My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for instituting this debate, and getting us to discuss the issues of vulnerable prisoners, particularly women, yet again. I shall also briefly address the right reverend Prelate, who argued that it was a Christian tradition to visit prisoners. All the world's faiths have a tradition of looking after the vulnerable. Certainly, my own tradition believes that we should break the prisoners free from their chains, as in the Book of Isaiah.

One reason the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is right to press for a women's justice board is that some of the worst statistics come from the women's prisons, where suicide rates, as we know, are so high, where self-harm is commonplace and the care of offenders seems wholly inadequate in many cases. From 1,811 women behind bars in 1994, only 12 years ago, the figure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, has stated, was 4,409 last Friday. The women are vastly overcrowded. Between January and June 2004, 10 women committed suicide, compared to 14 in the whole of 2003. The rates continue to rise.

As the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has said, many young offenders are parents. Facilities are inadequate both for the women who are mothers and their babies. These women are vulnerable, and the mothers are often the most vulnerable of all. Yet the Prison Service is, as a matter of course, taking babies from their mothers before they are a year old, even though most psychologists—of a variety of different opinions on almost everything else—agree that early separation can lead to long-term psychological problems for the child.

Mental illness and drug problems are commonplace. A case I find perhaps the most moving of many I have read over the last few years—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, referred in her remarks on Styal—is that of Sarah Campbell from Cheshire. She came from a conservative background and eventually ended up a heroin addict. She was sentenced to three years in Styal, a women's prison, after hassling an elderly man for drugs, who, petrified by Sarah and her friends, had a heart attack and died.

Sarah had spent six months on remand and, to her great delight, had become drug free. But she was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Styal, where she took an overdose within hours of beginning her sentence and died three days before her 19th birthday. At court, before her sentence, the liaison duty probation officer and a duty psychiatric nurse both warned that she might harm herself. It made no difference. Her mother, formerly a quiet, well behaved civil servant, has become what people describe as an "angry, vociferous risk-taker". Her experience of her daughter's death, a child with a known history of depression and drug dependency, has made her so furious, and opened her eyes to the fact that women are treated with medieval barbarity by our prison system:

"More and more women are being sent to prison when clearly they should be being treated for mental illness—and conditions once they reach jail are horrific . . . I have seen women who have used scouring pads and hairgrips to maim themselves".

Women prisoners are three times as likely as their male counterparts to commit suicide, despite being only 6 per cent of the prison population. They account for about half of all incidents of self harm. Pauline Campbell, Sarah Campbell's mother, argues that women in prison are an invisible issue—not so much now, thanks to the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. Nevertheless, they do not commit violent crimes and their offences are mostly theft, drugs or unpaid Bills. Two-thirds of women in prison suffer from at least one neurotic disorder, such as depression, anxiety or phobias, and more than half suffer from a personality disorder. Among the rest of the population, as the Bromley briefings tell us so powerfully, less than a fifth of women suffer from such disorders. Half of the women in prison are on some prescribed medication, such as antidepressants or antipsychotic medicines, and there is evidence, as the right reverend Prelate said, that the use of such medication increases in custody. So what is the point?

Even more worryingly, of all the women sent to prison, some 37 per cent say they have attempted suicide at some time, and nearly two-thirds of them have a drug problem. A quarter of them were in local authority care as a child, and the picture is one of illness, depression, loneliness, and addiction: not necessarily good reasons for seeing them in prison.

In an interview in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, said:

"In one women's prison there were six serious self-harm incidents a day. They were regularly cutting women down from ligatures. One woman was not only cutting her arms up but inserting Biros into her veins".

That is the situation we are seeing in our prisons. What is the point of the women being there?

Penny Mellor, a former prisoner, wrote movingly in the British Medical Journal about life in a women's prison:

"My experience inside three very different prisons was in itself very depressing; listening to the screaming and crying all night leaves you weary, alarms going off at all hours day and night as yet another inmate tries to kill themselves makes you jumpy and renders you physically exhausted, your heart sinking and your mind praying that it won't be somebody you've grown fond of that's hurt themselves; prison officers' faces etched in stress related lines as they run to unlock a door not knowing what they will find on the other side, no wonder members of the Prison Service"— the article was written some time ago—

"are looking to strike over conditions and pay".

She continued:

"If you weren't mentally ill when you went in, you certainly are after a very short space of time".

Some people might argue that that is special pleading from a former prison inmate, but it appears that it is not. Women prisoners' suicide and self-harm rates are now at a record high. The introduction of the NHS as the provider of mental health services in prisons is a good thing and is much to be welcomed, but, as yet, it has not made much difference. As Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said on launching her report on what was happening about suicide, self-harm and the mentally distressed:

"Prison is a punishment of last resort. It is cruel to lock up mentally ill women and it does lasting harm to them and their families".

Everyone agrees that prisons are not the place for vulnerable people and that women tend to be more vulnerable in prison than men. So why do the Government not listen? Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether it is just a desire to be punitive. Do they truly believe that people have a better chance of treatment for drugs and mental illnesses inside prison? Or is it simply that it would not play well in the media to say that women should not be sent to prison unless they have committed violent offences?

The interview with the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, published in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph—which is not necessarily known for its sympathetic views towards prisoners—reported:

"There has, she says, been a 'huge increase' in people in prison. 'Prisons are often acting as mental hospitals and that is not what they are designed to be,' . . . 'We are reaping the harvest of closing down our large mental hospitals without providing either proper community care or sufficient secure mental health care. That partially accounts for the overcrowding'.

"At the same time, she believes that too many drug addicts are being incarcerated when they could be treated, more cheaply and more effectively, in the community. 'I met a couple of sisters who I'd seen before in the prison. One of them said, 'I came out but got back on to drugs. I was so ill I felt I needed to get back into the safety of the prison. So I said to my sister let's go and shoplift from M&S'.

"At one women's prison, Ms Owers says, 80 per cent of the inmates are serious drug addicts. Its prisoners have two or three times the national average level of mental illness, a third of them have tried to commit suicide and most have experienced sexual abuse.

"We are expecting prisons to be our 'too difficult' tray, a place where we put people because we don't know what else to do with them . . . Prisons are not meant to be places where we mop up every social ill. They should be places to deal with, punish and deter serious criminals".

I believe that the Chief Inspector of Prisons and her predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, are right. We need a women's justice board to tackle these issues. What is going on now is unacceptable in a civilised country. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some comfort and say that the Government are changing their mind.