UK: Mothers & Prison: The alternatives

Article here. Excerpt:

'Similar projects are being pioneered in Bradford, Glasgow, Calderdale, Worcester and London to find more effective ways of stopping women from offending than the traditional prison system affords. At the centres, women undergo a detailed individual assessment and then are given help with a range of problems including drug and alcohol misuse, parenting and budgeting skills, debt, housing and employment problems, anger management, and mental and physical health problems.

The aim is to address the root causes of crime more effectively – and more cost-effectively – than prison. The approach works. The average court-directed order at the Together Women Project in Bradford costs between £750 and £1,000 per woman per year – compared with the £56,415 a year it costs to keep a woman in jail. It has a compliance rate of 80 per cent. And it has reduced reoffending to less than 10 per cent compared to a national average of 62 per cent.
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"Everyone agrees we need fewer women in prison but nothing happens," says Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust. So how has this impasse come about?
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Why are more women in jail? Most of the rise comes from a significant increase in the severity of sentences. Just 10 per cent of women convicted of an indictable offence were sent to prison in 1996. A decade later the figure had risen to 15 per cent. "Not since the mid-19th century has our prison system held as many women as it does today," says the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick.'