State of the Sector 2024 - Meeting needs

Many organisations discussed the needs of women involved in the criminal justice system. Some spoke about the scale of those charged and imprisoned for non-violent offences. One described an increase in low level offending, in line with the cost-of-living crisis:

I think we've seen more women committing low level offences connected to poverty. So whilst the cost-of-living crisis has been around longer than a year, actually it was a bit of a lag time. You know, I remember probation asking us, ‘are you seeing it yet?’ And I was like, ‘no, no’. And then suddenly we saw it.

Where impacts of the sustained cost-of-living crisis may have taken some time to filter through, they are coming against a backdrop of already very high levels of need and stretched services. Organisations described women’s intersecting needs including around domestic abuse, mental health, relationship issues, substance use, sex working, and homelessness. Some argued that short sentences given to women could be harmful, re-traumatising them or leading to a cycle of being released from and then returning to prison that does not address these underlying needs.

While organisations felt hopeful about some of the messages around women’s services coming from the new government and had been pleased by the commissioning of holistic services for women in recent years, some had seen a lack of understanding around women’s needs in agencies they worked with, with police and social care being raised specifically. One noted that policies and activities were ‘largely based on data that comes from men’.

A couple of organisations noted the geographically dispersed nature of the women’s estate (because of the relatively small number of women’s prisons and approved premises) means that women are often imprisoned and released far away from home, isolated from their children, families and support networks, which creates barriers for rehabilitation.

One organisation noted a gender bias in the End of Custody Supervised Licence early release scheme, such that men were released earlier in their sentences and the men’s scheme continued after the women’s scheme closed because overcrowding was worse in the male estate.

Some organisations spoke about racial justice issues within the criminal justice system. Two spoke broadly about the longstanding and pervasive nature of racism in the system, whilst they and others also discussed more specific points. Despite this, fewer organisations brought up racial justice than anticipated. One organisation that did noted that it can be difficult to talk about because it is ‘overwhelming’ in its scope:

I don't know if people even want to talk about [racism in prisons] because it's so big. Because all the other issues that are within prisons are almost – not that they're easy fixes, they're not, but there is a clear way of fixing it. But there [with racism] it's so ingrained in every level that it's so overwhelming. I don't even know if people want to actually really talk about it. It's not that they don't believe it's there, but I don't believe that people want to talk about [it] because it's too big.

Another argued that, while institutional racism was being discussed in networks and meetings, there had been little in terms of a ‘tangible call to action’, to date. This organisation had experienced difficulties in securing agreement from prisons to run its work focused on supporting people from particular racially minoritised communities.

More specific racial justice issues raised by participants included: Black people being overrepresented within the prison population and receiving harsher sentences; disparities between the imprisonment rates of different racially minoritised communities; some racially minoritised women in prison being given less information and support related to their release; women’s faith and cultural needs not being taken into account in custody; racist microaggressions towards people in prison and voluntary organisation staff in prisons, coupled with a lack of meaningful support for staff who have had these experiences.

Two organisations working with racially minoritised people noted that criminality and going to prison were ‘taboo’ subjects in the communities they worked with, and that this led to a lack of family support for people leaving prison. One, working in the North of England, had noticed more discussion about crime happening within the communities with which they worked. Other issues mentioned were that: potential service users do not come forward for support because many charities do not provide culturally-specific support and that women in some communities are sentenced for offences related to their partners’ criminality.

Organisations noted the needs of other specific service user groups, including:

• Young people involved, or at risk of being involved, in the criminal justice system, particularly young Black people in some urban communities: significant trauma experienced by young people who have witnessed murders, or had contact with the police or courts; prosecution in joint enterprise cases; the ‘criminalising’ of children by the police, contributing to young people feeling ‘excluded from mainstream society’ and living ‘peripheral lives’ and – in some cases – more susceptible to becoming involved in criminal activity; needs not being met during childhood and insufficient youth provision increasing the likelihood of involvement in criminal activity.
• Migrant communities: trauma and the increased criminalisation of migrants linked to ‘the hostile environment’; difficulties in accessing housing; increased waiting times for trafficking and asylum applications; people in prison being transferred to one of the three prisons in England that are particularly used to hold people who are foreign nationals serving custodial sentences.
• People who maintain innocence, including when facing allegations or following conviction: facing false allegations; emotional distress; company safeguarding policies not considering the needs of people against whom allegations are raised; admitting guilt on the advice of their legal teams; the criminal justice system not treating people as innocent until proven guilty; re-categorisation; securing employment following release.
• People with sexual convictions: limited availability of resources to support them.
• People who use substances: an unpredictable drugs market and uncertainty around what is in the drug supply; rise in synthetic opiates; an increasing amount of drug use in prisons.
• Families of people involved in the criminal justice system: wanting someone to listen as they talk about their experiences, sometimes over a long period of time; the overwhelming nature of the experience of supporting a child in court.

