Shona Minson

Punishment is not a binary process, affecting only victim and offender, nor a transactional process between the state and the punished. Punishment impacts not just those directly involved, but also families, communities, and society more generally. Punishment sets in motion events with long- term consequences, and very little attention is paid at sentencing to the life- changing effects of even short sentences of imprisonment.

My particular interest is in the punishment of women and within that group the punishment of mothers. There are more than twice as many women in prison in England and Wales as there were thirty years ago, with the women’s prison population in England and Wales standing at around 3,600 on any given day. In the year to June 2023, a total of 5,286 women were imprisoned, on remand before trial, on remand between trial and sentence, after sentence, or when recalled to prison for the breach of a licence condition. Although no data is routinely collected, and it is therefore hard to know exactly how many women in prison are mothers of dependent children, inspections in His Majesty’s Prisons and Young Offenders Institution Bronzefield and Peterborough¹ estimated that between 50% and 60% of women in those institutions were mothers to children under eighteen years. In Scotland, the daily women’s prison population is around 200 women, with approximately 900 women spending time in prison each year. In Ireland, a similarly sized jurisdiction, there were 800 female committals to prison in 2022, ² with a daily population of approximately 230 women.

In this essay I will explore the disruptive effects of women’s imprisonment on their children and the questions this raises about the proportionate nature of custodial sentences for mothers. The way in which custody is used for women both pre- and post-conviction will be considered, within the context

of our greater understanding of the pains of imprisonment for women. In the last section of the essay, I ask whether the commitment to imprisonment as punishment could be disrupted if we punished in ways that are more likely to lead to positive outcomes for both individuals and communities.

Are all children equal?

Before I moved into academic research, I was a barrister in England, practising in family law. I specialised in care proceedings where the local authority sought to remove a child from the care of their parents due to the abuse, harm, or neglect of a child or the likelihood of a child experiencing those things in the care of their parents. The child’s welfare was at the heart of the process. The Children Act 1989 provides statutory protection for the children, stating in section 1(1) that the ‘best interests of the child are the paramount consideration of the court’. The court uses the ‘welfare checklist’ as the framework for decision-making. The child’s wishes and feelings are considered, they are represented by state-funded lawyers and a Guardian ad Litem, and if the child is separated from their parents, the state provides and funds alternative caregivers. When I began to look at the imprisonment of mothers in England and Wales, I found that unlike the family courts, the criminal courts gave little attention to the children who were being separated from their primary carer due to the actions of the state.

It was that differentiated treatment of children that really caught my attention and troubled me. Why were children whose mothers were going to prison deemed of less worth or value than children who were separated from their parents for other reasons? All children have equal worth, so to treat these children differently suggested that they didn’t suffer harm when their mother was imprisoned, or the state had restricted its own duty of care to children to exclude this group, or judges were not allowed to consider the consequences to children when they sentenced a mother.

I didn’t intend to become an academic, but I wanted to answer those questions, and so I began ten years of academic research into the sentencing of mothers. I spoke with children whose mothers were in prison and adults who were taking care of children during their mothers’ imprisonment. I found that children experience many changes to their lives as soon as their mother is imprisoned and many of those are harmful to them.³ Most women who are imprisoned are single parents, and if they are caring for their child prior to imprisonment, the child will have to move out of their home to live with a new carer when their mother is sent to prison. This may mean their education is disrupted, if they have to move away from the area where they attend school. Siblings are often separated, as friends or relatives aren’t able to take on all the children, and many children experience multiple moves, as they are cared for by different people at different times.

Most people in prison are from a lower socio-economic demographic, as are their friends and families, so the burden of an additional child in a home means that the household experiences increased poverty. There is a great deal of stigma and shame around maternal imprisonment, so children often remove themselves from social groups and become isolated. The mother–child relationship is disrupted and altered, and this affects children’s immediate and future wellbeing and stability. Prison visits are emotionally challenging for children, but they are also difficult in practical terms, as the visiting hours are often during normal work and school hours, and there may not be an adult who can take them to visit during those times, nor is it easy for them to miss school.

