Forging the path for residential community-based alternatives to imprisonment in England and Wales: Hope Street

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Gender-Sensitive Policies in Prison Systems (II)

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that sending women to prison is detrimental to women’s health and wellbeing. Separation from children and families upon imprisonment, often for short sentences disproportionately negatively impacts women, worsening existing multiple mental health needs and histories of trauma and abuse. Acknowledging that these issues are further compounded by the conditions of prison confinement government policy states community sentencing options are appropriate and necessary. However, despite strong policy rhetoric spanning the past two decades, concrete change has been painstakingly slow. Forging the way is a pioneering gender responsive residential alternative to prison also supporting women already under probation in the community called ‘Hope Street’, located in Southampton, UK. Aiming to be a blueprint for change for policymakers and practitioners, Hope Street opened in 2023 becoming available to magistrates in the South of England as an alternative community sentencing possibility. The intervention is distinctly alternative in a myriad of ways, perhaps the most striking being that women and their children are not separated due to sentencing but allowed to live together at Hope Street. Designed and run by the charity ‘One Small Thing’, women and their children are provided with a trauma-informed, gender-responsive residential environment, offered tailored support and access to a range of specialist services. An independent evaluation is under way to gather the evidence on the impact of Hope Street for the women living there, towards building the knowledge base on community-based residential alternatives. This paper introduces the intervention and the evaluation by one of the evaluation research team, offering some reflections on some of the learning in first two years of operations of running the first gender responsive trauma-informed residential community-based service.

Author

• Donna Arrondelle, University of Southampton