IMB report on resettlement of women released from prison

Commenting on the findings of today’s report by Independent Monitoring Board, Jenny Earle, programme director for the Prison
Reform Trust’s programme to reduce women’s imprisonment said:

“This report from independent prison monitoring boards doesn’t pull its punches, revealing that a quarter of women in prison lost their homes as a direct result of imprisonment—often for short periods for a minor offence—and fewer than half of women released had housing to go to. As our Home Truths briefing evidenced in 2016 and again in 2018, releasing women to homelessness is setting them up to fail and it seems little has changed. Lack of accommodation remains the main barrier to
women’s resettlement on release.  

“We need answers from the Ministry of Justice on what the Homelessness Prevention Taskforces set up by the government earlier this year have delivered for women, as well as from the MHCLG on the failures of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. The most effective solution however is for the justice secretary to action the report’s first recommendation and ‘take steps to minimise the number of women entering prison as a result of a short sentence’. Implementation of the government’s Female Offender Strategy would help achieve that goal.”