan drew very similar conclusions. The evaluation added
that all the women thought that the quality of the help they had
received from their key workers had enabled them to stay out of
trouble and indeed, only two of forty five women attending TWTP
had reoffended during the evaluation (Holloway and Brookman 2008).
2.4 Women-centred initiatives
We would also ask the Committee to consider why a
number of promising women-centred initiatives undertaken by NOMS
and the Ministry of Justice seem to have not been as effective
as those leading them had intended. While the Women's Offending
Reduction Programme launched the Together Women Programme, WORP
does not seem to have succeeded in substantially reducing the
numbers of women being imprisoned. Where semi-specialist offender
managers for women are in place (as in West Yorkshire), better
outcomes seem possible, but such provision remains patchy despite
strategic commitments contained in documents such as the The
National Service Framework for Women Offenders and the Ministry
of Justice Strategy for Diverting Women Away from Crime. Initiatives
that are women-centred also tend to be child-centred. Many women
in prison are mothers and imprisonment of the mother is associated
with poor outcomes for children, including reception into local
authority care. Only 9% of children whose mothers are in prison
are cared for by their fathers (PRT 2009). The role of the probation
service should be to commission women-centred services that enable
all but the most high-risk women offenders to be supervised effectively
in the community so that they are not separated from their children.
3. CONCLUSION
We have argued in this submission that an inquiry
into the future of the probation service should take into account
the way in which women are disadvantaged by current probation
culture and practice, particularly in regard to the resettlement
of women who have been imprisoned. Three areas that we consider
must change for the position to be corrected are (1) the lack
of resources given to improving knowledge of "what works"
with women other than in provision for women's centres, which
are managed by the voluntary sector and are insecurely funded;
(2) the preoccupation of the probation service with risk, which
means that many women who are assessed as low risk to others,
but who have complex needs, are supervised (and often breached)
but not helped; and (3) the failure of the probation service to
invest resources in building the type of positive offender/offender
manager relationships that may be a prerequisite of effective
interventions with women. But, the outlook does not have to be
bleak. Work undertaken in the women's voluntary sector to develop
holistic interventions for women who have offended, from conditional
cautioning (Easton et al 2010) to alternatives to custody
(Hedderman et al 2008, Plechowicz 2009, Together Women
Project 2010), have been shown to be effective both in preventing
re-offending and in helping women transform their lives. The adoption
nationally of woman-centred ways of working that have been piloted
in some probation areas, such as the West Yorkshire semispecialist
probation officer role, would ensure a more informed approach
to supervising and helping women. It is in these promising interventions
that the Probation Service should be investing.
September 2010
REFERENCES
Deedes, R (2009) "Double invisibility"—Recalled
and female—and forgotten in the criminal justice system?
Griffins Society Research Fellowships Paper 2009/03; London, The
Griffins Society.
Easton, H, Silvestri, M, Evans, K, Matthews, R and
Walklate, S (2010) Conditional cautions: Evaluation of the women
specific condition pilot; London, Ministry of Justice.
Fawcett Society (2009) Engendering Justice—from
Policy to Practice; London, Fawcett Society.
Hedderman, C, Palmer, E and Hollin, C (2008) Implementing
services for women offenders and those "at risk" of
offending: action research with Together Women; London, Ministry
of Justice.
Holloway, K and Brookman, F (2008) An Evaluation
of The Women's Turnaround Project: Report Prepared for NOMS Cymru;
University of Glamorgan.
Home Office (2007) A report by Baroness Jean Corston
of a review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal
Justice System; London, Home Office.
Ministry of Justice (2010) Statistics on Women in
the Criminal Justice System London, Ministry of Justice.
Plechowicz, L (2009) Is attachment theory and the
concept of a "Secure Base" relevant to supporting women
during the process of resettlement? Observations from the Women's
Turnaround Project, Cardiff; Griffins Society Research Fellowships
Paper 2009/02; London, The Griffins Society.
Together Women Project (2010) Impact Report; Available
at:
httr)://fhq693-demonweb-co.uk/TWP/Impact~-/~2OP,e oort.Ddf retrieved
18.8.2010
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