THE words of the then-home secretary Michael Howard’s prison works speech at the Conservative Party Conference of 1993 have haunted Britain’s approach to justice for the last three decades, they became the foundation for cross-party consensus that led to penal populism dominating policy.

Howard exclaimed: “Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists — and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.”

That same year the then shadow home secretary and future prime minister Tony Blair unveiled the now trite labourite slogan “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” at the Labour Party conference. While the former has been shouted, the latter has been a meagre murmur in British politics.

The prison population has exploded in the last three decades, increasing by some 40,000, totalling to 85,000 inmates at the end of 2024, making for some of the highest figures in western Europe.

While Howard may not flinch at the current overpopulation crisis facing prisons, he may well do at reoffending rates, which fly in the face of his hypothesis that prison acts as a deterrent to offending.

The Gauke Independent Sentencing Review published on February 18 2025, found that the likelihood of reoffending after serving a custodial sentence is not only substantial but higher than following a non-custodial sentence.

Some have coined this the revolving-door effect, of short, successive prison sentences that do nothing to address the root of repeated crime. This is saliently illustrated when one considers that the proven reoffending rate for those who were homeless or rough sleeping was double the rate of those who were in a form of accommodation upon release. Logic follows here that inadequate housing is the issue to address, not inadequate prison sentences.

Perhaps the end of the line, the “tough on crime” rhetoric was hard to maintain when the Labour government announced a mass release programme in September 2024 which allows certain prisoners early release on licence after serving 40 per cent of their sentence in prison. The scheme is seeing thousands of inmates being released early. With prisons bursting at the seams, this was simply realpolitik.

However, some of the most poignant advocacy calling for change has been within the context of women’s justice.

With the announcement of a Women’s Justice Board last September, the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said: “The simple truth is that we are sending too many women to prison. Many are victims themselves, and over half are mothers, leaving a child behind when they go inside.”

A clear distancing from Howard and Blair’s proclamations in the ’90s, this is something to be welcomed, but with a fair dose of circumspection.

It is not as if the arguments supporting women’s justice taking account for material biological and societal differences were only discovered just preceding Labour Party conference in September of last year. They have existed and been painstakingly established for years, by numerous groups.

The Corston Report published in 2007 after the suicides of six women inmates at HMP Styal between August 2002 and August 2003, called for radical change in the way women encounter the justice system, declaring: “Women and men are different. Equal treatment of men and women does not result in equal outcomes.”

The report also identified how drug addiction disproportionately afflicts women prisoners and that mental health problems are far more prevalent among women in prison than in the male prison population or in the general population.

The National Women’s Justice Coalition has noted: “Many women in contact with the justice system are victims of crimes more serious than the ones they are accused of themselves … and face interrelated challenges such as homelessness, mental health issues, substance misuse, and domestic abuse.”

Level Up has stated: “When it comes to women in the criminal justice system, there is no distinct binary between victims and offenders: one in three women in prison grew up in the care system, the majority of women in prison are victims of domestic abuse and many are coerced into crime by abusive partners.”

The Gauke Review found 60 per cent of women supervised in the community or in custody report having experienced domestic violence. The overlap of victim and perpetrator is staggering.

The harm done to children cannot be overlooked either, as the Justice Secretary outlined, the majority of women being sent to prison are mothers. A mother’s imprisonment leads not only to catastrophic outcomes to maternal relationships, seeing many children sent into care, but drastically increases the child facing a similar fate of imprisonment later in life.

Disturbingly, prison is a place where pregnant women are five times more likely to have a stillbirth and twice as likely to give birth prematurely, and yet this demographic continues to increase in prison. There were 215 pregnant women in prison over the 12-month period of April 2023 to March 2024. This is an increase from 194 for the 2022/23 year.

Despite the overwhelming and obvious arguments against the imprisonment of pregnant women, the Justice Secretary, soon after waxing lyrical about the importance of a woman-centred approach to women’s justice, has introduced the Sentencing Guidelines Bill. The Bill seeks to prevent the Sentencing Council assisting judges in determining appropriate sentencing outcomes with consideration for protected characteristics, such as pregnancy. This has led to Amnesty, along with 20 other rights-based organisations, writing to the Justice Secretary to implore the Bill be reconsidered, fearing that it could result in even more pregnant women being handed custodial sentences. Such is the nebulous nature of penal policy, rife with political posturing.

The most prevalent offence of women in prison is theft, with shoplifting being the most common indictable offence for female defendants in 2023, accounting for 27 per cent of all female prosecutions for indictable offences, compared to 12 per cent for males. In 2023, Calpol, a children’s analgesic, was the most reported shoplifted item reported in Tower Hamlets, a borough that reports 39 per cent of its residents living in poverty. This is another harsh illustration that arguing the government is “tough on the causes of crime” falls squarely flat.

Public provisions to address poverty, substance abuse and mental ill health have been decimated by years of austerity. These factors happen to be three of the most significant predictors of criminality. Plainly, to argue any of the governments in recent memory have been “tough on the causes of crime” is a fool’s errand. What we have been left with is a prison system in crisis that disproportionately punishes some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The announcement of a Women’s Justice Board is a step in the right direction, but we must not allow the motive to address the prison overpopulation crisis to override the material arguments outlining why a different approach to women’s justice is necessary.