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Some interesting meetings today

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Once a month, we hold staff meetings. We now have 29 staff and so they are lively affairs. This morning Frances Flaxington, head of women’s policy at the ministry of justice, came along to talk to us. 

Our campaign to prevent the deaths of women in prison – Lost Daughters - was the focus for the discussion. Frances Flaxington talked about the plans to implement Baroness Corston’s recommendations from her report in 2007. She said that the minister for justice – who is also the minister for equalities – Maria Eagle, is deeply committed to making sure that things are improved for women in the penal system.

Only 3% of women in prisons represent a risk of serious harm to the public. The plan is to develop robust community sanctions and services for the majority of women. Additional funding of £15.6 million is being invested in local one-stop shops and community services. Small but significant steps to improve the care of women in prison have already been achieved – the ending of automatic strip searching of women on reception to prison. The directors of offender management have been given the primary responsibility for supporting community sentences for women and reducing the unnecessary use of prison.

The vision from the MoJ is that fewer women should be held in prison, resources should be diverted to communities and prisons closed.

As Frances Flaxington said this morning, we are on the same page.

This encouraging meeting was followed by an encounter with Professor Louis Appleby, national director of NHS mental health services in England, who came to our offices, I thought, to discuss issues of common concern. We have done a huge amount of work on suicide prevention, mental health services, individual representation of children and young people with mental heath problems in custody, and of course we have the public inquiry into the treatment of SP, a young girl who repeatedly tried to take her own life in prison. In the event, I think he was just a bit cross because we publicised the high number of deaths among those detained under the Mental Health Act. I sit on a new Ministerial council looking at deaths in custody that meets on Thursday, and this will be an issue of discussion. I will make sure it is.


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