- Conference
- 2005 National Women's Conference
- Date
- 19 October 2004
- Decision
- Carried
Conference will recall motion 33 from National Women’s Conference 1998 which highlighted the problem of teenage girls being inappropriately placed in adult women’s prisons, in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states that juvenile offenders should be separated from adults within the prison system, but that the British government reserves the right not to apply this. This ruling only affects girls as teenage boys sentenced to custody already have specialist facilities, Young Offender Institutions (YOIs).
Following a campaign led by the Howard League for Penal Reform this issue was addressed by the government who merely redesignated all women’s prisons as HMP and YOI thus circumventing the problem. This was a pyrrhic victory which allowed the government to sidestep the problem, an approach they now recognise as flawed. In 2000 they pledged that 15 and 16 year old girls would not be placed in prison service custody, but in April 2003, 91 were so placed.
Conference reiterates its belief that only a small minority of serious and/or violent offenders warrant incarceration and that they should be placed in secure accommodation centres run by local authorities rather than in adult women’s prisons. In a recent judicial review into the placing of a teenage girl in an adult women’s prison, the judge, in ruling the move as lawful, accepted that pressure of space, rather than the claimant’s best interests, had been the motivation for placing her in prison and he went on to say: “It is difficult to see how it can be said to be in the interests of a 16 year old such as the claimant to spend a considerable amount of time with those aged 18 and over”.
However concern now exists that the government is cutting the number of secure children’s beds in favour of privately run Secure Training Centres (STCs), which it believes provide better value and more flexibility. Social services and children’s charities are worried that this is the cheaper option and that STCs do not provide the level of support offered by secure homes because the latter require higher ratios of qualified staff to comply with the 1989 Children Act and are also subject to checks by the Social Services Inspectorate. Furthermore this proposed expansion of STCs is seen by others as meaning more, not less, use of custody for young offenders, particularly for teenage girls.
Conference therefore instructs the National Women’s Committee to:
1)urge the National Executive Council and Labour Link to liaise with the UNISON Parliamentary Group and seek their support for the placement of teenage girls in secure children’s homes rather than adult women’s prisons or STCs;
2)support the Howard League in any campaign on this issue;
3)urge branches and regions to take up this issue via all appropriate channels and ask members to write to their MPs on this matter;
4)report back to Women’s Conference 2006.