In the last 10 years the number of female prisoners

in Britain has quadrupled yet many are incarcerated for minor offences.
Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, asks why we continue to lock up the most vulnerable women in society Every time I visit a women’s prison I am struck by how distressed and ill so many of the women prisoners look. On arrival addicts huddle together, pale and stick-thin, some women are queueing for the telephone, desperately trying to put in place childcare arrangements for their children. Others are in shock, strangely still, staring into space.
Many of these women will have spent long hours in grossly inadequate prison escort vans. Some, particularly those who are pregnant, will have wet themselves on the journey. Staff will be working hard to process and assess new receptions and at the same time to treat these women decently and humanely.
Nonetheless, one commented that she felt like a number or “a catalogue delivery”, not a person at all. Where prisons have been able to establish “first night in custody centres”, such as those run by Catholic charity PACT, this helps to make entry to prison less traumatic and abrasive.
Just 10 years ago there were around 1,800 women in prison. Today there are almost 4,500. Women’s prisons are fast becoming our social dustbins. The courts use them to dispose of women failed by a range of public services.
Court liaison and diversion schemes are too patchy to catch women in need of mental health care. The National Treatment Agency has broken its promise to develop drug treatment specifically for women. Across the country there are just a handful of support and supervision centres designed to respond effectively to the needs of women offenders in the community. Instead prison has become a cheap provider of drug detox, low-level mental health treatment and psychiatric assessments for those on remand.
There is a high price to pay for this misuse of custody. Prison is not a place of safety. Fourteen women have already died in jail this year. Many women injure themselves repeatedly. Imprisonment will cause a third of women prisoners to lose their homes, reduce future chances of employment, shatter family ties and separate over 17,500 children from their mothers.
Women’s prisons are not reserved for serious and violent offenders. Most governors of women’s prisons would confirm that there are many women in prison who simply do not need to be there. More women are sent to prison for shoplifting than any other crime. Home Office figures show that 40 per cent of sentenced women serve just three months or less. Two-thirds of women enter prison on remand. When their case is considered one in five is acquitted altogether.
There is not much to do in prison. Constructive activity averages less than 24 hours a week. Efforts are being made to improve things. Some prisons have introduced specialist programmes and resettlement schemes. In most prisons staff do their best to respond to the needs of the women. Colleagues in healthcare and the chaplaincy also carry a high workload. But, working under pressure, staff have little time to help women to plan their sentence or prepare for their release back into the community. Visits have been dropping as population pressures drive women further away from family and friends.
Many women prisoners fear losing their children for good, being drawn back into prostitution and addiction and not having the kind of support they will need to make a go of things on release. Home Office figures reveal that just over half the women will be re-convicted within two years. One young mother confided: “If there was a place between a prison and home – but not a hostel – somewhere people could help and teach you real things so you can live and not have your baby taken away. It might help stop girls doing drugs or stealing or whatever. Somewhere that was clean, and like a home, I would like that.” Female jails are not full of happy, healthy women. Over half the women in prison report that they have suffered violence at home and one in three has experienced sexual abuse. A quarter have been in local authority care. Twothirds of women in prison have a neurotic disorder, such as depression, anxiety and phobias. Among the general household population less than a fifth of women suffer from these disorders. Women prisoners have a high rate of severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or delusional disorders: 14 per cent, compared to less than one per cent in the general population. Half of the women in prison are on prescribed medication, such as anti-depressants or anti-psychotic medicine. Over a third of women will have attempted suicide prior to imprisonment Earlier this year a set of shockingly ordinary selfharm and suicide figures was compiled by one small local women’s prison. In just six months one woman killed herself and, in a series of near misses, staff managed to resuscitate a further five. Special suicide risk monitoring procedures were instituted no less than 195 times, nine of which involved constant bed watches and eight admissions to outside hospital.
The 209 incidents recorded by the prison involved 41 distressed adults and 11 young women under the age of 21 who harmed themselves again and again. Hard-pressed, largely untrained, staff did their best to respond to the 13 attempted hangings and 28 self-strangulations. There were 112 incidents of cutting, 15 of wound aggravation, four of wall punching, two of head banging, two of burning and one severe scalding. In five separate episodes large amounts of medication were swallowed and, in a further two, glass and razor blades. One woman threatened to jump and one attempted to suffocate herself. Staff found, and destroyed, 23 ligatures. A short while ago this prison held one woman charged with harassing NHS Direct and another who had set fire to herself and a nearby tree and, as a consequence, was being held for criminal damage.
Why do we lock up our most damaged and vulner able women in bleak under-staffed institutions which, despite best efforts, are almost bound to make them worse? A woman exprisoner told the Prison Reform Trust: “During my incarceration I was to discover the depths of despair one can fall into, believing I was losing my mind, believing I was dead, believing I was buried alive, believing I would never be free. I learnt about selfharm, physically and emotionally, I learnt how to survive, yet at the same time I know how it feels to want to die every day... Prison is not a place for the mentally ill, and too many women are there already that should not be”.
Government policy on women offenders is shot through with contradictions. Committed to reducing women’s imprisonment, it is still pressing ahead with opening two new private prisons to hold a further 800 women. Promising to remove girls from prison, the Home Secretary is spending £16 million on specialist jail units for the under 18s. The first therapeutic prison for women has recently been uprooted to make space for men moving from overcrowded jails.
The Treasury Spending Review 2004 contains the promise that the Government will “pilot radical new approaches to meet the specific needs of women offenders, to tackle the causes of crime and re-offending among this group and reduce the need for custody”. Radical: not in the least, but certainly sensible, hopefully humane and long, long overdue.
The Prison Reform Trust commissioned an independent inquiry into women’s imprisonment chaired by Professor Dorothy Wedderburn. Since then it has published reports on women and mental health in prison and women on remand. For futher information visit www. prisonreformtrust.org.uk