Disproportionate punishment

I identified something I termed ‘confounding grief’ among the children I met. Most of the children were experiencing grief because of their mother’s absence; their expectations of their life had been confounded – everything about their day-to-day existence was turned upside down by their mother’s removal from the home. In addition, they had to deal with the fact that their grief confounded other people. When a child’s parents separate or a parent dies, those children are given extra attention and love, and people make special efforts to include them. This does not happen for a child whose mother goes to prison. There is an assumption that perhaps they are better off without their mother, and therefore their grief is not appropriate. People also seem to attach what has been called ‘secondary stigma’ to the child, viewing them as problematic because their parent has committed a criminal offence. Children experiencing this confounding grief manifest it in changed behaviours. Younger children often regress in sleep and toileting, and older children display more aggressive behaviour than before their mother’s imprisonment.

Parental separation and parental imprisonment are both categorised as Adverse Childhood Experiences. International research has evidenced that experiencing maternal imprisonment as a child creates what is known as a ‘turning point’⁴: a point in life where the trajectory changes, and it’s impossible to go back. There is research evidence that adults who have experienced parental imprisonment as children are less likely to be in education, training or employment in later life and are more likely to have mental health and addiction problems. A study from the Netherlands in 2018 found that people who experienced maternal imprisonment as a child were more likely to die before the age of 65 than their peers.⁵ It is a sobering piece of data, demonstrating that the disruptive effects of maternal imprisonment on children are not short term, but may in fact shorten life expectancy. It is also relevant to note that maternal imprisonment often intersects with poverty, with implications for the wellbeing of children. In research I undertook during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I interviewed adults in households where a child was living whose parent was in prison.⁶ Over half (53%) of these households had a total income of less than £15,000. A further 28% had a total household income of less than £25,000. Children affected by maternal imprisonment are unlikely to have their adverse experiences buffered by money.

Imprisoning a woman is a disruptive process and has the potential to cause life-long disruption to her children’s lives. If these women have committed serious crimes and the only appropriate punishment for them is imprisonment, then maybe the only thing that can be done is to mitigate the harms to their children through state support and changes such as increased provision for child-friendly visits at prisons, or cheaper telephone calls between prisoners and family outside. But, if they have not committed serious and dangerous crimes, there is a risk that the harms of imprisonment to their dependents are making punishment disproportionate.

Proliferation of short sentences

In England and Wales both crime rates and imprisonment increased through the second half of the last century. However, since the late 1990s, crime has decreased while imprisonment has continued to rise. It is penal policy, rather than crime rates, that increases prison populations. In the UK the increase in imprisonment has been fed by legislative changes including the creation of new offences with mandatory prison terms and longer minimum terms for existing offences. After changes were made in 2015 to the length of time a person was under supervision after leaving prison, there was an increase in people being recalled to prison after their release on licence. The supervisory requirements were made much more onerous for those sentenced to short terms of imprisonment, and now anyone who is sentenced to more than two days in prison is supervised on licence for twelve months after their release. The breach of a term, such as non-attendance at a probation appointment, triggers a recall back to prison. There is little discretion in recalls. I met the mother of a young woman who had been recalled to prison shortly after the birth of her baby, because the hospital she gave birth in was in a part of London that she was precluded from entering under the terms of her licence. It is not unreasonable to assume that people in prison have been convicted of serious offences. The Irish penal code is built on the principle of proportionality, and in England and Wales Section 230(2) of the Sentencing Code, 2020 sets out that prison is reserved for the most serious offences and should only be used as a punishment if a fine or community sentence is insufficient. However, in England and Wales 58% of men and 69% of women sentenced to imprisonment have committed a non-violent offence. The most common offence for women is theft. 53% of women and 37% of men have been sentenced to less than six months in prison, which means they will spend only three months, half their sentence, in prison before serving the rest ‘on licence’ in the community.⁷ These short sentences indicate that they are not serious offences or offenders. Again, a similar sentencing pattern is evident in Ireland. Of the 4,162 sentences handed down in 2022, 23% were for less than three months, while over half (54%) were for less than six months.⁸ Gendered differences are clear, with 65% of men sentenced to less than twelve months while 85% of women received a similar sentence.

