Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I shall not reiterate what my noble friend said, but we were all very much looking forward to hearing something about this. The number of women prisoners has almost doubled in 10 years but they are still a small proportion of the prison population. I was enthused by the Corston report. Given the quality and the experience in your Lordships’ House, I should have thought this would have been an area on which we would be consulted, and that the appropriate department might take our views into account when thinking the matter through. Unsurprisingly, the report suggests that if women should be in prison at all—I shall say a few words about that in a moment in relation to my visit to Downview—they should be in small, easily accessible units. Those units should, if possible, be situated in cities, although that may be a little unfair to those who live in rural areas. However, they should be situated in easily accessible areas to enable family members such as husbands to keep in contact. As we all know, families are likely to stay together longer if such contact is maintained, and, we hope, long enough for the children to get the full benefit of that. The idea went through my head—noble Lords might think it quite mad—that, although a couple of women’s prisons have already been sucked into the male circuit, if all of them became male prisons, that would provide places to resolve prison overcrowding and the new set-up could begin almost at once. The rather splendid idea of providing these sorts of prisons could be introduced. That may or may not make sense. I visited many women’s prisons while I served on the Parole Board, but on my recent visit to Downview I was struck by two things. First, all the women participating in an excellent course to train to be communicators and run a television unit were hard on me, asking why on Earth women had such long sentences compared to men. Only about a third of them, compared to many more men, had previous convictions when sent to prison. When one thinks it through, quite a lot of them were there for carrying drugs, maybe as mules, but then we need to think why and who sent them there. Were they subject to abuse? Were they in some form of slavery? I suspect that that side has not been sufficiently researched for some time, and it reinforced my thoughts about this range of issues. At Downview it appeared that a number of good initiatives were going on. One brilliant woman won a prize from Asda—I think I mentioned that to the noble and learned Baroness—and the television unit made a film about it. She was given a great deal of attention by the local Asda. Out of all that came the interesting thought that Asda central office was not taking the view that all Asdas might take in offenders, think of them in this way and get rid of the awful feeling that anybody who has been in prison should not be recruited. It could have done that, but it has not. If the noble and learned Baroness, as I suggested to her, got Asda central and other companies likely to behave in the same way involved, you could extend enormously the number of employers—when a lot has already been done to get them aboard—that would take on the problem. We should think about women as part of the scene, as a crucial part of society. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, wanted a report in six months. Well, we have had another amendment passed that is looking six months hence. I would like some assurance from the noble and learned Baroness that the important and rather different role of women is being taken account of and that wider consultation is going on rather than just inward discussion.