I thought I'd ask what your general thoughts were before I sent it. Excuse the formatting.

...

Hi,

I've tried for the past few hours in typing up an email -- my wording, what I'd focus on and so on. I was reading the news relating to a £24 million investment to support female offenders:

With over 60 per cent of women in prison having experienced domestic abuse and 50 per cent having drug addictions almost £21 million will be invested in women’s services to tackle the causes of female offending and cut crime.

Organisations such as Working Chance, the UK’s only charity dedicated to getting women with convictions into work, support offenders who are serving a community sentence or have recently been released from prison and may be at risk of reoffending.[1]

I can't say I've read an article about any reformation regarding men's prisons -- other than investment in new prisons. So I thought I'd see what information is out there. I found Prison Reform Trust. But none of the search results related to either male prison reform, bills or, even strategies.

During my early drafts, I initially found [2] and [5]. If you'll excuse my candour, the majority of the statistics where both sexes are mentioned, that's based on the percentage of that specific prison population. As if there's a game afoot and the one with the greater percentage receives the most focus.

There's a key point I noticed in [2]

Women are a small minority of those in the criminal justice system, representing less than 5% of the prison population, and are easily overlooked in policy, planning, and services - they have been described as 'correctional afterthoughts'.

But that isn't reflected in either legislation or guidelines [6][7][8]. If women make up, currently, just 4% of the prison population anyway you frame it, they may inadvertently be overlooked on numbers alone.

Men make up 96% of the UK prison population. If those publications[2][3][4] were based on figures instead, they'd be completely different publications altogether. The two exceptions I noticed were self-harm and a statistic relating to childhood abuse -- that was based on a baseline of 1,425 respondents with no breakdown of either sex or ethnicity though -- but the baseline amount of respondents was so low there's no way of telling if this would scale up if the amount of respondents increased substantially, as the current prison population is around 80k.

And statistics relating to BAME. The theme with those statistics revolve around female. They seemingly exclude or limit information relating to male BAME.

It's a bit of a long way around to get to the point of this email: Every time I've read about prison reform, I've always wondered why men don't seem to be part of it. They are somehow excluded, deemed as lesser. With the exception being facilities and services, relating to the difference between the sexes.

And from that, I've got these questions:

  • Why do you believe the sole focus of prison reform should be women's prisons? Please don't link to either [2]. [3] or, [4]. I'd prefer an actual answer
  • Why is prison reform framed in this manner?
  • Is there information or publications on your website that relate to male prison reform ?
  • Would you know of any governmental strategies -- new or old -- relating to male prison reform?

Failing that, would you know which individual or government department I could direct my questions to?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

[Redacted]

​

  1. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-invested-to-support-female-offenders
  2. [2] https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/why-focus-on-reducing-womens-imprisonment-2/
  3. [3] https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/why-focus-on-reducing-womens-imprisonment/
  4. [4] https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/why-focus-on-reducing-womens-imprisonment-3/
  5. [5] https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/mental-health-and-learning-disabilities-in-the-criminal-courts-information-for-magistrates-district-judges-and-court-staff/
  6. [6] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7995844/Judges-told-be-more-lenient-to-women-criminals.html [paywall]
  7. [7] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311004/Judges-ordered-mercy-women-criminals-deciding-sentences.html
  8. [8] https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Equal-Treatment-Bench-Book.pdf