ao link
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In

You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles

Providing housing to mothers leaving prison

A 10-year project providing housing to mothers leaving prison reduced the number of repeat offenders and helped reunite women with their children. Lola Okolosie finds out why it came to an end.  Illustration by Neil Webb

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Sharelines

Housing mothers leaving prison

Ten years ago, a housing association and two charities founded a flagship project. The aim? To support mothers leaving prison by providing them with accommodation that would ensure an early reunification with their children.

Funded by housing charity Commonweal, from 2007 until this year Re-Unite worked with more than 100 mothers leaving prison. Of these women, less than 10% would go on to be convicted of another offence. By contrast, 51% of women in prison reoffend within 12 months of their release, according to the Prison Reform Trust.


READ MORE

How to stop women leaving prison for the streetsHow to stop women leaving prison for the streets

That first pilot, based in south London, was set up by Commonweal, along with 900-home association Housing for Women and charity Women in Prison. It has since been replicated – sometimes adapted, other times adopted wholesale – by women’s centres and housing associations across the country. By 2015, a dozen separate schemes were operating with and within every women’s prison in England.

End of the road

Yet 10 years on, despite the positive outcomes for the women supported, Re-Unite as it was first envisioned has come to an end. The story of what happened – the successes demonstrated and lessons learned – and why it has all fallen apart, have been outlined in a major new report, shared exclusively with Inside Housing.

But how did the project work in the first place? Initially, Housing for Women managed the properties, while Commonweal purchased the homes and provided the funding. Later, Commonweal provided some seed funding to partners to cover additional costs. The project was in large part successful because women were offered an approach that centered on them, crucially acknowledging they were part of a family unit.

Commonweal insists that access to housing is a major element in whether or not mothers leaving the prison system are able to maintain a secure and stable family life. The charity found that two-thirds of women entering prison have a dependent child. Each year, 17,000 children are left behind as a result of their mother’s imprisonment. Despite this, 60% of women leaving prison have no homes to go to when they are released. They become caught in a catch-22 scenario: unable to regain custody of their children because they lack a suitable family home, which they cannot secure because they do not have custody of their children.

Saving money

The individual stories make a powerful case in themselves for the continuation of the project. But Commonweal’s research demonstrates a strong economic argument as well. In its report, Commonweal calculates that, over two years, the cost of a mother returning to prison is on average £25,000 higher than the cost of running the Re-Unite service.

On average it costs £42,000 per year to keep a woman in prison. Yet this isn’t the whole picture. Children whose mothers are imprisoned have increased instability in their lives, entering the care system or living with either friends or extended family as only 9% will be looked after by their fathers. They themselves are three times more likely to become offenders, experience mental health problems or do less well at school.

Given the increased likelihood of their children becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training), the New Economics Foundation estimates that imprisoning non-violent mothers costs the state £17m in total over a decade. Both Commonweal and the Prison Reform Trust argue that the government could save money and prevent these outcomes by ensuring judges and magistrates consider community orders for offenders who are primary carers.

In 2014, Commonweal ended its day-to-day running of Re-Unite, handing this to Birmingham-based voluntary organisation Anawim and Women’s Breakout, an umbrella group focusing on women in the criminal justice system.

This year, the charity completely finished funding of the project, 10 years after it started - the charity’s model is to provide initial pilot funding for new ideas, rather than cover costs on an ongoing basis. Commonweal says the remaining funding had only been “to insulate our project partners from risk”, adding that it had “stood back from our own formal engagement” to let partners develop their own models.

But shrinking council budgets and the unprecedented privatisation of the probation system have proved too much to overcome for many projects, meaning only two Re-Unite providers have secured funding since 2016.

 

Anawim runs one of these through an arrangement with Midland Heart, although it is no longer labelled ‘Re-unite’ and chief executive Joy Doal admits that “the climate now is very different” with fewer properties available for women leaving prison.

In a 2016 joint report by HM Inspectorate of Probation and HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Dame Glenys Stacey, chief inspector of probation, found that “dedicated funding for women [offenders] has virtually disappeared, and so the future of some services, and in particular those provided by women’s centres, is in doubt”. The report continued: “With less funding available, and without a clear strategy for women, more women are likely to re-offend.”

While it is clear that local authorities need to rethink how housing is allocated to imprisoned mothers, what are the lessons for social landlords?

"Dedicated funding for women [offenders] has virtually disappeared", Dame Glenys Stacey

Edward Lowe, communications and policy co-ordinator at Commonweal, says that the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation (NHF) must “engage more with local women’s centres to ensure that they are providing the right services and identifying the best way to assist the housing needs" of women in these circumstances.

In response Catherine Ryder, head of policy at the NHF, says: “We are very happy to highlight this important report and talk to our members to explore how housing associations can further support this vital area of work.”

Last year the government announced Britain’s largest women’s prison, HMP Holloway, was to be put up for sale. Property experts estimate that offers of £200m could be made for the site. Many will hope that after reviewing the successes of Re-Unite, the government will invest in approaches with a track record of driving down recidivism. The project’s 10-year story can at least provide the evidence that it would be a prudent investment.

 


Lucy’s story

Mother of two, Lucy (not her real name), was among the first women to be housed by Re-Unite. She was given a 14-month sentence for stealing from her employer – a crime which she claims her husband forced her to commit. Ten days later, Lucy learned that her family had been sent an eviction notice.

Speaking to Inside Housing 12 years later, she recalls this was a “horrendous” time in her life.

“I didn’t know right the way through my sentence that I was going to have somewhere to take the kids when I came out,” she explains. Taking a resigned breath, she says it was “absolutely horrific”. Her two children, aged 10 and 15 at the time, were unable to live with their father and resided with Lucy’s sister-in-law and her daughter in their one-bedroom flat.

The wait to find out whether she had got on to the Re-Unite project was “really nerve-racking”. Though Lucy had taken her council to court over the eviction notice issued to her and won, the ambiguity over what kind of housing she would now get was too much. The uncertainty meant her children suffered as much as her through her imprisonment.

The prospect of suitable accommodation, away from a violent ex-husband who had attempted to kill Lucy in the presence of their children and his own mother, was the first real moment of hope for her and her children. Several times, she refers to the project as a “godsend”.

Knowing where she was going to be, and that she would be reunited with her children as soon as she left prison allowed Lucy to believe “something actually positive might happen’”after her time there. Drawing out her words with difficulty, she says: “It was just an amazing sense of relief. We could actually start making plans as a family, we could get excited about starting a new life, and getting stuff ready for the house.”

She saw first hand what it was like for fellow prisoners before Re-Unite existed. “There wasn’t really any support at all. I’d seen women coming and going right the way through [my 12-months in prison]… not getting the kids back because the council would bung them into a hostel, or they would go out with nowhere [to live] because the housing departments in the prison were completely swamped.”

 

Update: on 12.10.17 this article was updated to clarify that Commonweal’s funding of the Re-unite project was never meant to be ongoing.


 

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Add New Comment
You must be logged in to comment.