Offenders: Females

(asked on 17th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what community-based pilot schemes for women-only offenders are in operation; what the reasons are for such schemes; and if he will make a statement.


Answered by
Lucy Frazer Portrait
Lucy Frazer
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
This question was answered on 25th March 2020

There is currently one community based pilot scheme for women offenders only. This is the Women’s Offender Management Complexity Pilot. The Pilot is operating in 2 Probation Delivery Units (PDUs) in Wales.

The rationale for this pilot is that existing Offender Management (OM) models have been derived from information about the whole offender population of which women make up only a tiny proportion. They are therefore more representative of male offending patterns than female.

Learning from this Pilot is being shared with the Probation Reform Programme, to inform the future design of probation services, and the learning is also being tested for its relevance to the whole (ie male and female) caseload.

There are other community based pilots ongoing that are looking at the whole of the probation caseload, but that include cohorts of women. These are:

  • The Bail Information Service pilots which will operate across seven locations in the North West (Liverpool, Bolton, Manchester x 2, Blackburn and Preston Magistrates Court as well as HMP Styal). This Pilot is for men and women. The Pilot sites will be promoting and providing a bail information service, with the aim of diverting suitable defendants from remand in custody.
  • The Community Sentence Treatment Requirement (CSTR) Pilots - Through the Community Sentence Treatment Requirement (CSTR) Programme, health and justice partners are working together to improve access to timely and appropriate mental health and substance misuse services for the offenders who need them. The Programme aims to ensure greater use is made of mental health, alcohol and drug treatment requirements as part of community sentences, supporting efforts to reduce reoffending. The pilots are for men and women, operating from 12 sites including 5 women only sites.

It remains our intention to Pilot residential women’s centres, as set out in our Female Offender Strategy.

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