Women Prisoners: Throw Away the Key? BBC Scotland Investigates

Scotland jails more women

than almost anywhere else in northern Europe.

I've been in and out of prison for about 33 years now.

Almost two-thirds of female admissions

to Scottish prisons are for remand.

Before I got to jail there I had moved, got myself a job,

and a judge still remanded me.

So, now he's put my life right back to square one.

The offenders themselves say prison doesn't work.

Prison doesn't do nothing for me.

As far as I'm concerned, it was like a holiday camp.

Tonight, one of Britain's top human rights lawyers investigates

whether it's time to stop jailing so many women.

There are almost 3,000 female admissions

to Scottish prisons every year.

For many women, prison is a revolving door of short sentences

and periods on remand.

But great reform is afoot.

Women's prisons in Scotland are about to change from this...

..to something a bit more like this.

There's such a feeling in Scotland that things have to change.

There is a progressive tide sweeping Scotland in relation to

people in prison, but especially to women in prison.

We will make this work, because we have to.

Under the new plans, Scotland's only women's prison will

be pulled down, to be replaced by a much smaller one.

But the radical part of the plan is that 100 women will be

moved from prison to communities across Scotland.

What we hope is that after a short period of assessment,

women will be out and about in the community during the day,

they will be out accessing a GP,

will be out at worker volunteering opportunities or going to education.

The women will be housed in five

small prisons which are being called community-based custodial units.

We're looking for sites just now.

We are determined that these community units will be

in the kind of areas that women come from.

They won't look like prisons, they will look like

the buildings that are around them,

so there won't be any barbed wire or bars on the windows.

A lock on the outside door, absolutely,

but within the units, women will live in small, flatted houses.

There will be four or five women to a house,

they will be sharing living and dining and cooking facilities,

and they'll all have the keys to their own doors.

The new plans give a capacity of 180,

less than half what's available at Cornton Vale.

So will this reform cut Scotland's ever-rising prison population?

Lady Helena Kennedy QC has been an advocate for prison reform

since her earliest days at the Bar.

She wrote a book on the

unequal treatment of women in the justice system

which is still used in the training of young lawyers today.

Nowadays she's a prominent human rights lawyer

and a high-profile Labour peer in the House of Lords.

And I just wanted to ask the minister

if there's an acceptance in Government that the costs,

as you've described, are huge, and yet over the last few years,

we've seen a reduction in the additional services of up to 80%.

She's visited prisons in the UK and across the world,

but hasn't yet come across a reform plan like Scotland's

and is curious about whether it will work.

I want to look at whether the changes to the actual

fabric of how prisons are,

making them, sort of, more...

Smaller, more intimate, where good work can be done with women.

Whether that is going to be the answer, or whether we really

should just be absolutely taking a scythe to the numbers of women

that we're sending to prison, which I've always believed.

On any given day there are 400 or so women in prison in Scotland.

They live in units within male prisons

at Edinburgh, Grampian and Greenock,

And more than half live here, at Cornton Vale near Stirling.

Helena Kennedy has come to visit the prison.

People are usually locked up for about 9 o'clock at night,

a bit earlier at the weekends.

We try to keep people out as much as we can.

It's a prison which used to be notorious

for suicide and self-harm.

The majority of women here have horrendous backgrounds

of trauma, chaotic lives, terrible, dreadful, things happening to them

that most people can't even begin to imagine, and things that you would

hardly believe or credit would go on in modern Scotland, but they do.

So many of our women are products of their backgrounds.

The governor's arranged for Helena Kennedy to meet

a group of women, including one on remand

and others serving time for shoplifting, drugs and fire-raising.

One of the things that I think is generally understood now is

the extent to which women who end up prison

have often got many other kinds of problems.

I mean, have any of you got a drug problem?

Have any of you come in here who've been drug users before coming in?

-MURMURING

-Yeah.

I first tried drugs in here.

Did you?

Aye. I didn't take drugs until I came here.

