Plea to jail fewer women

The head of the Prison Service today asked judges to think hard before sending women to prison as figures showed a huge rise in the number of female inmates.

Director general Martin Narey said that alternatives to jail should be considered as the number of women in prison in England and Wales reached a record high of 4,045.

An announcement is expected that the 350-place Buckley Hall jail in Rochdale is to become the third men's jail in a year to be converted to take women. The number of female prisoners has reportedly risen by seven per cent in the three months to the end of September.

Attempting to explain the causes of the rise, Mr Narey told BBC Breakfast: "I do not think anybody quite knows. I think everybody expected the population to be many hundreds lower at this time of year but the number of women has risen by 700 a year." He described the soaring number as "almost going off the graph".

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Norman Baker said: "The Government's macho 'lock 'em up' policy is coming undone." The last men's prison to be turned into a women's jail was Downview at Sutton, Surrey, a 340-inmate Category C jail and a drugs rehabilitation unit. Mr Narey said drug rehabilitation programmes in jails were being threatened by overcrowding.

He added: "I want the courts to think very carefully not only about perhaps not using custody, but, if they can, issuing rather shorter sentence lengths. That would quickly lead to a downturn in numbers."

He added: "That's the position, for women particularly, but also for men."

Home Office minister Beverley Hughes acknowledged the rise in women inmates was putting pressure on efforts to increase the rehabilitative impact of prison. She said: "It has an impact on the ability of the Prison Service to deliver."

The 4,045 women in prison in a total jail population of 68,357 compares with fewer than 1,000 female inmates in 1970. Currently, 18 of the 138 prisons in England and Wales hold women.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Locking up women is an admission of defeat."