Women’s Imprisonment and the Case for Abolition

Critical Reflections on Corston Ten Years On

Linda Moore, Phil Scraton, Azrini Wahidin, Linda Moore, Phil Scraton, Azrini Wahidin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138700260
• eBook ISBN: 9781351792141
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 2007, the Corston Report recommended a far-reaching, radical, 'women-centred' approach to women's imprisonment in England and Wales. It suggested a 'fundamental re-thinking' about how services to support women in conflict with the law are delivered in custody and in the community, recommending the development and implementation of a decarceration strategy. This argued for appropriate treatment programmes in the community, reserving prison for only those women who commit serious and violent offences. Ten years on, what progress has been made? What is the relationship between Corston's vision and a more radical abolitionist agenda?

Drawing on a range of international scholarship, this book contributes to the critical discourse on the penal system, human rights, and social injustice, revealing the consequences of imprisonment on the lives of women and their families. A decade on from Corston's publication, it critically reviews her report, revealing the slow progress in meeting the reforms it proposed. Identifying the significant barriers to change, it questions the failure to reverse the unrelenting growth of the women's prison population or to transform state responses to women's offending. Reflecting the global expansion of women's imprisonment, particularly marked in advanced democratic societies, the chapters include comparative contributions from jurisdictions where Corston's recommendations have relevance. It concludes with a critical appraisal of reformism and the case for penal abolition.

Essential for applied and theory courses on prisons, punishment, and penology; social justice and the criminology of human rights; gender and crime; and feminist criminology.

1
THE POST-CORSTON WOMEN’S PENAL ‘CRISIS’ IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Exploring the failure of reform

Linda Moore and Azrini Wahidin

Introduction

I want to ensure that fewer women die in custody.

(Corston 2007: 15)

The number of suicides, assaults and cases of self-harm in prisons in England and Wales has reached record levels. Figures from the Ministry of Justice show 119 prisoners killed themselves in 2016, 29 more than the previous year. The number of incidents of self-harm reached almost 38,000. Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform says it’s a national scandal … The Justice Secretary Liz Truss stressed that the government was taking action to tackle the problem.

(BBC Radio 4 News Bulletin 26 January 2017)

In her 2007 review of ‘vulnerable’ women in the criminal justice system in England and Wales (E&W), Baroness Jean Corston¹ expressed hope that the ‘radical changes’ she proposed would result in a reduction in women’s suffering, self-harm and deaths in custody. The review was commissioned by the (then) Labour Government in the context of an explosive rise in women’s incarceration at the close of the twentieth century and the deaths of six women between August 2002 and August 2003 in Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Styal in Cheshire, England. The deaths by hanging of Nissa Ann Smith, Anna Baker, Jolene Willis and Hayley Williams and the deaths by substance overdose of Julie Walsh and Sarah Campbell (INQUEST 2005) were considered the nadir of a system in ‘crisis’, providing tragic evidence of the need for an alternative response to women with mental health difficulties and addictions. Individual inquests into the deaths delivered highly critical verdicts. An investigation by the Prison’s Ombudsman (2005: viii) found ‘serious inadequacies’ in ‘regimes, facilities and procedures’ at Styal. Within this context, Corston was tasked with reviewing the treatment of ‘vulnerable’ women within the criminal justice system.

