PShe had been in trouble with the police before, when she was 16 and thrown out of the care system with no qualifications, no housing and no support. Almost 50 years later, he heard a knock on the door again.
There had been a fire on the farm where he lived and another resident said he had seen Pat start it. “I was at the police station for almost two days before I got to the magistrates court,” he said, running a finger across the top of his hand. “The magistrate said he would send it to the crown court and basically send me to prison.”
Pat, now 66, spent the next seven months on remand at HMP Bronzefield. When her case reached the Crown Court, she was acquitted. He finds it difficult to walk, but when he was released from prison he discovered that his mobility vehicle had been confiscated after local authorities suspended payments.
“Being in prison changed my life,” he said. “Even now I still can’t get over the fact that I was in prison. Words fail me. I have no money, I had to get an emergency universal credit loan to live. And I’m still paying it.”
James Timpson, chief executive and Minister for Prisons in England and Wales, believes women like Pat should not be behind bars. During a visit last week to Alana House, a women’s center in Reading run by the charity Pact, which supports women in the criminal justice system, Lord Timpson spoke to former prisoners about their parents who raised 90 children during their childhood, some of them just babies who needed to be cared for while their mothers served time.
“What is clear is that there are too many women in prison who should not be there,” she said. “Some women need prison for the crimes they commit, but there are too many women who should be taken out of prison and supported, and that’s what we want to try to do.”
Timpson, who was on the visit to announce £31.6 million of new Ministry of Justice funding for women’s services, admitted the transition from chief executive of his family shoe repair and key duplication business to (unpaid) government minister had not been easy.
Having to immediately deal with an overcrowding crisis, the Labor peer was tasked with shepherding the Sentencing Act, which was passed in January and replaced most short sentences of a year or less with community sentences and allowed some people to be released earlier.
“I will consider the first months a traumatic experience because we had a capacity crisis,” he said. “But now I feel real green shoots in a lot of areas that we are responsible for, including from a women’s justice perspective.”
Timpson, a longtime observer of the criminal justice system (he has employed ex-offenders since 2002), said he was grateful for the opportunity to use the machinery of government to make a difference. “I firmly believe that there are so many people who deserve a second chance at life and to be able to obtain the keys to drive change, it is worth sacrificing all the other things,” he said.
Women make up only about 4% of the prison population, and their numbers have dropped slightly from 3,600 in October 2024 to about 3,300. But for those who participate in it, the statistics are relentlessly bleak. Half of the inmates are victims of domestic violence and more than half have suffered a brain injury. While two-thirds did not commit a violent crime, female prisoners are nine times more likely to self-harm than men.
“In my opinion, there are a lot of women who are in the criminal justice system because they are victims,” Timpson said. “We need to help them.”
Last year, Timpson created the Women’s Justice Board with the explicit goal of reducing the number of women in prison. In her first report, published on Monday, she called for a change in the law so that pregnant women are imprisoned only in exceptional circumstances, and new laws to reduce pre-trial detention and revocation.
She also urged the government to incentivize police forces to keep women out of prison by using alternatives such as deferred sentences, which give offenders a grace period to address an issue that led them to commit a crime.
Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust and a board member, said successive governments had called for fewer women to be jailed, without much change. She compared the formation of the Women’s Justice Board to that of the Youth Justice Board in 1998, which is partly credited with significantly reducing the youth prison population in England and Wales, from 3,200 in 2008 to 445 in 2024.
“When everyone works together, you can really make a difference on the ground,” Sinha said. “Now we have a team of experts influencing the government and saying, ‘We’ve been hearing this for 20 years, what are you going to do that’s different?’”
Speaking to Timpson at Alana House, Pat said the women’s center had been her “lifesaver.” After leaving school at the age of 15, he took GCSE maths and English in prison, achieving the highest possible grade. Now she hopes to be able to pay off her debt, get her mobility car back and start volunteering to help other women who are leaving prison.
“It’s like I’m missing a piece right now,” he said. “But I’m going to get that missing piece back.”
