Styal Prison

(asked on 21st February 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many women whose home address is in North Wales served sentences of (a) less than six months and (b) six months or more at HMP Styal in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Lucy Frazer Portrait
Lucy Frazer
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
This question was answered on 1st March 2019

The department is unable to identify the total number of women in each year as the information is not centrally held. Table 1 in the attached instead sets out the number of women with a home address in North Wales held at HMP Styal who were serving less than/more than 6 months at quarterly intervals over the last 5 years.

Table 2 attached, shows the number of women remanded to HMP Styal by a court in North Wales since 2014.

There is persuasive evidence that short custodial sentences do not work in terms of rehabilitation and that community sentences, in certain circumstances, are more effective in reducing reoffending, and therefore keeping the public safe. We will therefore be looking at what more we can do to emphasise that short custodial sentences should be viewed as a last resort.

In June we published our female offender strategy which makes clear that we want fewer women serving short sentences in custody and more remaining in the community, making use of women’s centres to address needs such as substance misuse and mental health problems.

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