Responding to Female Prisoners' Needs

We know a considerable amount about the difficulties female prisoners face before, during, and after sentence. Prisons have attempted to respond to this by introducing such devices as needs analyses, sentence plans, reviews, and the like. This article reports on a project that examined organizational responses to prisoners' needs. The fieldwork was carried out in three women's prisons in England and involved interviews with 200 prisoners, both pre- and postrelease. The article specifically addresses the difficulties in translating good practice into actual practice, in translating rhetoric into reality.