ABSTRACT
Despite the widespread international concern to develop and co-ordinate policies which might either slow down the rate of women's imprisonment or engender flexible custodial and non-custodial ‘interventions’ 1 successful in reducing the damaging time spent in custody, a recurring problem in several jurisdictions has been to develop effective projects which survive more than a year or two. The main reasons for individual project close-down (or change of role) are usually financial, though funding problems may sometimes mask a range of shortcomings (for example, change of objectives, poor or adverse publicity, loss of gender-specificity, non-use by the courts (see also chapter 6 this volume), and inappropriate expectations and/or evaluations by funders), for all of which reduced finance is only the presenting symptom.
