The Debate: should we release female prisoners to make space for men?

Could an answer to the prison overcrowding crisis be to let out women offenders? Two writers go head to head

Yes: We are locking up women who’ve been failed by the system

Right now, prisons contain women who shouldn’t be there. Prison doesn’t work and it harms women. Almost 70 per cent of women in prison have experienced domestic abuse, and our research tells us that many of those women were forced or coerced into offending. Many women are very mentally unwell and the self-harm rates in prisons are shockingly high. Others are there because poverty, substance misuse and homelessness led them into offending.  

Most women entering prison to serve a sentence (63 per cent) have committed a non-violent offence. About 900 women are in prison on remand (meaning they haven’t been sentenced). Around two thirds of women remanded at Magistrates’ Courts end up not being sentenced to prison. 

When in prison, women lose their homes, their jobs and nine times out of ten their children will have to leave home. Those are severe punishments and they are all factors that stop women from rebuilding their lives and ending offending. 

There are alternatives available, women’s centres work with women in the community as an alternative to prison. This means women keep their housing, children, medical appointments and get support to address the root causes of offending. It helps them, their children and families and the wider community. Women in Prison supported 4,000 women last year in prison, through the gate and in the community – our approach works and is a fraction of the cost of imprisonment.  

The government is facing a crucial moment in time with overcrowding in prisons. There’s one solution that could really help, stop putting women in prison who shouldn’t be there and take the bold step to rebuild a justice system that works for women.  

Lucy Russell is head of policy and public affairs at Women in Prison

No: No one convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes should get early release

A qualified “no” to releasing some women from prison to make room for men starts by admitting an uncomfortable truth: the women’s estate has long been used as a pressure valve for a male system in crisis. If we are to contemplate early release, it must be tightly targeted and explicitly rooted in risk, not panic. Most women in custody are there for non‑violent offences, often embedded in histories of abuse, addiction and poverty; many could and should have been managed in the community in the first place. It is defensible to identify a narrow cohort of genuinely low‑risk women, with stable community supervision and housing in place, and move them out of custody ahead of schedule. You might buy one or possibly two category C prisons with that. 

But a qualified “no” also means clear red lines. No one convicted of serious violence, sexual offending, domestic abuse or offences posing a clear public‑protection risk should be in scope. The test must be: would we be content to defend this release to a victim, to a coroner and to Parliament if it goes wrong? And if the policy is dressed up as a feminist decarceration measure while its real purpose is to hide the failure to build enough men’s places, it will be both cynical and short‑lived. Using women as the “easy” cohort to clear space buys a little time at the cost of further eroding confidence. The only honest settlement is to pair any female early‑release scheme with a credible long‑term plan to expand and stabilise capacity for the dangerous men who must, unequivocally, remain behind bars.

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor, His book Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How to Escape is available now

The Verdict

Criminals who have committed serious domestic abuse and manslaughter will be released early from jail, under the government’s plans to free up space in the Prison estate. More than 70,000 people have been freed since Labour introduced the emergency measures were brought in to prevent prisons being unable to accept new inmates. This crisis is a result of decades of neglect of which successive governments should be ashamed. It is an insult to victims that will only be compounded when some of these convicts inevitably reoffend.

But it also raises the question of what prison is for. Depriving someone of their liberty is the greatest coercive power a state has over its citizens short of sending them to war. It should only be deployed when required to keep people safe. 

So it is difficult to justify releasing violent men while keeping non-violent women inside. As both Ian Acheson and Lucy Russell agree, the majority of female prisoners do not represent a danger to society and have been victims of crime themselves. And given that many of these women have been coerced into these crimes by men, they are surely easier to rehabilitate with the right support. When children are involved, the case for the kind of community-based alternative Russell describes is all the stronger. But Acheson is surely right that no woman guilty of a serious crime should be considered – early releases should be based on risk, not ideology. The great shame is that some level of risk is now unavoidable thanks to the abject failure to build enough prison places for dangerous men.