Fewer women in prison should be the outcome of better justice – not a solution to overcrowding elsewhere

There is an uncomfortable familiarity to the current debate about prison capacity.

As the government grapples with severe pressure across the prison estate, proposals reportedly under consideration have included repurposing parts of the women’s estate for men. At the same time, significant sentencing reforms are intended to reduce the use of short custodial sentences and increase the number of people supervised and supported in the community.

There are no easy answers to the capacity crisis. Government must manage the prison population effectively while protecting the public, amid intense political and public pressure over prison places and release.

But there is a danger that the urgent question where can we find more prison places?  crowds out a more fundamental one:

How many women genuinely need to be in prison in the first place?

Custody should be reserved for the most serious cases where imprisonment is necessary, including where public protection requires it. For many women currently caught in the criminal justice system, properly funded, gender-responsive community alternatives offer a better opportunity to address the circumstances contributing to offending.

Nearly two decades ago, Baroness Corston called for community solutions to be the norm and imprisonment reserved for the most serious cases. In March, the Women’s Justice Board returned explicitly to that vision, saying the radical change Corston sought has still not been achieved.

The question is not how we preserve the existing women’s prison estate, but whether we are prepared to build a more effective justice system for women.

That does not mean retaining conventional women’s prisons simply so women can be held closer to home.

How do we stop immediate pressure for prison places displacing the longer-term reform that could reduce the need for them?

Reform or capacity management?

Reducing women’s imprisonment through better justice is fundamentally different from reducing it because their cells are needed elsewhere.

One is reform.

The other risks becoming capacity management.

Immediate pressure cannot be allowed to crowd out long-term reform.

Capacity management asks where we can find another prison place. Reform asks whether that prison place is needed at all. If the first question continually takes precedence, we risk managing overcrowding without addressing the conditions that recreate it.

A prison place is more than a space on a spreadsheet

The temptation during a capacity crisis is understandably to count places.

A prison place has a geography, a function and an infrastructure around it.

Changing the women’s estate cannot simply mean moving a number from one column to another.

The starting point should be who genuinely requires custody, who can be safely and more effectively supported in the community, and what provision best supports the smaller number for whom custody remains necessary.

Those questions should determine the future women’s estate, not the number of cells required elsewhere.

Holloway should have taught us something, but not that we need another Holloway

Corston envisaged community provision as the norm, with smaller and more local provision for those women for whom custody remained necessary.

Today that means strong local women’s centres and specialist organisations, supported accommodation and residential alternatives where appropriate, alongside smaller, suitable provision for those who genuinely require custody.

What Holloway demonstrates is that alternatives must be built before prison places become unnecessary.

And community organisations cannot indefinitely absorb additional responsibility without the resources to deliver it.

We already have some of the building blocks

In our manifesto for the new government, Clinks calls for a Whole System Approach for women, embedding gender-responsive, holistic and joined-up support across every stage of the criminal justice system. The current debate about the women’s estate makes the case for delivering that ambition more urgent, not less.

We are not starting from scratch.

The Women’s Justice Board builds on Corston’s vision, placing women-specific, trauma-informed provision at the heart of a Whole System Approach and creating opportunities to divert women into support at every stage.

Intensive Supervision Courts are an important part of that picture.

The government has expanded the women-focused Intensive Supervision Court model from one court to six, providing a community alternative to custody with tailored support addressing the drivers of offending.

The Women’s Justice Board has called for effective ISC expansion with women’s specialist services embedded within them.

Community alternatives must be credible to courts, effective for women and safe for communities.

That means linking Intensive Supervision Courts with effective local Whole System Approaches, women’s centres, housing, healthcare, substance misuse treatment, domestic and sexual abuse services and other specialist provision.

Short sentences are only part of the picture

The Sentencing Act introduces a statutory presumption that custodial sentences of 12 months or less should be suspended, subject to specified exceptions. Given how many women receive short sentences, implementation could substantially reduce the number entering prison.

Remand matters too

If we want a smaller women’s prison population, we must examine every point at which a safe and effective community response could replace custody. The Women’s Justice Board has called for a stronger presumption against custodial remand except in the most serious cases. Bail information and advocacy at court could play a crucial role in reducing remand.

The other side of the equation is recall.

Most recalls are linked to licence breach rather than a further charge. Unstable or unsafe accommodation, poor mental health, substance use, abusive relationships, poverty and fragmented support can all make compliance difficult.

We can learn from women-specific work including HMPPS Women’s Group’s recall workstreams and Project RECALL, involving Lancashire Women and HMP Styal, which supports women experiencing repeated recall.

If we are serious about reducing women’s imprisonment, we have to pay attention not only to who enters through the prison gate, but to who comes back through it and why.

Community infrastructure is justice infrastructure

None of this works without the voluntary sector.

Women’s centres and specialist women’s organisations are not optional: they are infrastructure required to reduce imprisonment.

The Women’s Justice Board describes specialist women’s services as fundamental to the Whole System Approach and calls for transformation of their complex and precarious funding.

Our latest State of the Sector research found that only 25% of respondents achieved full cost recovery on all services delivered under contract or subcontract, while 58% said the level of contractual funding was inadequate to deliver their service to a high quality.

We cannot build a women’s justice system increasingly dependent on community organisations while expecting them to subsidise statutory provision through inadequate contracts, short-term grants and reserves.

Sustainable reform requires sustainable infrastructure.

If government expects community provision to carry more of this work, women’s centres and specialist organisations need the stability and resources to deliver it.

These principles also underpin Clinks’ recommendations for women in our forthcoming manifesto, where we are calling for a justice system that reduces the use of custody for women and invests in the gender-responsive, specialist community provision needed to make that possible.

The order matters

That means making effective community provision the norm: expanding Intensive Supervision Courts and Whole System Approaches; reducing unnecessary remand; ensuring safe accommodation and accessible mental health and substance misuse treatment; responding to abuse and trauma; protecting family relationships; and improving resettlement to reduce unnecessary recall.

The women’s estate should become smaller because better justice has made those places unnecessary, not simply because pressure elsewhere has made those cells desirable.

Stop moving the pressure around

We cannot simply move pressure from the male estate to the women’s estate, from prison to probation, from statutory services to voluntary organisations, or from custody to families and communities.

Better justice means being much clearer about what custody is for.

It means reserving imprisonment for the most serious cases where it is genuinely necessary, including for public protection, while supporting others safely and effectively in the community.

We should not measure success by how many women’s prison places we can repurpose. We should measure it by how many women no longer need a prison place in the first place.

Nineteen years after Corston, we do not lack evidence, recommendations or examples of what doing things differently can look like.

What we have lacked is the sustained commitment to build it.

Fewer women in prison should be the outcome of better justice - not the by-product of overcrowding elsewhere.