ABSTRACT
As outlined in Chapter 2, responses to women offenders in England and Wales have been reshaped in the past few years to focus more directly on what we know about women’s needs, and to divert them from both crime in general and prison specifically. Five particular prompts have led to innovative community-based initiatives: First, an unprecedented rise in the number of women sentenced to imprisonment between the early 1990s and early 2000s (Home Office 2007) with concerns about both the high level of their personal and social needs, and the general failure to address them; second, the establishment of the Women’s Offending Reduction Programme (WORP) in 2004 (itself a reflection of the increasing concerns about women and the failure to address their distinctive needs); third, the Equality Act 2006;1 fourth, a report from Baroness Jean Corston on vulnerable women within the criminal justice system (Corston 2007); and fifth, the setting up of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) in 2008. The dramatic increases in women’s imprisonment, the Women’s Offending Reduction Programme, and the Corston Report have all been described in some detail in Chapter 2 of this book, thus I dwell only on the creation of NOMS here. I do so because it has facilitated some of the innovations in the delivery of services that we have seen.