Not convicted but imprisoned

Perhaps even more surprisingly, around 20% of the people in prison in England and Wales have in fact not been found guilty of any offence. These people are in prison ‘on remand’, which means they have entered a not guilty plea and their trial hasn’t taken place yet. It was reported by the House of Commons Justice Committee in January 2023 that the use of remand was the highest it had been in fifty years. In September 2022, 14,507 people were held in prison on remand – an increase of 44% in the eighteen months since March 2020.⁹ In Scotland between 20% and 40% of the women’s prison population are held on remand. In the Irish prison estate in April 2024, 20% (almost 1,000 people) of prisoners were on remand. But the number was significantly higher in Ireland’s women’s prisons, with 26% not convicted of an offence.¹⁰

Remanding someone to prison before they have been found guilty of a crime is supposed to be an unusual step to take. The Bail Act permits it when someone is not expected to comply with the conditions that would allow them to remain in the community on bail, or when they have committed an extremely serious offence. So again you may be surprised to hear that of those on remand, 52% overall, and 85% of women, have been charged with non-violent offences.¹¹ It is thought that the high number of people remanded to prison is because remand is increasingly being used, at a cost of more than £50,000 (€58,500) per person per year, to manage issues such as homelessness, mental illness or addiction rather than the risk of offending. Although a person should not be held in prison on remand for more than six months, due to the long delays in bringing matters to trial, when the Justice Committee report was published, 770 prisoners had been held on remand awaiting trial for more than two years. One might argue that if all those people were then convicted of their crimes and given a custodial sentence, it might make sense, as it would all balance out eventually, but, in 2022, 10% of all those remanded into prison by magistrates’ courts were subsequently acquitted and a further 11% received a noncustodial sentence. In the Crown Court 14% were acquitted and 16% given a noncustodial sentence.¹²

20% of people are on remand, which means, one would assume, that 80% of people in prison have been convicted of a crime and are receiving an appropriate and effective punishment. In order to determine whether prison is an effective punishment, we must consider the purposes of punishment. In Ireland, case law has established that the purposes of punishment are retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation.¹³ In England and Wales, section 57(2) of the Sentencing Act 2020 sets out the five statutory purposes of sentencing: punishment, reduction of crime (including by deterrence), the reform and rehabilitation of offenders, the protection of the public, and the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their offences.

Pains of imprisonment

Prison undoubtedly punishes. Imprisonment is a painful process, and, for many reasons, prisons do not act and cannot act as a rehabilitative or reformatory space. Sykes, a sociologist and prison researcher, created a typography of the ‘pains of imprisonment’ in 1958.¹⁴ These were the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of goods and services, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships, the deprivation of autonomy, and the deprivation of security.

In the sixty years since there have been many expansions of the definition of ‘pains of imprisonment’ and for women the pain of separation from children and disruption of family relationships is recognised as a primary ‘pain’.

Recent prison inspections in England and Wales have found that prisons are not safe. The rates of self-harm and suicide in prison have increased; the self-harm rates among women reaching the highest recorded figures. We know that women in prison are among the most vulnerable in our societies and imprisonment compounds and exacerbates these vulnerabilities. In England and Wales, 53% of women in prison have suffered sexual, emotional, or physical abuse.¹⁵ 48% committed the offence to support the drug use of someone else.¹⁶ 76% report problems with their mental health, and 46% have attempted suicide.¹⁷ 31% have spent time in local authority care.¹⁸ 35% of all women cautioned and convicted were first time offenders, and 23% of women in prison are serving a prison sentence for their first conviction.¹⁹ Recruitment of staff is an ongoing issue and with prisons at capacity, there are insufficient staff to run full regimes, including not just association time, or visits, but also education, physical activity, and behavioural intervention programmes. The lack of purposeful activity in prison negatively impacts prisoners. There is extensive and irrefutable research evidence that prison does not reduce reoffending; it actually increases it when compared to reoffending by people who have served community sentences.²⁰ Women are more likely to go on to commit further offences if they are given a short custodial sentence rather than a sentence served in the community.