Not even a line of coke, not even a bit of drink, nothing.

I've tried drugs once. I've tried...

What is it...?

Heroin, in here.

One of the lassies gave me it,

but that was, like, a couple of year ago.

Yvonne, you were in care.

It was abuse after abuse after abuse.

In every social setting that I've had, it's been abusive.

-And you've been in and out of here ever since.

-Yeah.

I started self-harming after my sexual assault when I was younger.

It's my way of coping after the drink and that.

Were any of the rest of you

sexually abused as children or when you were young?

You were, yeah.

And, um, what about mental health problems?

-ALL:

-Yeah.

Have any of you got children?

-SOME:

-Yes.

How many of you have got children?

-Me.

-Me.

-Hard being away from your kids, eh?

-It's really hard.

Female offenders are different to male offenders, not only

because they have higher rates of drug abuse,

histories of sex abuse and self-harm,

but because so many of them are mothers.

This 17-year-old has been visiting her mother, a heroin addict,

in prison since she was a little girl.

It must've been quite hard at school. Did people know?

They were talking about it, like, the whispering.

It made me feel more self-conscious in myself, and I think that's why...

I was more... I'm more, now, paranoid about my sister.

Because, obviously she's getting to that,

like, that's her at high school now and, obviously,

people are going to be speaking about it.

So I know what's she's feeling. She knows I know how it feels.

And what about your father?

WRY LAUGHTER

I don't really, I don't really hear from him at all.

Think I've met him twice.

-You've only met him twice.

-Only about twice.

It's just, it's the unfairness of it,

-because you've never done anything wrong...

-No.

..and you pay the price.

The children of female prisoners will be able to stay over at

the new secure units being planned by the Scottish Prison Service.

You know, meeting the women is... These are women that are

so familiar to me, because I've spent my life

being connected to women like this.

Every single one of those women has a back-story,

and if we had spent time hearing it,

we would have seen that they really had very little chances and that

very little real work has been done

to help them get their lives in order.

Prison isn't the answer to that.

-Sandra, hello, how are you?

-Yes, I'm very well, thank you.

Great, lovely.

There are alternatives to prison in the community.

This is one of them.

Over the last decade, more than 800 women have come through here,

most sent by the courts.

For many, agreeing to come to 218 spared them prison.

And it's had a great deal of success,

one the Prison Service is hoping to emulate.

Welcome, everybody in the group today, and as part of the groups

within 218, we are focusing on victims and consequences.

Helena Kennedy sits in on one of 218's group sessions.

Here at 218, we're here to address the root cause of offending,

and a lot of the time, women will come in

and there is addiction issues. Would that be fair to say?

For myself, I'd never got the jail unless I was...had a substance.

That's the same as me.

A lot of the time when you're in the criminal justice,

it's hard to get out it.

So, would you say that the benefits of working on your offending

do actually help you from reoffending?

Learning some more extra tools to help me outside,

it's changed my life.

Women here have dozens of recent charges against them

but they are encouraged to address the reasons

behind their offending and make more positive plans for the future.

Lindsay was a persistent shoplifter, using it to feed a drug habit.

I've been in and out of prison for about 33 years now.

I'd always been given sentence upon sentence.

I'd heard about 218 in the prison cells, but it's the first time...

..I'd ever been off drugs, erm...

ever really came back to look at why I offended.

When I was in prison the last time it was actually the staff

that pushed for me to come into residential, because I think

they knew, and I knew as well, that that's what I needed.

-Something more intensive?

-Yeah, yeah. Something more intensive.

To be kind of grounded more,

so I could deal with my mental health and understand how

I felt how it triggered me.

The 218 service is the only residential

project of its kind in Scotland and it has a waiting list.

It has 12 beds and a day service for 50.

The manager shows Helena Kennedy round.

It's like putting a bit mirror in front of people

and saying, "Look at yourself." You know, it's no easy.

You know, to look at some of the stuff that you've done.

And for it somehow not all to be about them,

but also about what's happened to other people as a result.

Absolutely.

And I think that's what our group work does, it really forces

the women to look at how their behaviour's impacted on others.

The secure units run by the Prison Service could look a bit like 218.

They've been asking about how the service works.

We've had lots of visitors from the Prison Service coming here.

The architects, the designers, even asking us about our security.

We don't have bars on our windows,

we don't have keys, we don't have any locked doors behind us.

Going to 218, you can really see how just having people taking

an interest in you, helping people to kind of just feel

good about themselves is a way of helping them address

so many of the problems that, you know, surround them.

It turns out Scotland's new women-centred approach may not

be as ground-breaking as first thought.

30 years ago, Canada's female prison system was in crisis

with high rates of violence, self-harm and suicide.

A federal task-force came up with a radical plan.

Five low-security prisons were built in communities across Canada.

The units were to be centred around therapy and rehabilitation, to

help women rebuild family links and offer work outside the prison gates.

One of them is here.

This prison houses 200 women in what the Canadians call

cottage-style units.

These are what we call the living units and this is for...

in the main compound, for minimum and medium-security women.

The women live in houses of up to 12 with a focus on self-care,

including cooking together.

The women just live together just like you would

with a group of ten other people.

There are no prison officers in the locked living units

but prison guards do rounds every two hours.

There's times during the day, many times during the day,

when they have free access to be out of their homes

and you'll see them walking the track and

playing sports and then there's obviously times as well

when they have to be in their homes for...

When there's house checks and when they have to be...

Quiet time.

The first women to move into the new units were given far more freedom

than in the old Prison For Women and encouraged to look after themselves.

Prison For Women, you were told when to get up,

when you were eating breakfast, when you were eating lunch,

when you were going to work.

With Grand Valley, when you got there, in the units there's

washer-dryers, kitchens, bathrooms, so you are responsible to get

yourself up, you're responsible to do your own laundry.

So the more you continue this,

the better chances of reintegrating into the community.

You should only use prison as a last resort.

But the new-style prisons have attracted criticism from prison

reformers who complain about human rights abuses and say the reality

of the community-based prison is very far from the original idea.

Why, if this is a community-based prison, is everybody locked up?

Why would you need that with a group that was supposed to be

integrating into the community and

the majority of whom are low-security?

The units were designed to be low-security,

but within a few years, the Correctional Service had

added maximum-security units to every prison.

Because it's a multi-level prison,

women are actually housed in more secure settings in this

prison that they would be if they were in a comparable prison for men.

Just like in Scotland, it was envisioned that

workers would be assisting women

in all kinds of therapeutic ways. Not doing strip-searches,

not doing all kinds of massive security.

The idea was that the majority of the women would be employed

outside of the prison, unless, because of their sentence,

they were ineligible to go out.

When I was there, there were all kinds of programmes,

I ended up getting my Grade-12 diploma.

When I left Grand Valley, I left with 67 diplomas and certificates.

Erm, all those programmes are gone.

Three times as many women are sent

to federal prisons than in 1989.

Reformers say one reason for the rise in the female prison

population was that sentences became longer

and prison became a more attractive option for the courts.

We see judges and lawyers actually saying,

"Let's give, you know, send women there,"

because there's a presumption there are more programmes.

And, in actual fact, there are fewer vocational opportunities than

existed at the Prison for Women.

The massive overcrowding is leading to fewer resources.

Promoters of this new scheme in Scotland say that

where it's different from Canada is that these

units, these new prison units,

-are going to be very small, 20 women apiece.

-Mm-hm.

I would be surprised if, already,

you aren't being encouraged to expand the numbers of those units.

In some regions there were as few as 10 to 13 women and now

in one of the regions, the Atlantic region where there were 13

women when the new prison was opening, it now houses 88.

When we were embarking on this initiative in Canada,

it was cast as the, really,

one of the best reform initiatives internationally.

Now, 26 years on, it's been, I would have to say,

not quite a dismal failure, but pretty darn close.

I think it's interesting that Canada

has gone down the same sort of road as us.

Judges thought they were doing a favour to a woman

to send to her to one of these new facilities.

And, in fact, then, you get them overcrowded,

a doubling-up of the numbers almost.

And then, what's supposed to be on offer in those places which

are like therapeutic communities end up being much less therapeutic

than they were ever intended to be

so the outcomes become less good.

The number of women sent to

prison in Scotland

has seen a similar rise to Canada.

Prison reformers are sceptical the new prison strategy will impact

on the record number of women arriving in Scottish prisons.

If you expand capacity without shrinking

the capacity of the old estate, what you might find is a swelling.

And there is academic evidence to support the fact that...

The kind of, "If you build it, they will come".

I think those numbers are hugely optimistic.

Not because what we're about to do

in terms of the women's strategy won't be successful,

actually, we're not in control of the numbers.

We don't sentence people to prison.

We just deal with who the courts send to us.

It's not going to require a change just inside the prison.

It's going to require a change in terms of our courts

and sentencing policy.

The big difference between male and female offenders is that women

commit more crimes of dishonesty and

fewer crimes of violence than men.

Women are also more likely than men to be remanded in custody -

that's kept in prison

although they haven't been sentenced or their cases tried.

Almost two thirds of female admissions

to Scottish prisons are for remand.

There's a huge churn of women who are going in

and out of prison on remand, and the vast majority of those women

never end up with a custodial sentence.

Before I got the jail there, I had moved, got myself a job.

I had a job that was...

It was a responsible job.

I was banking money and stuff like that,

and a judge still remanded me.

So, now, he's put my life right back to square one.

It seems to me there's a large percentage of the women

in here on remand,

and then end up never being sentenced to a prison sentence.

Aye, um, that's happened to me

the past couple of times I've been in.

I've been charged with offences

and then lay nine months on remand and got out.

The Scottish Prison Service doesn't decide how many women

are sent to prison, the Judiciary does.

No sitting sheriff was allowed to take part in this programme

because of "judicial independence".

But this retired sheriff, who has decades of experience

in courts across Scotland, agreed to give the view

from the other side of the dock.

The most difficult decision that a sheriff normally has to make

is the one which is on the balance between prison or not to imprison,

whether there's an alternative.

If it means receiving public criticism, that's part of the job.

It's not my job to be popular,

it's my job to do what I think is right.

He says sheriffs often use remand to ensure women

with chaotic lifestyles cooperate with pre-sentencing reports.

They end up in the situation

where the only way you can get a report

is to remand the person in custody.

That happens quite regularly because of the difficulties that they have.

-Have all of you been in and out of here a number of times?

-Yes.

Do you leave saying, "I'm not going to get into trouble again?"

-Aye.

-Every time.

-Always say it?

-ALL TALK OVER EACH OTHER

-Never coming back.

ALL AGREE

What do you feel would change your lives?

There must be judges sitting there saying,

"What am I going to do with this woman?"

when you appear in front of them,

and they think if I put her inside for a while

it might mean that she'll stop taking the drugs.

I've done the programmes

and you're sent back to your cell,

and there's no support for when you get back.

-It's just opens up a can of worms.

-ALL TALK OVER EACH OTHER

It brings everything back to the surface.

'Sadly, we don't get the full follow-up

'of what has happened to people we've sentenced.'

The only way we ever find out if it's not worked

is if they appear again before us at a later date.

I get the chance of talking to judges regularly,

and they really are frustrated about

the very limited menu of options they've got

for dealing with the troubled women who are coming in front of them.

What judges need to have is a far greater sense

of what the alternative possibilities could be.

One of those alternatives is to divert repeat offenders

from crime in the first place.

This day service claims to take a radical approach,

because although attendance can be recommended through the courts,

it is essentially voluntary.

Helena Kennedy has come to see if it works.

Many women here have very similar backgrounds

to those at Cornton Vale,

and have also served short sentences.

