"I was sentenced to eight months in prison in March of this year for taking my ex-husband’s speeding points on to my licence 10 years previously. I served two months inside—four days in Holloway in central London and just less than two months in East Sutton Park, an open women’s prison in Kent near Maidstone. That was followed by two months on a “tag” at home on a nightly curfew. The time spent inside, and the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) thereafter, are standard practice for anyone receiving a similar sentence to mine as hardly anyone serves more than half the allotted time they are handed down.
Don't moan, get on with life and what's past is past are not bad mantras and so I went to prison mentally prepared to survive it and give something back. However, I wouldn’t recommend prison to anyone and in fact my new book Prisonomics argues strongly that alternatives should be pursued wherever possible. Most women in prison are vulnerable already before they commit their crimes and they are victims as well as offenders. Fifty-three per cent of them have been sexually, emotionally or physically abused as children. Very few of the women I met were a danger to society but many are a danger to themselves—although women make up under five per cent of the overall prison population they account for nearly a third of all the incidents of self-harm while in prison.
There is a disproportionate amount of mental health problems and drug and alcohol abuse among women entering prison. A very large number have no qualifications whatsoever and many are homeless before they are placed in custody. They often then lose control of their homes and in many cases their children go into care at huge short-term and long-term cost to society. One third of women in prison are single parents compared to only nine per cent of the population as a whole. Thanks to our obsession with locking people up, some 17,000 children were separated from their mother by a judge in 2010. In the last 20 years, while crime has fallen dramatically we have doubled the prison population in England and Wales to some 85,000—of whom just under 4,000 are female.
The average cost to the British taxpayer of keeping someone in prison for a year is estimated at around £40,000. For women, most recent Ministry of Justice figures put it at £44,000 and female inmates often need extra help with mental health and other issues. The cost of a community order with all the restrictions and obligations attached to it, often including unpaid work, is considerably cheaper with some estimates suggesting a cost of under £1,500 per year—although this could increase depending on the type of offender and the supervision required. In 2010, 45 per cent of women were reconvicted within a year and the reoffending rate was probably much greater. The total cost of reoffending is reckoned at somewhere between £9.5bn to £13bn a year. Reducing that by say 10 per cent offers huge savings to society. The evidence suggests that those given non-custodial sentences reoffend at a lower rate than those coming out of prison, and that the threat of a custodial sentence is not a deterrent to crime for most people.
Overall, I found that the prison system deals with all that is thrown at it as best it can. I encountered humanity wherever I was and I saw prisoners being treated with reasonable dignity. Thanks to the Labour peer Jean Corston’s seminal 2007 review of women‘s conditions in prison there is no strip-searching in Holloway, but closed prisons have many hours of lock ups and can do little in practice to rehabilitate prisoners. Whereas the open prison to which I was sent soon after my sentencing, and which is now due to close following a review of the women’s estate, was a real eye-opener. There were no fences, no lock ups, no cells but proper rooms shared with others and food that was edible—a striking contrast to Holloway.
More importantly, there was access to the grounds of this Elizabethan Grade II listed manor house—a relief after the small paved exercise yard I was allowed to visit for half-an-hour a day at Holloway. The girls worked in teams in the prison farm, the gardens, the house or the kitchen, and many went out to work, some even commuting to London on a daily basis for voluntary or, in some instances, paid work. It was clear to me immediately, and it has been highlighted in the research I accessed after I came out, that improving education and finding employment for people is an absolute must in reducing not only first time crimes but also reoffending rates. The huge benefit to society of a productive person out in the community cannot be exaggerated.
I'm an economist, and very little of prison and sentencing policy makes economic sense. The most simple of cost-benefit analyses would demand new thinking. But is any judge or politician ready to change their mind?
Prisonomics by Vicky Pryce was published by Biteback Publishing in October 2013. Royalties from the book go to Working Chance, a charity that finds quality employment for women offenders.
