Scotland's Community Custody Units for women praised but researchers warn reform is needed

A new report into Community Custody Units has painted a mixed picture, with positive feedback from women about their accommodation and access to healthcare, but concerns raised over staff training and how aligned the current units are with their original remit. 

When HMP Lilias in Glasgow and HMP Bella in Dundee opened in 2022, they signalled a new approach to rehabilitating and reintegrating female offenders through trauma-informed, gender-specific practices rather than punishment.

A research team, led by researchers at the University of Glasgow and involving colleagues from the University of Stirling and University of Cambridge, spoke to 33 women living in the Community Custody Units (CCUs). They described feeling safe living there and liked having access to on-site health and social care staff, and in the most part spoke positively about staff. 

However, the researchers also found that the strict rules set out by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) were inhibiting the originally stated ethos of the CCUs, which was to change the way that Scotland manages women in custody.

Bored and disaffected

Professor Michele Burman from the University of Glasgow, who led the research team based at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, said: “There is a real danger that HMP Lilias and HMP Bella have become ‘mini prisons’ because they have retained many of the features of more traditional prisons and are not the radical departure that was first envisaged. 

“Where we might have seen strong relationship building between staff and the women living in these units, we saw there was a constant fear of having community access withdrawn, or of being returned to closed prison conditions, which meant that women withheld issues of concern from officers. 

“We also noted that body searches were still being carried out, which makes developing trust difficult, especially if women have already experienced trauma. There was also a lack of purposeful activity, with limited access to life skills and cooking lessons, leaving many of the women we spoke to feeling bored and disaffected.” 

Risk-averse decision making

Dr Annie Crowley, University of Glasgow and one of the co-authors of the report, which was commissioned by the Scottish Government, said there were fewer examples of women being integrated into the community than expected.

Dr Crowley said: “The biggest risk to the CCUs realising their intended vision is the lack of women being given opportunities to integrate meaningfully into the community. From our research we found there was a culture of risk-averse decision making which may be acting as a barrier to these women."

Dr Crowley added: “We also found throughcare services were probably better managed in closed prisons than they were in these CCUs.”

Throughcare refers to the provisions put in place while someone is in custody to support their move back into the community.

As part of the research, the team spoke to 40 CCU officers and found most demonstrated commitment to their role and a shared view about wanting to do their best for the women in their care. However, they also showed their understanding of gender-specific and trauma-informed approaches was limited and lacked depth of understanding.  

During interviews with researchers, CCU staff said they felt training was limited and voiced concern over the level of support provided to them by SPS senior management. 

Continuous improvement

The report sets out ten key recommendations, including more training for officers, a call for the culture of continuous improvement to be embedded in the CCUs, investment in technology such as body scanners to replace body searches, and a review into throughcare arrangements.

The University of Stirling led on evaluating engagement with delivery partners, highlighting the importance of increasing opportunities for services in the community to support women during sentences and following release.    

The University of Stirling’s Professor Margaret Malloch, co-author of the report, said: “The study identified the need to encourage and support greater engagement with services in the community. This would enable delivery partners to provide more direct provision for women and would more effectively support the reintegration that many of those partners anticipated would happen." 

The full report, Scottish Prisons Assessment and Review of Outcomes for Women (SPAROW), is available at http://www.gov.scot/ISBN/9781806434312.