In 2004 the Government in England and Wales published a new policy on responding to women who offend. The aims were to reduce women’s involvement in crime and to divert them from prison. The ‘Together Women’ project was funded under this policy initiative to demonstrate how services for women offenders should be provided in the community. The first stage of the associated evaluation included interviews with Together Women’s clients as their feedback was seen as important in helping to develop effective services and as an early indicator of impact. However, the final assessment of impact relies on a quantitative assessment based on project files and criminal records data. The only interviews to be conducted will focus on asking sentencers about whether they use Together Women to divert women from custody. This article draws on interviews conducted with Together Women clients in the project’s development phase to argue that outcome evaluations which rely exclusively or mainly on information in project databases and criminal records may not capture key elements which make an intervention ‘work’. Neglecting service users’ insights may lead to under-estimating resource needs, unrealistic target setting, and the eventual abandonment of promising ideas in favour of the next ‘new’ magic bullet.

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Although a range of opinions about the impact of incarceration on later offending have been articulated, there have been very few studies of sufficient methodological quality to allow the effect to be examined empirically. Drawing on a sample of 5,500 male offenders from 1 of 10 regions in the United Kingdom, propensity score matching was used to balance the preexisting differences between two groups of offenders: those who had been incarcerated for their index offense and those who had received community orders involving supervision. Both methods of balancing the group differences (matching/stratification) suggested that 1 year after release, offenders who had been incarcerated were significantly more likely to have committed another (proven) offense. These offenders also tended to commit more offenses and started reoffending earlier than those supervised in the community. Moreover, offenders who had originally been incarcerated were much more likely to be reincarcerated. In line with other emerging evidence, it was concluded that incarceration tends to slightly increase rather than decrease the chances of future offending. Limitations of the research are considered and directions for future research are explored.

IntroductionThis chapter analyses changes in the sentencing of women between 2000 and 2012. We update an earlier analysis conducted by Hedderman (2004) Drawing on analyses of official statistics and on a recent interview study with a small sample of magistrates and judges, the findings indicate that whilst overall the use of custody appears to have remained fairly static, there are interesting differences between the sentencing practices of magistrates and Crown Court sentencers. Moreover, rather than witnessing significant shifts between immediate custody and non-custodial options for women, a key finding of this analysis concerns the shifting landscape within non-2 custodial sentencing, particularly the increasing use of Suspended Sentence Orders, introduced in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 as an 'alternative to custody', which seem instead to be used in place of other lower-tariff community orders (Stanley, 2009).The chapter concludes by raising concerns about how this shift, combined with the restriction of judicial discretion when orders are breached, may lead non-custodial sentences to become precursors, rather than alternatives, to custody. Community-based options for dealing with women who offend have been developed in the light of evidence concerning differences in their offending-related needs and responses to punishment, especially prison (for example, Together Women project, discussed later in this chapter).It is important that sentencers, particularly magistrates, are informed of the value of such facilities and understand that using them in place of custody constitutes an appropriate, rather than an unduly favourable, response to most women who offend. Understanding the contextIn the eight years leading up to the Millennium, the number of women in prison more than doubled to reach 3,350 (Home Office, 2001a). Previous research concluded that this was because of changing criminal justice responses to women offenders rather than changes in underlying offending (Hedderman, 2004). Hedderman's analysis found that there had been a move away from cautioning and towards sending women to court, together with a generally harsher sentencing climate. Thus, when women reached court and were convicted, even those dealt with for minor offences were much more likely to receive a custodial sentence. Most strikingly, a third of the extra women being sentenced to prison over this period were convicted of theft and handling; and the proportionate use 3 of custody for this group by magistrates rose more than for any other offence (Hedderman, 2004).There are at least three reasons to think that the sentencing of women is likely to have changed since 2000. First, there have been a number of legislative changes which could be expected to have implications for the treatment of women in the criminal justice system. Second, for at least part of this period, diverting women from custody was an explicit government policy objective. This included devoting funds to develop local community-based support services for women offende...