Based on observations and consultations with women prisoners and prison staff, the scenario depicted by Corston was grim. The women she encountered were mothers, pregnant, in poor physical health, mentally ill and addicted to drugs and alcohol. They had histories of poverty, abuse, trauma, self-harm and suicide attempts and included an over-representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and Foreign National women. Many women’s prisons were overcrowded, unhygienic, vermin-infested and lacking in privacy and decency, with minimal access to fresh air or healthy food. There were ‘toilets, often without lids, in cells and dormitories, sometimes screened by just a curtain, sometimes not screened at all’ (Corston 2007: 4). Corston (2007: 4) considered it ‘humiliating for women to have to use these facilities in the presence of others, most particularly during menstruation’. Enduring the degrading practice of strip-searching and ‘cramped’ circumstances with ‘limited autonomy’ and ‘often, no other person to talk to’, women were ‘distressed and sometimes frightened of spending long hours locked alone into single cells’ (p. 26). While noting the commitment shown by many staff and managers, Corston portrayed a system that was fundamentally unsafe and disrespectful, further undermined by inadequate services to meet a tangible high level of need. Yet she was optimistic that the time was right to ‘adopt a new approach to women in the criminal justice system’ (p. 13). Accordingly, her 43 recommendations were aimed at achieving decarceration by providing community ‘alternatives’ coupled with gender-specific prison reform. Most, but significantly not all, of her recommendations were accepted by the government (MOJ 2007), and her vision was widely welcomed as being ‘thoughtful and realistic’ and a ‘blueprint for reform’ (House of Commons Justice Committee 2013a: 9).

Corston influenced official policies in United Kingdom (UK) jurisdictions (e.g. DOJ (NI) 2010) and beyond (e.g., Joint Probation Service – Irish Prison Service Strategy 2014). Ten years later, however, her optimism seems misplaced. The ‘crisis’ in the prison system (male and female) remains firmly entrenched, with persistently high population figures, overcrowding, poor conditions, staffing problems, lengthy lockups and unsafe and non-rehabilitative regimes (PRT 2016). Prison deaths (male and female) reached a tragic high in 2016, including the deaths of 22 women, at least 12 of which were self-inflicted (three await classification in March 2017) (INQUEST website). Moreover, the deaths in 2015 and 2016 of Vicky Thompson, Joanne Latham and Jenny Swift highlighted the degrading and dangerous practice of placing transgender women in male prisons.

In this chapter, we analyse the impact of Corston, asking why her strong review failed to ignite a transformation of women’s imprisonment in E&W. The chapter opens with a reference to the prison’s historical role in regulating and punishing women and the episodic attempts to reform women’s penal regimes from the nineteenth century onwards. The late twentieth-century influence of feminist and critical criminology is acknowledged in highlighting women’s experiences of imprisonment and generating arguments for gender-specific reform. Corston’s vision and official responses to her recommendations are explored, identifying the perspectives adopted by successive Labour, Coalition and Conservative UK governments. The authors then consider the post-Corston, continued ‘crisis’ in imprisonment, touching on how intersectionalities shape women’s experiences. Given this evidence, it is argued that Corston failed to acknowledge that ‘crises’ are not exceptional but inherent within the political and material conditions of penal punishment. Further, she underestimated the potential within the system to ‘claw back’ and subvert positive reforms (Carlen 2002). In conclusion, we propose that the failure of Corston’s programme for reform suggests the need to develop and progress abolitionist strategies.

Contextualising women’s imprisonment

Playing the key role in the punishment and containment of women, the prison system has historically experienced recurrent states of ‘crises’ and attempts to reform. Prior to the development of the modern prison system, houses of correction and bridewells were used to detain women for behaviours associated with immorality, such as prostitution or adultery. John Howard’s damning reports on eighteenth-century jail conditions included concerns that mixed-sex environments encouraged depravity. His work inspired the development of a model prison at Gloucester with separate sections for men and women (McConville 2015). The nineteenth-century reformer Elizabeth Fry campaigned for separate facilities where women would be supervised by female wardens and treated with ‘gentleness and sympathy so that they would submit cheerfully to the rules and cooperate willingly in their own reform’ (cited in Zedner 1998: 301). By the end of the nineteenth century, separate female institutions began to emerge in the UK, Canada, the United States of America (USA) and Australia. Progress, however, was inconsistent, with women often confined in units within larger male institutions. The reformatory movement, particularly prominent in the USA, aimed to provide ‘softer’ regimes for women, but in practice, surveillance in reformatories was ‘much more intense than that experienced by male prisoners housed in larger and far more anonymous cellblocks’ (Dodge 2017: 101). Reflecting institutional racism, reformatories were reserved primarily for white women, while Black women continued to be held in harsher prison environments (Rafter 1985).

