Therapeutic or Therapunitive? Conceptualising Community Custody in Scotland

By: Lisa Mary Armstrong and Margaret Malloch

In June 2011, the Commission on Women Offenders was set up to explore ways to improve the justice system in Scotland. The Commission’s report made a broad range of recommendations echoing those of the Corston Review (2017) but for the most part have remained aspirational. In Scotland, change has been painfully slow with many women imprisoned on short term sentences and remand rates having spiralled during the pandemic. One of the recommendations to come out of the Commission’s report led to the building of two Community Custodial Units (CCUs). The units were designed to take into consideration the high rate of trauma and adversities that formed the experience of many women in prison. Consequently, the discourse of trauma-informed and gender-specific approaches to punishment has been pronounced. This chapter considers the aims and objectives of the restructuring of the women’s prison estate and the emphasis that it gives to conjoining ‘community’ and ‘custody’ in the operation of the two new units that are presented as the innovative pulse of the new Strategy for Women in Custody. We are interested in exploring the extent to which the prison is the most effective space for this attempt at community integration, in contrast to a distinct community resource. While acknowledging the recent introduction of the CCUs, we do not attempt to provide an evaluation of them, but rather to engage with the principles and ethos which underpin their conceptualisation.

Geographies of Gendered Punishment, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology