Keeping women out of prison must be the focus | Letters

Your editorial (The Guardian view on the prisons crisis: moving men into women’s jails is not the answer, 10 September) is right to argue that the prison capacity crisis cannot be solved through a series of short-term fixes. Victims need confidence that the government has a credible long-term strategy for the criminal justice system, not another piecemeal intervention designed to buy time.

I share your concern about the pressures facing probation services. There are also legitimate questions about the impact on policing, but we cannot discuss the prisons crisis without confronting the crisis in our courts.

About one in five prisoners are now awaiting trial, often because cases are taking so long to be heard. Some defendants spend so long on remand that by the time they are sentenced, they are released from court, having effectively already served their sentence. Victims will rightly ask whether that is justice, and the public will rightly ask what it means for public safety.

The government points to the removal of foreign offenders as part of the solution to prison overcrowding. Yet a third are held on remand awaiting their day in court due to a court system in crisis.

Prisons, courts, probation and policing are interconnected. The government cannot hope to resolve the prisons crisis if it does not also resolve the crisis in our courts. Delays leave victims waiting years for justice, drive up the remand population and place further pressure on an overcrowded prison estate. As victims’ commissioner, I need assurances that the prime minister is focused on pursuing a strategy for the whole justice system, not simply responding to the latest emergency.
Claire Waxman
Victims’ commissioner for England and Wales

We are a collective of women’s charities, frontline services and women with lived experience of prison. We saw first-hand the devastating impact that Holloway prison’s closure had 10 years ago. For 170 years, it was a paradoxical space – a place of trauma, but also a crucible of feminist resistance and home to dozens of frontline services. From the suffragettes to the activist Chris Tchaikovsky, women’s history unfolded there. Now it has been razed.

This invites the question: what could we build instead? Your editorial offers some answers when it references the Corston review. However, one crucial element is missing: women’s centres. These are spaces where women’s services are brought together under one roof, offering support with housing, domestic abuse, employment, childcare, therapy and more. They help women holistically, rather than simply fixing one area of their lives. Women in Prison reports that for every £1 invested in a women’s centre, £2.75 is saved.

Women’s centres stop women entering the criminal justice system, keep children out of care and relieve pressure on emergency services. We’ve spent a decade campaigning for one on the Holloway prison site. The public are supportive and building work is under way, but funding is still not secured.

If Andy Burnham wanted to pursue a visionary policy, he could champion a women’s centre programme across the UK, starting with the Holloway Women’s Building.
Polly Creed
Holloway Women’s Building Collective, London

Measures to reduce the number of women behind bars are long overdue, but it must be more than a short-term fix to try to free up capacity (Ministers propose converting female prison estate into cells for men, 7 September).

Women in, and leaving, prison face particular challenges. Many have also been victims of crime or have children they hope to be reunited with. Rates of homelessness are higher among women than men when they leave prison.

These challenges also lead to higher numbers of women being recalled to prison. Our analysis found that there was one recall for every four women under post-release supervision in the community in the first three months of this year, compared with one recall for every five men.

In some cases, recall will have been needed to protect the public. But in others, better community support could and should be put in place.

If the government is serious about a long-term reduction in the number of women in prison, it should start by ensuring that women leaving prison are supported to stay out.
Enver Solomon
Chief executive, Nacro

The reported proposal to convert parts of the women’s prison estate to accommodate male prisoners may initially sound controversial, but the more important question is why so many women need to be imprisoned in the first place.

A pilot women’s court in Bristol offers a potentially much more constructive answer. By taking a trauma-informed, problem-solving approach, the court seeks to address the circumstances underlying offending – including domestic abuse, addiction, mental ill health and homelessness – while still holding women accountable for their crimes.

This seems preferable to the familiar cycle of short prison sentences, release and reoffending. It also recognises something often overlooked in the debate: imprisoning women can have consequences far beyond the offender herself. Many are mothers and primary carers, so custody can profoundly disrupt children’s lives and family relationships.

If the Bristol experiment demonstrates that intensive community supervision and properly funded support can reduce reoffending while keeping women safely out of prison, it deserves to be expanded.

The real test of a successful prison policy should not be whether we can find more cells, but whether we can reduce the need for them.
Stuart Harrington
Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset