By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent Published: 05
December 2005
Britain's senior female judge will make an impassioned
plea today for fewer women to be jailed, protesting that both
courts and the prison system discriminate against them.
Baroness Hale of Richmond will point to the "disproportionate
increase" in the numbers of women and teenage girls in custody
and call for judges to consider alternative community sentences
for female offenders. She will also complain that recent
changes by the Government to sentencing rules could have had
the perverse result of more women being sent to prison.
About 4,600 women are currently locked up, 6 per cent
of the prison population, compared with 900 in 1960, when
they represented just 3.3 per cent of prisoners. Another 267
girls under 18 are in custody. The chance of a woman being
jailed by a crown court has doubled in the past 15 years.
Delivering the Longford Lecture, sponsored by The Independent,
Lady Hale, the only female law lord, will denounce "some very
unequal treatment" faced by women and girls who appear before
the courts. "A male-ordered world has applied to them its
perceptions of the appropriate treatment for male offenders,"
she will say.
More and more in recent years, women and girls have been
punished in the same way as men and boys. There seems
to be less and less understanding of the ways in which their
lives are very different from men's." She will argue that
courts do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that many
female offenders have been victims of crime, including sex
abuse or domestic violence, which could account for "behavioural
problems and antisocial activity". They suffer higher levels
of mental illness and even more serious problems with drug
addiction than male prisoners. The suicide rate for women
in prison (there were 13 cases last year) is double that for
men. Because there are few women's jails, prisoners are often
separated from their families by long distances or are housed
in institutions designed for men. "As the chief inspector
[of prisons] has put it, prisons are geared to young adult
males. That is their comfort zone. Everyone else is in a minority
and they struggle to know how to cope." Lady Hale will conclude
that the most effective way to tackle the problem is to develop
alternatives to jail: "The greatest impact would be if there
were more community treatment facilities for women with mental
health and substance abuse problems and more community sentences
designed with women's needs in mind." That approach has been
backed in a recent public opinion poll, she will argue, but
instead, prison chiefs are building two more jails for women,
which has caused some to "doubt where the service sees the
future". Lady Hale will also say that the Criminal Justice
Act of 2003 could have increased the chances of women being
jailed because it toughens the severity of sentences imposed
on repeat, low-level offenders such as shoplifters. And new
sentences that combine prison and community punishments, brought
in under the Act, are imposed on women who might otherwise
have received community sentences. "It is right that the judiciary
should jealously guard its independence from Government and
the executive," Lady Hale will say. "But that does not mean
it should ignore the concerns expressed by others about the
trends for which its decisions are responsible. A review of
the treatment of female inmates has been ordered by ministers
after an investigation into suicides concluded too many vulnerable
women were being locked up. Stephen Shaw, the prisons ombudsman,
warned that jailing women with drug and mental health problems
was "disproprotionate and ineffective".
