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Andrew Feinberg
White Home Correspondent
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has set out plans to slash the variety of girls going to jail and finally shut girls’s prisons amid an overcrowding disaster.
She unveiled a brand new physique, the ladies’s justice board, which could have the “final ambition of getting fewer girls’s prisons” – probably permitting them to be transformed to male or combined jails.
The jail inhabitants in England and Wales hit a report new excessive a fortnight in the past, with 88,521 folks behind bars – however there are simply 3,440 girls in jail.
Greater than half – 55 per cent – are victims of home abuse, whereas two-thirds have dedicated non-violent offences. Ministers wish to enhance providers like neighborhood help and residential girls’s centres to offer an alternative choice to jail.
It comes after the federal government stated hundreds of inmates can be freed early in a bid to ease overcrowding.
In her speech to the Labour convention in Liverpool, Ms Mahmood stated that when she took over the ministerial position, the disaster had been simply “one unhealthy day from catastrophe”.
“Inside minutes, I used to be advised our justice system was on the purpose of collapse,” she stated. “Inside weeks, our prisons would overflow. Had that occurred, the implications would have been apocalyptic.
“Courts compelled to cancel trials. Police unable to make arrests. Criminals who would by no means see the within of a cell. And victims who would by no means see justice executed. We might, in brief, have seen the overall breakdown of regulation and order.”
When it got here to girls in jail Ms Mahmood stated it was “too hardly ever acknowledged” that the majority girls in jail are victims themselves.
She added: “Now, there’ll at all times be girls imprisoned for the safety of the general public. That can by no means change. However we imprison girls on minor expenses to a far larger diploma than males. Round two-thirds didn’t commit a violent crime. But they’re despatched into prisons which might be determined for locations.
“Self-harm in girls’s prisons is eight instances increased than within the male property. Maybe worst of all, girls’s prisons are hurting moms and breaking properties.
“With just a few girls’s prisons dotted throughout the nation, girls are sometimes held removed from their households. Over half are moms. The injury passes down generations.”
She went on: “For girls, jail isn’t working. Relatively than encouraging rehabilitation, jail forces girls into a lifetime of crime. After leaving a brief custodial sentence, a lady is considerably extra more likely to commit an extra crime than one given a non-custodial sentence. The shameful reality is: we have now recognized this for twenty years.”
The Jail Reform Belief stated: “The justice secretary’s dedication to ascertain a girls’s justice board tasked with the goal of lowering the variety of girls in jail represents a historic second for ladies’s justice reform.
“After many years of advocacy on this subject by us and others, we’re delighted by [the] announcement and sit up for working with the federal government to show the promise of a good and efficient justice system for ladies right into a actuality.”
Nicola Drinkwater from the charity Ladies in Jail, stated: “[This] announcement from the lord chancellor is long-awaited and eventually alerts a recognition that girls don’t belong in jail.
“With the very best self-harm charges on report amongst girls in jail, failing take care of pregnant girls, and the demise of two infants in jail in recent times, the scenario has lengthy been at disaster level.
“We have now stated for many years that the jail system doesn’t work for ladies. Ladies in jail, alongside lots of our companions, have lengthy referred to as for a future the place the basis causes of offending are addressed, and ladies can entry the help they want of their communities.”
In July, the federal government introduced that hundreds of prisoners are to be launched sooner than deliberate in a bid to avert the “collapse” of the jail system.
On the time, ministers hit out at Rishi Sunak and his authorities, calling them “responsible males”.
Below the plans set out by Ms Mahmood, there’s a short-term lower within the proportion of the sentence many prisoners should serve in jail – from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.
