- Conference
- 2005 National Women's Conference
- Date
- 19 October 2004
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes that women comprise less than 10 per cent (4,500) of the prison population and yet they account for nearly 50 per cent of the incidents of self harm amongst prisoners. In a recent report it was revealed that many have drug and/or mental health problems – at HMP Brockhill in the West Midlands three-quarters of admissions in 2003 had a drug problem. In the same year 14 women prisoners committed suicide, well above the average for the prison population as a whole.
For women who are convicted of a criminal offence there are several areas of concern:
1)the factors which lead women to commit crimes, namely economic necessity, drug dependency, coercion by men; the types of crimes women commit, mainly petty crime and gender-defined crime such as prostitution; and the attitude of society which takes no real account of this;
2)the sentencing options used by the courts are far more limited than for men convicted of the same or similar offences. This is compounded by the lack of community alternatives to custody for female offenders and the almost total lack of drug rehabilitation/treatment programmes and relevant community-based mental health facilities;
3)the attitude of the courts, as a reflection of society, to female offenders is both harsh and ambiguous resulting in inconsistent and inappropriate sentencing;
4)that pregnant women and women with babies who receive a custodial sentence will almost certainly be separated from their children if their sentence is more than nine months, though there are proposals to extend the age of children whose mothers are incarcerated. This is to the detriment of both mother and child(ren) and is in conflict with the main principle of the 1989 Children Act which places the welfare of the child above all other considerations;
5)that all mothers sentenced to custody will be separated from their children, a factor far more significant than the separation of fathers sentenced to custody.
Conference believes that the increasing imprisonment of women is consistently disproportionate to the offence(s) committed, and that too many women have been imprisoned on their first court appearance and often for offences which do not warrant a custodial sentence. For women with drug and/or mental health problems imprisonment not only fails to address such problems, but usually serves to exacerbate them, leading to increased incidents of self-harm and suicide while in prison.
Conference therefore instructs the National Women’s Committee to work with the National Executive Council, Labour Link and all TUC affiliates to:
a)publicise the facts about women in prison, particularly the disproportionate incidence of self-harm and suicide;
b)seek support from the UNISON Parliamentary Group for a more radical and innovative approach to the problem of female offenders, including more appropriate community options particularly for those with drug and/or mental health problems and to monitor their use by the courts;
c)publicise this issue through all appropriate channels, highlighting the impact on the women, their families, the prison system and society at large;
d)liaise with relevant organisations for example the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Prison Reform Trust, NACRO and if appropriate the Chief Inspector for Prisons;
e)urge women members to write to their MPs and ask for urgent action to address this issue;
f)report back to Conference 2006.