The urgent need to devolve powers over justice is not only a question of principle; as we've heard already, it is necessary to gain greater fairness for our people, to help people when they are at their most vulnerable. We have heard already about institutional racism in parts of our current justice system; I'd like to focus my remarks on the ways in which our present system not only lets down women, but exacerbates their trauma.

The Equality and Social Justice Committee has, I know, looked at this, and found a worrying lack of progress since Baroness Corston's work on this area 16 years ago. The committee has highlighted how counterproductive short custodial sentences are for female offenders—again, this is from our current system—citing evidence from the Prison Reform Trust that 60 per cent of prison sentences handed out to women in Wales in 2021 were for less than six months. Those will often be for petty offences. Women are more likely to be the primary carers of children, meaning that their incarceration will throw their families into the mouth of a lion. Nobody in those families will come out unscathed by that experience of separation, loss and trauma—they will be ripped apart.

A six-month prison term—again, what is put out by this current system—cannot be motivated by any hope of rehabilitating a person into society, or of encouraging them to change their ways. It is a punishment, slapped down on people who often offend for complicated reasons—a sense of hopelessness because of neglect or abuse or the fact that support services haven't been there to get them onto a better track, or indeed the cost-of-living crisis. So many petty crimes could be avoided if we invested in caring for people instead of criminalising them. And it's not only a question of doing what's right, it's also a question of resource. Short prison terms are statistically far more likely to lead to reoffending. The Women in Prison charity has found that over 70 per cent of women released after prison sentences of less than 12 months reoffend within one year, meaning nobody is learning anything from the experience—it just makes things worse, and sets up this cycle of carelessness, abandonment and blame.

This system lets down female survivors of crime badly too. UK Government statistics show that only 1.9—. We've heard these harrowing statistics of how few recorded rapes result in conviction. Almost 70 per cent of survivors of rape withdraw from investigations because of their loss of faith in the system. As the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has found, it is a system that retraumatises survivors of violence because of a lack of support in family and criminal courts. I know from my experience of working with survivors of stalking and coercive control about the devastating, shattering impact that that retraumatisation can have—that cycle of carelessness all over again.

Devolving justice in and of itself, Dirprwy Lywydd, won't signal an automatic change, but transferring those powers, if it is accompanied by work at the ground level, by investing in social services, refuges, training for police, and integrating these services more effectively, will start to mean that fewer women will fall through those gaping gaps in our system. I know the cross-party group on women has looked at this too. It can start to rebalance the scales, and to mean that instead of thinking of justice as a system of punishment, it can instead be a mechanism for mercy. Mercy is what is so often missing from our justice system—that quality that is never strained, which, as Portia reminds us, can 'season justice'. And as well as mercy, we might strive for a society where desire for the common good, where responsibility for other people's well-being is a cornerstone of how we live our lives. That is how we will obtain true justice, because as Helen Keller said,

'Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained'.

So, let's give ourselves the tools to make that investment in our fellow citizens, to make the choices that will make our society a less careless place, a safer place, and, most of all, a merciful one.