'We're working with the most chaotic women,

'who have offended for a long, long time.'

They've got multiple problems, whose lives are a mess.

They've got multiple problems.

We need to deal with the multiple problems.

We have a clothes bank, because a lot of women,

they've lost all their possessions because they've been in prison,

they've lost their supported accommodation

or their temporary furnished flat - wherever they've been staying.

One woman turned up here in her pyjamas.

Staff from many different areas, including social work,

housing and psychology, work together here.

They say dealing with basic needs and underlying complex trauma

tackles the reason many of these women offend.

Prison didn't do nothing for me,

as far as I'm concerned, it was like a holiday camp.

You had your en-suite shower,

the only thing was you were locked up at 9.30 at night,

but you weren't really locked up

because you were still in the corridor with everybody else.

You could go and get your hair done, your eyebrows done,

your nails done, you name it.

You can get that done in prison, so, to me, it was like a holiday.

It didn't solve the problems.

I came straight back out, and as soon as I came out,

I went right away and bought my coke right away,

the day I got out, know what I mean?

This woman credits the service with helping her

look after her son again.

It was a lot of guilt, there was a lot of guilt.

I blamed myself for a lot of the wean going into foster care.

Because I knew it was all down to me,

my drug abuse,

my anxiety,

and being in a domestic violence relationship.

He's seen a difference in me before he got took off me

and the now - he sees a totally different mum.

You've been through a hard time, too?

I got a Community Payback Order.

It was as an alternative to prison, two years ago.

And it was my criminal justice worker referred me here.

I wouldn't really engage,

I wasn't being upfront with them when I first started coming.

-So, you were secretly drinking, still?

-Yeah.

And I didn't want to face up to my problems, neither I did.

I was frightened. Scared.

I started receiving trauma counselling...

..and it made a massive, massive difference to my life.

The women that we're working with have experienced complex trauma

in their lives, and if we continue to just jail them

and do nothing else, they're just going to repeat.

That's why the women we're working with just now,

they've been through that cycle of in and out of prison,

in and out of prison,

in front of judges, you know?

The judges know them.

This is a different approach,

a radical approach within criminal justice services.

But it is an approach that works.

Prison campaigners say projects like these work,

but are chronically underfunded and should be given more money

to expand rather than building new prison units.

We know, for example, that there are facilities run very successfully

by the voluntary sector.

It's...it's a bit baffling to us why the voluntary sector

hasn't seen more of an uplift,

or more financial certainty for running these services.

Which, as far as I understand it, is the intention behind these

community-based custodial units.

Judges seem to have their hands tied, and I just wonder

whether it isn't because

there aren't enough alternatives in the community

and that we're not spending money there

rather than in building new prisons.

The Justice Minister says he wants

to cut the women's prison population.

But is his strategy going to work?

The experience in Canada

has been that they tried out something similar,

but in the end, they found that it's not the bricks and mortar.

It's actually about putting resource into the way

in which there is some sort of delivery of rehabilitation.

I think the experience in Canada is very interesting,

because nobody has actually achieved

what we're trying to achieve with the new community-based approach

that we want to take here in Scotland.

It's important not to look at this as being an issue

around bricks and mortar.

It's about changing the way in which we actually deal

with the offenders while they're in these establishments.

There is some evidence, Minister,

that actually while the funding of the prison service has gone up,

something like, I don't know, £12 million,

the equivalent almost reductions

have taken place in community delivery of services.

Historically, we are overly dependent upon prisons,

so absolutely key to trying to deliver this change,

is to make sure that sentencers

are actually using the sentencing provisions

which are available to them

in the best possible way to achieve better outcomes.

So, there's a balance to be struck here.

I hope we can make this programme in ten years' time

and, uh, and revisit these issues.

And I would like to find that, in fact,

we had taken a scythe to the numbers of women who are going to prison,

that what we're going to be seeing is that the real work

with women who've offended is being done in communities.

THAT is what will work.