Women’s open prisons in England and Wales are struggling to fulfil their function as sites of resettlement, due to an increasing number of prisoners on short sentences. This was the conclusion drawn by Daria Przybylska, a PhD student at the Prisons Research Centre, in her latest article in the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ Prison Service Journal. This article is based on her doctoral research, which explores the function and lived experience of women’s open prisons in England and Wales.
Open prisons grant prisoners greater freedom and responsibility with minimal supervision, after a risk assessment has deemed them safe and trustworthy to be managed in this environment. There are two open prisons for women. In recent years, however, overcrowding in the closed prison estate has led to more prisoners on shorter sentences being placed in open prisons. Przybylska’s latest article explores the impact of this development on open prisons’ function.
The role of a penal regime
From the beginning, Przybylska wanted to explore the purpose of women’s open prisons, but she did not set out to focus on population dynamics. However, this specific issue arose repeatedly during her research, which involved spending extended periods of time observing in the women’s open prisons, and interviewing staff and incarcerated women in depth about their experiences.
“Prisoners and staff talked about changes to the population of women’s open prisons,” says Przybylska. “Many saw these changes as having a disruptive effect, on the operation of the open prisons, the work of staff, and on prisoners’ experiences of open imprisonment. These insights made me think differently about what open imprisonment meant for people, and how it was connected to who was serving time within them.”
A big part of this sentiment concerned Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL). This process allows prisoners to leave the prison for periods of time for resettlement purposes, such as spending time with their families or working in the community.
“The loss family contact and maternal identity is especially painful for incarcerated women,” she explains. “Open prisons grant more autonomy and responsibility and, through ROTL, facilitate the rekindling of family ties, enabling women to reinhabit the roles important to them, like that of mother.”
Findings such as these underscore ROTL's importance. Przybylska herself is currently writing a research article on how women in open prisons manage family life while on ROTL. Many of the women interviewed also preferred the open prison environment for this reason. But not all of them were able to benefit from these opportunities. Przybylska found that many women on shorter sentences were arriving in open prisons for shorter periods of time, sometimes only weeks before release.
“The risk assessments that have to be carried out by prisons and probation, before a prisoner can be approved to access ROTL, take time,” she explains. “And they take more time when staff are overwhelmed and under-resourced. So, if a short-stay prisoner only had a few weeks in open conditions before their release, these risk assessments would likely not be completed in time.”
Women who were in open conditions for longer, and therefore had the time to benefit from ROTL, recognised this issue and questioned the value of women spending only short periods of time in open conditions.
Overall, while women on longer stays continued to benefit from the open regime, including ROTL, there were increasing numbers of those who did not, because of how little time they would spend in open custody. Przybylska argues in her article that these developments added up to a lower proportion of prisoners accessing ROTL than in the past, ‘diluting’ of open prisons’ resettlement function.
Planning in the future
Going forward, Przybylska hopes her PhD research can encourage greater use of ROTL across the wider prison system, given that both women and men in prison benefit greatly from ROTL. While technically ROTL is permitted from closed women’s prisons, in practice it is rare, and many eligible women never manage to access it.
At the same time, Przybylska emphasises the need to revisit questions of purpose in response to ongoing developments in penal policy and practice. Since her own research took place, the policy around transfers has changed, as prisoners can now progress to open conditions up to 5 years before release.
“It was 3 years at the time of my research,” Przybylska explains, “and before that, it used to be 2 years. So, this change will likely have a significant impact on population dynamics over the next few years.”
Such developments should be seen as opportunities to conduct more research into open prisons, particularly ethnographic research, of which there has been very little in open prisons.
“I think this is a missed opportunity,” explains Przybylska, “because some of the most significant sociological insights about imprisonment have come out of the kind of careful, immersive and sustained engagement in the field that comes with an ethnographic approach.”
Przybylska’s doctoral research has reinforced to her that being embedded in prison environments for extended lengths of time can yield insights that might otherwise be missed. The depth of understanding that we gain from such an approach enhances the recommendations we can make for policy and practice.
“Ultimately, the goal is to see fewer people in prison,” she says. “While I have valuable insight to offer based on my PhD’s findings, I would rather share them with policy makers, practitioners, and advocates whose expertise, in combination with the evidence I have gathered, can lead to better ideas and solutions for change.”