For nearly 20 years policymakers and researchers have agreed that prison is not suitable for the vast majority of women who end up in the criminal justice system.
At the heart of government policy-making, however, is a harsh contradiction that unravels this consensus: the realisation that prison fails to work for many women flounders against the perceived electoral necessity to be seen to be tough on crime and to make offenders pay for their crimes.
Baroness Jean Corston’s 2007 historic review of women in the criminal justice system called for a radically different approach that is strategic, proportionate and – crucially – gender specific. Her central recommendation was to establish and strengthen ‘one-stop-shop’ Women’s Centres as community-based alternatives to prison, that seek to address the circumstances that bring justice involved women to the door of the system in the first place.
Since then, the increasingly evident repercussions of incarceration for women, their families and broader society, along with the growing evidence that prison often does not work effectively in reducing reoffending, have driven widespread calls for policy change.
But progress has been slow, partly because of a lack of evidence that alternative interventions will work.
For too long there has been a paucity of high-quality evidence that tells us what works best for justice-involved women. Our work seeks to plug this gap and the WRNA offers a robust means to do this. There is a genuine opportunity to contribute to an important policy window with initiatives such as the Women’s Intensive Supervision Court and Women’s Justice Board – that could lead to fundamental change.
Putting crime in context
Birmingham researcher Professor Simon Pemberton is working with The JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls and seven Women’s Centres on an innovative collaboration, the Effective Women’s Centres Partnership. This is designed to challenge fundamental assumptions about the ways women come to be involved in the criminal justice system, and drive improvements that will offer support and opportunity – and ultimately divert women away from prison. ‘Our society has changed in the past 40 years from one in which we dealt with social problems through the healthcare and welfare systems to one in which we use the criminal justice system and women have really got caught up in that shift, with disproportionate rises in the numbers sent to prison,’ explains Professor Pemberton.
'Offending is seen as a choice. But policymakers should view crimes within their context, bound up with personal histories scarred by poor mental health, substance abuse, childhood experiences of abuse and social marginalisation. In these reduced circumstances, where choice is significantly constrained, punishment is often ineffective as it fails to address these issues and, in many respects makes them worse – leading to a revolving prison door for many women.’
Alternative approaches have been designed, but the ways in which they are applied and the methods used to evaluate them have been patchy, so many agencies – and the Ministry of Justice – have been unable to back them fully.
Gender-centred decision-making
Professor Pemberton and colleagues in the Women, Crime and Justice Research Group started to look at ways to test, refine and then validate one tool that seemed particularly promising: the Women’s Risk Needs Assessment (WRNA).
Originally designed in the US, this assessment tool is distinctive because it takes a gendered approach and looks at factors such as past trauma, parenting, substance abuse and accommodation to assess the risks of reoffending and the interventions that might be effective in supporting women to lead healthier, safer lives.
With funding from The JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls, the team set out to find out if WRNA could be used to improve practice in the UK, as well as to demonstrate to policy decision-makers that an approach with Women’s Centres at its heart could be used as a viable community alternative to prison.
This year, WRNA was validated by Professor Pemberton and his team at the University for the first time in England. The validation study, conducted with more than 500 women, showed WRNA has a remarkably high rate of accuracy in predicting the risk of future reoffending and giving insights into the support women need.
Further research by Professor Pemberton and his team has shown gender-responsive interventions are up to 42% more effective than gender-neutral interventions in reducing reoffending, providing a strong case for the tailored approaches enabled through WRNA.
Dr Barbara Scott (BSc Biological Sciences, 1977; PhD Medicine, 1981), Trustee at The JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls, says: ‘We are excited to support this research project, which fills a critical evidence gap and could be a game-changer in how policies for women are designed. We are at a pivotal moment for change, with a growing consensus from policymakers and the public to rethink and reform the justice system.
Testing the approach
With the research based at Birmingham, it was fortuitous that Birmingham also turned out to be the ideal place to test WRNA. The city is home to the pioneering Women’s Intensive Supervision Court, a national pilot problem-solving court set up in 2023. The court refers women who would otherwise be given short custodial sentences to Anawim, Birmingham’s Centre for Women, where they undergo a WRNA assessment. This informs the pre-sentence report, which is used to formulate an appropriate community sentence that involves mental health support, accommodation services and substance abuse treatment, with Anawim caseworkers providing specialist holistic support to meet all the women’s needs.
Joy Doal, CEO of Anawim, says: ‘WRNA is proving to be transformational for the women. It enables Women’s Centre staff to gain a much stronger understanding of women’s circumstances and build the evidence around what works for women in the criminal justice system.’