Disrupting women’s imprisonment

It is clear that imprisonment is a disruptive process. When women enter pris- on, they often lose their housing, any employment that they had, and their children. Short sentences and an under-resourced prison system do not allow offending behaviour or drivers of offending – poverty, addiction, mental ill health – to be addressed sufficiently. Prison punishes, but it often does so without even a nod towards rehabilitation, restitution, or reducing recidi- vism. In the next part of this essay I will consider three possible ways to dis- rupt women’s imprisonment. Firstly, through a requirement that all sentenc- ers consider the impact of a sentence of imprisonment on dependent children. Secondly, by the implementation of a presumption against short custodial sentences. Thirdly, with an increased use of alternative forms of punishment for women.

1.  Considering child dependents

The question raised, of course, is should the impact on children be relevant to the sentencing of primary carers? Those who would argue that it isn’t, tend to say firstly that it is unfair to defendants without children to allow sentence to be affected by dependants, and secondly, that the criminal court is not a welfare court. In response to those arguments, I would say that it has always been the case that the social situation of a defendant is relevant to sentencing, and sentencers are used to considering the personal circumstances of every defendant when they sentence. The court is not a welfare court, but there is case law in England and Wales, dating back to 2001,²¹ in which Lord Phillips stated that separating a parent and child is the most serious thing the court has the power to do and therefore the consequences of separation must be balanced against all other factors in sentencing.

Since 2011 the factor ‘sole or primary carer for dependent relatives’ has been included in the list of mitigating factors in every sentencing guideline. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), a child has a right not to suffer discrimination because of the status or activities of their parents (Article 2), the right for their best interests to be a primary consideration in any decision concerning them (Article 3), the right to be heard in any proceedings concerning them (Article 12), and the right to special protection and assistance form the state if separated from their parents (Article 20). In England and Wales, the Human Rights Act 1998 also gives a right to family life (Article 8) and a right to non-discrimination (Article 14). If we consider the separation of children from their parents by the state in another court forum, the family division of the courts, it is clear that every effort is taken to minimise the disruption to children. Treating children differently when the state is separating them from their parents in the criminal courts is a form of procedural discrimination. This was confirmed by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in the UK parliament and their findings and recommendations are set out in their report.²²

Since that enquiry the Sentencing Council of England and Wales has set out in detail the consideration that should be given to a defendant’s children when sentencing.²³ It is welcome that there is recognition of the fact that the impacts of maternal imprisonment on a child can ‘make a custodial sentence disproportionate to achieving the aims of sentencing’. In addition, the court is told that it ‘must ensure’ it has all relevant information about children before sentencing and should ask the Probation Service to prepare a pre-sentence report addressing a defendant’s caring responsibilities. On 1 April 2024 a new sentencing guideline came into force directing the courts to particularly consider the impact of sentence on a woman who is pregnant, has given birth recently, or has a child under the age of one. It is clear that in England and Wales it is now uncontested that maternal imprisonment causes severe disruption to children’s lives and is a harm that should be avoided where possible.

2. A presumption against custodial sentences

As previously mentioned, many women are sent to prison for very short periods of time, with adverse consequences for themselves and their children. Scotland introduced a presumption against short sentences of twelve months or less in 2019, and it has been raised as a possibility in England and Wales. Is this a step in the right direction?

When in 2019 the Scottish parliament voted in favour of a presumption against short sentences of twelve months or less around 90% of women sent to prison in Scotland were sent for a year or less, and many had experienced abuse, mental health, and addiction problems. The then justice secretary, later first minister, Humza Yousaf said:

We know from evidence and research that community-based interventions are more effective than disruptive short prison sentences. With such a high proportion of women prisoners serving custodial sentences of twelve months or less this extension could have a significant impact on women in the justice system.

More recently the Sentencing Bill has been introduced in England and Wales. If passed it will place a duty on the courts to suspend all sentences of twelve months or less. The principal rationale for doing so is efficiency: ‘The current sentencing framework is leading to inefficiencies in terms of substantial economic and societal costs resulting from high levels of re- offending.’ The policy objective is to ‘reduce the current high levels of re-offending and ensure the effective use of the prison estate’. The duty to suspend short sentences is ‘intended to highlight to the court that short sentences of immediate custody should only be used as a last resort and alternative disposals should be used wherever possible’.

