Why Scotland needs to stop sending increasing numbers of women to a £50,000-a-year prison cell

Over the past few weeks, some of my colleagues have been carrying out research interviewing people who’ve failed to turn up for court. It’s a huge problem and the reasons are more complicated than you might think.

A colleague interviewed a woman who’d been arrested on a failure-to-appear warrant. She was affected by homelessness, sofa-surfing, chaos and disconnection. Appointments and diaries are an alien concept when you are in survival mode.

We have known for decades that individuals with multiple disadvantages will be regular faces in our courts and health services. So stretched are resources that we treat only what we see in front of us, so we often fail to get to the heart of the issue.

A manageable problem

The women in this group are incredibly vulnerable, their lives frequently marked by domestic abuse and neglect. They have often been brought up in care and many have had children removed.

Their offending is rarely fodder for the high courts or a sheriff and jury, but of the summary courts for crimes of shoplifting, other thefts and breaches of orders. Sheriffs often feel they don’t have the tools to address the complexities of the women in the court.

A prison officer adjusts the bedding inside a room in HMP and YOI Stirling, which houses remand and convicted young and adult women | PA

The population of imprisoned women seems to rise unabated. Last week there were 370 women in prison and a staggering 36 per cent of them on remand. I state this not to admire the problem, but to outline the scale, which I believe is manageable.

There are solutions. There are pockets of wonderful practice and services skilled in meeting this group of women’s needs. Short-term sentences don’t help. They need expert, wrap-around support, encouragement to engage with their sentence, healthcare and providers who understand the nature of their trauma.

Bespoke support

We know that problem-solving courts dedicated to women can reduce offending and prevent the cycle of short-term sentences that is so often the pattern. Evidence shows this approach – where a single sheriff oversees a woman’s sentence, develops a relationship with them, while helping them through a bespoke programme of services and support – works.

There are current and new services around the country aimed at supporting women, often with drug, alcohol and other challenges, to find a more stable life and stay with their children. The expertise and evidence is there – what we need are dedicated sheriffs, social work and for these services to be available to the problem-solvers in our courts.

It would be no mean feat to deliver this type of service in the current period of fiscal challenge, but make no mistake; we either pay now or pay more later. A community sentence costs around £5,000 with some additional money required for the services the women need – a prison sentence is around £50k a year.

Moreover, we know that for women who receive a prison sentence, only one in 20 children stay in the family home. The rest end up in kinship or foster care, which can impact children’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being and growth, as well as disrupting and separating families.

Working in public service often means wrestling with difficult choices about where and what to support – but with such a compelling financial and moral evidence-based argument, investment in this shouldn’t be one of them.

Karyn McCluskey is chief executive of Community Justice Scotland