Dickens today would write about the plight of women in prison

Where is Charles Dickens when one needs him? In this anniversary year we are awash with commemoration of the greatest social reformer ever to write unputdownable novels '“ but however many readings of his works, memories of his life and reconstructions of his prose there might be, that authentic passionate voice cannot be heard again.

If by some magic he could be reincarnated, pens, quills, ink and all, what would he write about in our wondrous technological Facebooked twittering century? He would of course be a script writer for soap operas, and would crank out movie scripts by the shed load '“ but the themes which obsessed him would almost certainly be the same. Poverty, the heartless state, child abuse, the failures of education and prisons, particularly women's prisons: still a rich seam of material for invective and despair.

Nick Hardwick, her majesty's inspector of prisons may seem an unlikely successor to the chronicler of the Marshalsea, but his speech last month to Sussex Law School was both hard hitting and heart felt. He said that the circumstances of the women held in the Keller unit of Styal Prison in Cheshire were more shocking and distressing than anything he had yet seen on inspection '“ the levels of self-mutilation and despair there had kept him awake at night.

He pointed out '“ again '“ that prisons as they are currently run are no place for the distressed, damaged and disturbed women which they hold. And he certainly did not pussyfoot around as to where the responsibility lay '“ squarely at the door of successive governments and parliament.

He is the latest in an honourable line of inspectors to make such criticisms: any right-thinking person who has any sort of contact with criminal justice does, sooner rather than later, say the same things about the imprisonment of women and the conditions in which they can be held. I doubt that any one of the recent prison inspectors has had easy sleep.

The statistics are shocking '“ and they always are: women make up only five per cent of the prison population, but account for almost half of all self-harm incidents inside; almost half of all women prisoners have abused alcohol at dangerous levels; half are drug users.

Of the general prison population almost one in three were in care as a child compared with one in 50 of the population as a whole; prisoners are ten times more likely to have been excluded from school; one third were homeless before custody and two thirds were jobless; three quarters suffer from one or more mental disorders. There must be a statistic somewhere about how many present prisoners had a father or, more pertinently perhaps, a mother imprisoned during their childhood.

Rejected reforms

Hardwick made his speech in February 2012. In March 2006 Patricia Scotland, then minister at the Home Office, commissioned Baroness Corston to conduct a review of women in the criminal justice system who had particular vulnerabilities. The primary trigger for the report was a series of six self-inflicted deaths of women prisoners at HMP Styal in one year.

The Corston report was a wonderful piece of work. It had 43 recommendations including one that went to the heart of reform: to replace existing women's prisons with small multi-functional custodial centres geographically dispersed, with no more than 20 to 30 women there able to access a range of rehabilitative help. Localism was key to this '“ giving a chance for women and their families to stay connected during the sentence. Corston suggested that such units be phased in over ten years, and that work start within six months of the report's publication. While some of her more minor recommendations were accepted by the then government, not all were '“ and the huge central reforming one was rejected. Apparently it was not practical, not desirable, and not likely to deliver the full range of services women need.

So, there are still 14 women's prisons, large and far away, still with grim hell holes which keep inspectors awake at night. And there are still women in prison who should not be there: not just because of their personally damaged psychologies, but because of two problems that Corston identified six years ago. She expressly laid out that custodial sentences for women should be reserved for serious and violent individuals who are a threat to the public. Sixty-eight per cent of women are in prison for non-violent offences, compared to 47 per cent of men '“ and the overall numbers of women in custody are going up.

Corston also recommended that women unlikely to get custodial sentences should be identified, and not remanded pre-trial. This was ignored, and the numbers are not just the same '“ but are going up.

What the Dickens is going on here?