If there is really a desire to ‘ensure a diversion from custody is the primary aim of judges and magistrates when considering sentencing decisions for those who would otherwise receive short sentences of immediate custody of twelve months or less’, then I would argue that neither the Scottish nor the English and Welsh approach will achieve this. Professor Cyrus Tata of Strathclyde University has said the presumption against short sentences leaves prison available as a ‘last resort’, and therefore prison will continue to be used as the default when appropriate services aren’t available. ²⁴ ‘Individual professionals (the judiciary) are left to shoulder the impossible burden of chronic societal failures’. Indeed, when Humza Yousef announced the presumption in Scotland, he said this:

This presumption is not a ban; it will encourage courts to consider alternatives to custody which can be more effective in rehabilitating individuals as they pay their debt to society. Impact will be monitored closely and there will always be serious crimes where it is decided in court that prison is the right option.

Suspending sentences leaves the possibility that the sentence will be breached, and the person will then serve time in prison. Under the current use of suspended sentences, when a judge has had discretion to choose it as the most appropriate sentence for a person, the breach rate is 20%. It can be assumed this will be higher if there is no judicial discretion. The average length of a suspended sentence is 19.7 months, and therefore people who might have been subject to a six-month custodial sentence will find themselves subject to both a longer period of supervision and potential time in custody if the sentence is breached.

If the intention is to reduce the female prison population, as was stated in the government White paper ‘The Female Offender Strategy’ in June 2018, there needs to be a shift in thinking and practice so that prison, rather than the alternative, must be justified as exceptional punishment. Professor Tata has suggested that will only happen if there is a date by which a prison will close and the budget shifts to the community services, and yet the use of community sentences in England and Wales has more than halved in a decade, and prison expansion continues in both the UK and Ireland. ²⁵

3. Alternative forms of punishment for women

In my most recent work I’ve been looking at an alternative mode of punishment for women. These are women-specific courts that provide oversight or supervision of women during either a deferred or community sentence. The time during which they are under the jurisdiction of the court is used to support their engagement with services that enable them to address the underlying needs that have destabilised their lives and have therefore contributed to their offending.

Many women in the criminal justice system have been through extraordinary trauma. Observing these courts, I have seen women whose lives have been riven by abuse, exploitation, violence, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. If those criminogenic factors can be addressed, and women have agency restored to them, they are less likely to reoffend because they will have choices in the future. The supervision or problem-solving courts, two names by which they are known, create a supported pause. Every month the women return to the court for a conversation with a judge who explores how they are progressing with their housing, addiction, or health. For many women the loss of their children was a catalyst for their spiral into offending, so in the women’s courts there is a focus on the women’s efforts to reconnect with their children and some even succeed in having the children returned to their care. The courts aim to leave women in a much better situation than they were at the time of the original offending.

In the Glasgow Female Offenders’ Court (FOC) women are on a structured deferred sentence. This means that they’ve been convicted of a crime for which custody could be imposed, but as they have been deemed suitable for the FOC, the punishment is deferred until they’ve had time to address issues under the FOC supervision. If women are able to engage with the services offered and make progress with dealing with the presenting problems in their lives, they can end their time at the court by being ‘admonished’. This means that no further penalty is imposed, and the case is finished. In FOC in other jurisdictions, for example the United States, the conviction may also be deferred, meaning that if a woman successfully addresses the issues which led to her original behaviour, she may finish the process without a conviction. There are only a few of these courts operating in the UK currently, but it is an encouraging development that recognises the complexity of women’s pathways both into and out of offending. There is money in the budgets, but at the moment it is spent on imprisonment.

I met a woman who had gone through the problem-solving court in Texas. She was an addict with numerous convictions, and her two children had been removed from her care. She was pregnant again when she was arrested on another drug-related charge. In her words she ‘begged’ the judge to allow her to go to the problem-solving courts. ‘He said, “Well why would I do that? You’re a disaster. You just want help because you’re pregnant. Why would we waste our time on you?”’ Despite his view of her he was persuaded by her lawyer to give her a chance. She was sent to a facility for pregnant women. She kept her child, has been clean for several years, and works as a peer supporter for other women involved with the criminal justice system. I’ll leave you with the question she asked, ‘Why are we putting all of the money into punishments which don’t work? That is a high-risk strategy. Why don’t we take a different risk and put the money into keeping people out of prison and see what happens?’

