New women's community custody unit to open in Dundee
- Published
The Bella Centre will house 16 low-risk offenders
A new women's community custody unit, described as the first of its kind in the UK, will open in Dundee next week.
The Bella Centre, based in the city's Hilltown area, will house 16 low-risk offenders.
The centre, which does not have high perimeter walls or barred windows, features shared house-style accommodation.
The Scottish Prison Service said it marked a significant step-change in the way women were supported in custody.
A second community custody unit, the Lilias Centre, will open in Glasgow later this year.
The cost of the two community units is £16m, with three further units planned, depending on evaluation of the Dundee and Glasgow sites.
A smaller £57m national prison for women to replace HMP Cornton Vale is due to open in Stirling next year.
The Bella Centre includes communal living spaces downstairs and individual bedrooms upstairs.
Residents in the community custody unit have their own rooms
The residents will be supported to live independently, and encouraged to take responsibility for their own personal care, laundry, and housekeeping.
The women can also meet visitors in the centre's community hub and access support networks to help reintegrate into the community on their release.
Community Safety Minister Ash Regan said: "It takes a gender-specific and trauma-informed approach to better prepare women for re-integration back into their communities.
"Enhanced access to the community will enable women to retain family ties while allowing supportive partnerships in the locality to flourish."
More than 1,000 local residents signed a petition objecting to the unit when plans were put before Dundee City Council in 2018.
There's an infectious atmosphere of optimism in the Bella Centre.
Some of the staff openly admit they can't quite believe they're working in such a place. When the prisoners start to arrive next week, they'll no doubt share the same sense of culture shock.
The intention was to make the community custody unit as little like a prison as possible, and inside it does feel more like a budget hotel or Ikea showroom than a traditional jail.
Named after Bella Keyzer, a welder who blazed a trail for women's rights in Dundee's shipyards, the centre is the first adult penal establishment to operate in the city since 1927.
The Scottish Prison Service claims it represents a UK-first and it's certainly like nothing Dundee or Scotland has seen before.
The complex has been built on the former site of primary school in the city's Hilltown and resembles a smart modern housing development.
There's security at the main entrance, unobtrusive cameras and a tall perimeter fence. The staff wear prison service uniforms but there's no barbed wire, clanging metal gates or foreboding cell blocks. The windows have blinds instead of bars.
A prison service official compared it to student accommodation, with house-style shared living and cooking facilities and an individual bedroom for each of the 16 prisoners.
Some of the women will be allowed out into the community and they'll get £40 a week to buy their own food. The SPS says only carefully selected, low risk prisoners will be allowed to come here.
Many will have backgrounds of trauma, adverse childhood experiences, emotional problems, learning difficulties and issues with addiction, self harm and mental health.
The centre will try to address these deeply rooted problems, boost the women's confidence, improve their life skills, and reduce their chances of coming back to prison. That's why it's been built. To try a new way of tackling the cycle of offending, prison, release, and reoffending.
One obvious challenge will be the fact that some of them will find it hard to readjust to life on the outside, having spent the end of their sentence in such a safe and comfortable environment.
And some local people will have to be won over. There was opposition to the centre. It is still a place of incarceration after all, albeit one in sheep's clothing. It's possible that a very small number of the prisoners will be preparing for release from life sentences.
To a certain extent, the Bella Centre is a carefully considered, multi-million pound experiment and it's in the interest of everyone - the women, their families and the entire country - that it works.