Many of the organisations involved in our research run activities in prisons – for example, literacy, skills and arts activities. They described a difficult operating environment in prisons, referring to high staff turnover at prison officer and governor or senior levels, staff reductions and shortages, staff inexperience sometimes leading to difficulties in managing incidents, staff disengagement, bullying of other staff, and a lack of person-centred, trauma-informed communication with people in prison. Several noted people in prison being locked in their cells for long periods and having limited access to keyworker support, education, employment and other positive opportunities. Other reported issues were violence and conflict, turnover of people in prison due to overcrowding, younger people in prison feeling unsafe in environments in which older people in prison have been introduced following age category changes, and crumbling infrastructure. While many of these issues had been initiated or exacerbated by Covid lockdowns, they persisted.

Organisations described stopping their work in or with prisons because of Covid lockdowns, with a couple noting that they had not yet been able to restart work involving placements for people on release on temporary licence (ROTL). For one organisation, this was because ROTL had not yet recommenced in the prisons they worked in following the pandemic, and for another, they described the prison not having enough staff available to facilitate ROTL.

Since the lockdowns, many organisations had experienced difficulties in securing new agreement from prisons to run their activities. They variously attributed this to prisons’ financial and other resource constraints, hesitancy around introducing different ways of working, and reduced autonomy in decision making for some governors and senior prison staff. An organisation running arts interventions in prisons said:

So you have a request come in, you negotiate, spend time talking about the best piece of work and the groups that you might be working with. ... And they say, ‘yes, brilliant, absolutely, but I’ve got to…’ – and they have to take it to one or two layers above who go, ‘well, why should we do this?’. … Obviously the prison service is under immense pressure, but it's also, I think, about churn, about the number of staff moving, changing or levels of budget decision making have changed. So where those kinds of decisions are being made in organisations has got more complicated. I think that's one of the biggest changes we've seen.

Where organisations were able to run prison-based activities, they had experienced:

• Difficulties in maintaining the engagement of senior prison leadership and operational staff when staff move on frequently.
• Not being able to run planned activities or running activities for smaller numbers than anticipated. This was variously because of: a lack of prison staff to escort people in prison to, or support them to access, activities; limitations on movement around prisons to reduce conflict, or people in prison feeling too nervous to attend activities because of the risk of conflict; staff inexperience in understanding when individual people in prison can access activities; interest of the prison leadership in their project not being shared by operational staff.
• Uncertainty around, or fluctuations in, the number of people in prison attending activities because of the early release scheme, being transferred to other prisons to reduce overcrowding, or (they assumed) HMPPS or MoJ-mandated changes.
• Running activities which had previously had prison staff involved, without them.
• Limited digital opportunities. For example, an organisation working in education described how much of its work was paper based because of a lack of digital access in prisons, while another found it difficult to locate its clients moving out of a remand prison because of a lack of access to prison data systems.

Three participants noted that conditions in London prisons made it particularly difficult to run activities in those establishments, although another had plans to pilot a programme they ran in a North of England prison in a London prison in 2025.

Some participants mentioned more positive experiences in prison-based delivery, including having successfully set up and embedded new programmes in prisons, working with effective prison staff, having positive engagement from people in prison, and continuing to have prison staff supporting them to run activities. Two mentioned having seen a recent uptick in approaches from prisons wanting to bring them in to run projects:

[In the last year and a half] we've been approached [by prisons who want us to run activities] significantly more than we were pre-COVID, actually. I think partly because of all the damage that Covid wrought amongst those incarcerated.

Some organisations operating in the North of England, the East Midlands and the South West noted a geographical divide in terms of inequalities in life chances and there being fewer services to refer their service users on to than in other regions. Organisations had further observed an urban/rural divide, noting that there were fewer services in rural areas. One organisation observed that a rural prison in the South East in which they delivered activities had, this year, taken on people serving sentences from cities in the North East as a result of prison overcrowding.

There were also some references to variation in service provision by local area. In one focus group, two participants argued that a ‘haphazard’ application of Levelling Up funding had ‘almost led to two tier services in local areas’, even when those areas appeared to have similar levels of deprivation. In another, a participant had noticed a ‘postcode lottery’ in terms of service provision in the specialist criminal justice area in which it worked.

A couple of organisations referred specifically to the financial problems of Birmingham City Council, noting that Birmingham-based organisations that they partnered with now had less capacity to work with them.

A few organisations noted that delays and inadequacies in parts of the criminal justice system were affecting their service users. They mentioned significant delays in trials getting to court, defendants being given very little notice of the need to attend court and it being likely that they would not attend and be penalised as a result, a lack of safety planning around domestic abuse cases, cases being categorised as ‘no further action’, and limited resources in the appeals court meaning that people are not encouraged to appeal. Two organisations mentioned that it was difficult for their service users to access legal support because of the costs involved and difficulties in accessing legal aid solicitors.