A persistent theme has been the formal and informal categorisation of deviant women as ‘bad’ or ‘mad’ (Edwards 1986). The development of nineteenth- century psychiatry increased the emphasis on medicalisation, as illustrated by the creation of a separate section for those classified as ‘criminal lunatics’ in London’s Bethlem Hospital and by the opening of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. In 1907, Aylesbury Convict Prison for Women became the first in the UK to segregate ‘feeble-minded’ prisoners (Zedner 1998: 320). The predominant view throughout the twentieth century was of the ‘fundamental pathology of female prisoners’ (Carlen 1998: 16), clearly illustrated by the history of Holloway Prison. Built in 1852 as a mixed-sex prison, in 1903, Holloway became England’s first officially designated women’s prison, soon notorious for the detention and force-feeding of suffragettes and as a site of execution until the 1950s. The belief that most women were potential mental health patients led to the decision in 1968 to redevelop Holloway as a secure hospital based upon therapeutic principles (Carlen 1998). However, by the completion of rebuilding in 1984, political ideology had shifted in a more punitive direction towards ‘retribution, incapacitation, and the management of risk’ (Garland 2001: 8). Operationally, Holloway reflected this approach (Rock 1996), an inspection finding overcrowded, filthy conditions and high levels of mental ill health, self-harm and violence (Home Office 1985 cited in Scott and Codd 2010). In 1995, inspectors walked out in protest about conditions (Ramsbotham 2005).

A central feature of the women’s prison ‘crisis’ has been population growth, yet women’s incarceration remained relatively stable for much of the twentieth century. During the 1960s, women averaged just 2.5 per cent of the total prison population in E&W, leading the Home Office (1970, cited in Carlen 1983: 23) to predict that by the end of the century, ‘penological progress’ might mean ‘ever fewer or no women at all being given prison sentences’. Such optimism was misplaced, and the population of women in prison doubled between 1995 and 2010, from under 2,000 to over 4,000 (PRT 2017). In 2015, over 700,000 women were imprisoned globally, the population rise having affected all five continents, with particularly high increases in Central and South America, and Southeast Asia (Walmsley 2015). Yet evidence suggests that the rise in women’s imprisonment has not been driven by any corresponding rise in offending (McIvor and Burman 2011). Rather, within the context of neoliberalism and neocolonialism, the ‘poorest, most marginalised, least powerful and most vulnerable people’ are disproportionately imprisoned within societies riven by discrimination (Scraton and McCulloch 2009: 15). Sudbury (2010: 12) identifies four contributory factors: a ‘war on the poor’, including criminalisation of ‘women’s survival strategies’; criminalisation of addictions through the ‘war on drugs’; criminalisation of migration; and consolidation of the prison industrial complex as a profit-making enterprise. Law (2009: 165) likewise attributes the increase to punitive drug laws and welfare policies, which combine ‘to push poor women, particularly women of color, closer to prison’.

Awareness has grown of women’s gendered needs and experiences and different routes into the criminal justice system (HMCIP 1997). Research on what have been termed ‘pathways into criminality’ indicates that women’s offending is overwhelmingly non-violent, most often occurring within contexts of abuse and poverty (Bloom et al. 2003). Women are more likely than men to be first-time defendants in court, to have mitigating factors for their offending and to receive short sentences. They are also more likely to be on welfare benefits and in poor mental health and to have self-harmed, attempted suicide, lived in the care system, experienced violence and abuse in the home, and to have offended due to coercive relationships (MOJ 2016a). Thus, women find themselves ‘trapped in a vicious cycle of victimisation and criminal activity’, a situation ‘worsened by poverty, substance dependency or poor mental health’ (PRT 2017: 3). BME women are more likely to experience social exclusion and mental ill health and to have stigmatising, discriminatory encounters with the criminal justice system; they are over-represented in custody (Chigwada-Bailey 2003).