Conclusion

Although, in comparison to the male prison population, few women are imprisoned, we must not be complacent about the continued use of imprisonment for women and mothers. Decades of research evidence confirm that imprisonment is a harmful process that neither rehabilitates individuals nor protects communities. Policy makers and sentencers must think harder about why imprisonment is used to punish, and money should be invested in community alternatives that more appropriately address and reflect the type of offending behaviour for which women are most often punished. Imprisoning women disrupts lives, and the thinking and behaviours that keep us fixed on imprisonment as punishment need to be disrupted. With courage and imagination, we could become a society in which punishment would lead to positive outcomes for women and their families.

Dr Shona Minson, Research Associate in Women’s Justice at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, is a former family and criminal barrister. Her work focuses on the sentencing of women, and she is the author of Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Notes

1. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP & YOI Bronze- field (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2018); HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP & YOI Bronzefield (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2022).
2. Irish Prison Service, Annual Report 2022: Creating a Better Environment (Longford: Irish Prison Service, 2023).
3. Shona Minson, Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2019).
4. Daniel P. Mears and Sonja E. Siennick, ‘Young Adult Outcomes and the Life-Course Penalties of Parental Incarceration’, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53:1 (2016), 3–35.
5. Steve G. A. van de Weijer, Holly S. Smallbone, Valery Bouwman, ‘Parental Imprisonment and Pre-Mature Mortality in Adulthood’, Journal of Development and Life-Course Criminology, 4 (2018), 148–161.
6. Shona Minson, ‘The impact of Covid-19 prison lockdowns on children with a parent in prison’, Oxford, 2021, <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/migrated/the_impact_of_covid-19_ prison_lockdowns_on_children_with_a_parent_in_prison.pdf>
7. Ministry of Justice, HM Prison & Probation Service, ‘Offender Management Statistics for calendar year 2022’, <www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quar- terly-october-to-december-2022/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-decem- ber-2022-and-annual-2022>
8. Irish Prison Service, Annual Report 2022.
9. Justice Committee, The role of adult custodial remand in the criminal justice system: seventh report of session 2022–2023 (London: House of Commons, 2023).
10. Irish Prison Service, ‘Prisoner Population on Monday 1 April 2024’, <www.irishprisons.ie/ wp-content/uploads/documents_pdf/01-April-2024.pdf>
11. Ministry of Justice, HM Prison & Probation Service, ‘Offender management statistics quarter- ly: April to June 2023’, table 2.4b.
12. Ministry of Justice, ‘Criminal justice statistics quarterly: April to June 2023’, table Q4.4.
13. Law Reform Commission, Report on Suspended Sentences (Dublin: Law Reform Commission, 2020).
14. G. M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1958).
15. Kim Williams, Vea Papadopoulou, Natalie Booth, Prisoner’s childhood and family back- grounds: results from the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) longitudinal cohort study of prisoners (London: Ministry of Justice, 2012).
16. Ministry of Justice, ‘Women and the Criminal Justice System’, 2019, <www.gov.uk/govern- ment/statistics/women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2019>
17. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Annual Report 2021–2022 (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2022).
18. House of Lords written question HL8980, 17 July 2023.
19. Ministry of Justice, Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2021 (London: Min- istry of Justice, 2021).
20. Table 1.1 Ministry of Justice (2023) Compendium of re-offending statistics and analysis.
21. R (On the applications of P and Q) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2001] EWCA Civ 1151.
22. Joint Committee on Human Rights, The right to family life: children whose mothers are in prison (London: House of Commons, 2019).
23. Sentencing Council, ‘General guideline: overarching principles’, 2019, <www.sentencingcoun- cil.org.uk/overarching-guides/magistrates-court/item/general-guideline-overarching-princi- ples/>
24. Centre for Justice Innovation, ‘Expert Voices: Presumption against short sentences: the Scottish experience’, webinar, 9 January 2024, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP6zkXWkaIo>
25. Ministry of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly, (London, 2022).