IRELAND SHOULD not go down a road that has failed in Britain and is now being reversed, according to Britain’s leading expert on women in prison.
Baroness Jean Corston is a former Labour MP, a life peer and the author of the Corston Report on vulnerable women in the criminal justice system.
She spoke to an all-party group of women members of the Oireachtas yesterday, and to a seminar organised by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice and the Bar Council last night.
Her report was published in March 2007, and the British government responded in December, accepting 40 of its 43 recommendations.
She was asked to write the report in the wake of the deaths of 13 women in Styal women’s prison in Cheshire over a short period.
At the inquest into one of them, the coroner said the woman had spent most of her adult life “serving at regular intervals short periods of imprisonment for crimes which represented a social nuisance rather than anything that demanded the most extreme form of punishment”.
In her report, Baroness Corston said there are some crimes for which women should be in custody, but there are many women in prison for minor crimes, and for whom imprisonment is a disproportionate response, often leading to them losing their homes and their children.
A woman who leaves prison is 36 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, she said, and about half of women in prison self-harm.
The women she focused on suffered from vulnerabilities in three areas: domestic circumstances, such as domestic violence or being a single parent; personal circumstances, such as mental illness or drug abuse, and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and isolation.
She said there was a need for a fundamental rethink on how to meet the needs of such vulnerable women, including those at risk of offending, as well as those who have already been through the criminal justice system.
The British government had already invested £9.15 million in two flagship projects in the north-east and northwest of England, which were community centres designed to bring together all the services needed to keep women out of prison.