Research has also highlighted the gendered nature of women’s prison experiences (Carlen 1983, 2002; Wahidin 2004; Moore and Scraton 2014; Crewe et al. 2017). Carlen’s (1983) seminal research on Scotland’s only women’s prison, HMP Cornton Vale, broke new ground in revealing women’s experiences of stigma in the context of repressive, infantalising regimes. Subsequent research confirms that women’s needs in prison are distinctive, as are their carceral experiences. As a relatively small prison population, there are fewer female prisons, with many women incarcerated long distances from home. Women tend to have more restricted access to services than men, including education, training, ‘rehabilitative’ programmes, leisure and healthcare (Moore and Scraton 2014). Security processes are gendered, with strip-searching experienced as distressing and degrading, especially during menstruation (McCulloch and George 2009; Moore and Scraton 2014). Pregnancy and motherhood cause particular pains of imprisonment. Pregnant women and new mothers experience significant anxiety, fearing separation from their babies if space in a Mother and Baby unit is not available or placement is considered inappropriate (Abbott 2015). More than two-thirds of women in prison are mothers of children under 18 years of age. Often separation from children is experienced as ‘physical, deep pain’, accompanied by a strong sense of guilt, with women feeling they have failed both through their offending and as mothers (Baldwin 2015: 161).

Clearly, women in prison have specific needs regarding reproductive health, menstruation, ante- and postnatal care and menopause. Their ‘overwhelming experience’ is that ‘their health needs are not consistently dealt with in a respectful and appropriate way’ (Carlen and Worrall 2004: 61). Being pregnant in prison is ‘by definition stressful and something which may exacerbate pre-existing mental health issues’ (Abbott 2015: 189). The shackling of pregnant women during labour provoked a media and public outcry in E&W and the USA, leading to anti-shackling bills in several American states (Law 2015). In general, prisons neither identify nor respond to the needs of older prisoners (HMIP 2004). Older women regularly fail to receive adequate healthcare, inadequacies including denial of access to nutritional supplements, appropriate physical examinations, vision screenings and mammograms (Wahidin 2004). Older women may be discouraged from seeking vital medical services, for example, by having to climb stairs to reach facilities or being labelled as ‘hypochondriacs’ for requesting treatment (Wahidin 2004).

Hawton et al. (2014) note that women’s self-harm in E&W’s prisons is 10 times higher than that for men, with 20–24 per cent of women and girls self-harming each year and suicides 20 times higher than for women in wider society. Despite the appointment of suicide prevention coordinators and the development of strategies, deaths remain a ‘permanent and enduring feature of prison life’, with lengthy lockups, separation from family, bullying, inadequate healthcare, insufficient staff training and poor communications each contributing to women’s deaths (INQUEST 2013: para 10). The situation is exacerbated for Foreign National women who are ‘more likely to feel isolated in custody, less likely to seek help and face additional language and cultural barr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The post-Corston women’s penal ‘crisis’ in England and Wales: Exploring the failure of reform
• 2 After Corston: Community, change, and challenges
• 3 From ‘troubled’ women to failing institutions: The necessary narrative shift for the decarceration of women post-Corston
• 4 The imprisonment of women in Scotland: Restructure, reform or abolish?
• 5 Post-Corston reflections on remanded women’s experiences in Northern Ireland
• 6 Corston principles in Canada: Creating the carceral Other and moving beyond women in prison
• 7 In pursuit of fundamental change within the Australian penal landscape: Taking inspiration from the Corston Report
• 8 ‘Ukhohliwe’: A South African perspective on the Corston Report
• 9 Beyond Corston: The politics of decarceration and abolition in a punitive climate
• Index