by Pryce, Vicky
According to recent data 15.6 per cent of women in prison are there for drugs offences29 with many more sentenced for property-related offences to fund their drug habits. Drug dependence in the year before entering prison is as high as 54 per cent for remand prisoners and 41 per cent for sentenced prisoners.30 I have been told in fact that in some prisons access to drugs is easier than on the outside. A survey by the Prison Reform Trust in 2012 backs up previous academic research in finding that 19 per cent of prisoners who had ever used heroin reported first trying it in prison.31
I discovered that a number of the girls on A3 were apparently on remand and there was a general sigh of relief from the other girls for the few quiet hours everyone was able to have when these troubled girls were taken to court. And the girls didn’t often come back; those on remand didn’t always end up receiving a custodial sentence. In addition to higher rates of substance misuse, remand prisoners have been shown to suffer more from a range of emotional and mental health problems, though whether this is due to the uncertainty about their future, or the reason for their being denied bail, is unclear. The Ministry of Justice found that nearly twice as many remand prisoners by comparison to convicted prisoners rated highly for various symptoms of neurosis, including sleep problems, worry, fatigue, depression and irritability. Phobias, panic and obsessive behaviour were also significantly more common among remand prisoners. When asked, some 23 per cent of female remand prisoners reported having considered suicide within the previous week, while just over a quarter had attempted suicide within the past year. In addition, roughly twice as many remand prisoners are prescribed antipsychotics or anti-anxiety medication.32
Others on my landing included Irish ‘travellers’ who had somehow got into trouble together with their boyfriends, who were also arrested and in prison; a couple of girls in for hurting someone after they got too drunk one night out and who were serving a few months each; and a girl who had an accountancy qualification, had gone out one evening along with her boyfriend and some of his friends and found herself the object of attention by a different gang of boys. Scuffles broke out, she threw a bottle of Ribena at someone but in the scuffle a boy from her group knifed someone from the other group. The girl and one other didn’t run away and were sentenced to a number of years in jail on the charge of ‘joint enterprise’. This is an old charge but one used increasingly, so it seemed, to deal with gangs that committed crimes in groups. It makes sense as a concept but in the way I saw it exercised – if I were to believe what I was being told – it seemed that this joint enterprise or ‘association’ was now so widely used and caused so much hardship for many young girls that all proportionality was removed during sentencing.
I resolved to investigate that further while I was in prison and after I came out. It was obvious to me straight away that my position was different to most people there. Some of them were likely to be spending many years in prison or were serial offenders and serving successive short-term sentences. The proportion of women leaving prison who are reconvicted within twelve months is a staggering 54 per cent, rising to 90 per cent for those who have served ten or more previous custodial sentences.33 Reconviction does not automatically mean a custodial sentence, of course, but there is something wrong with a prison system that perpetuates itself and is unable to help the women who pass through it. Imagine the outcry if half the women treated by the NHS were soon back in hospital. We would replace doctors, ministers and executives. I felt I could begin to make sense of it all by talking to fellow prisoners and looking at all the evidence that others working in the area had gathered. This was clearly a very weird environment for anyone to find oneself in and such a waste of time, public money and misdirected effort as it seemed to have little impact on reoffending. I knew already that the past twenty years or so had seen a momentous increase in the prison population (people can’t have suddenly become that much worse behaved, surely); indeed, the number of women in prison increased by 85 per cent between 1996 and 2011.34 Between 2000 and 2010 alone the population of women in prison had increased by 27 per cent. Despite the election of so many women as MPs, many of whom became ministers after 1997, and the commission of Baroness Corston to complete the first review of women in prison, we still sadly saw the biggest increase in the incarceration of women in British prison history. Did none of their colleagues at the Treasury ever ask if spending all that taxpayers’ money locking up women (and many men) was efficient public expenditure?
Many of the girls I spoke to had young babies and children, and more often than not seemed to be in prison due to or because they were fleeing from an abusive relationship. Data suggests that the number of women in prison who have been physically, emotionally or sexually abused as children is as high as 53 per cent.35 And Karen Elgar, governor of HMP Send, a closed women’s prison in Surrey, wrote in a report on fashion education in prisons that ‘often … women become involved in criminal activity through unhealthy, violent or dependent relationships with men – and consequently have very poor levels of self-esteem and no self-confidence’. Not surprisingly, a highly publicised study by the Prison Reform Trust published during my two months in East Sutton Park drew attention to the fact that although women represent only 5 per cent of the entire prison population they account for a third of all the incidents of self-harm.36
Indeed this has been a problem that prisons such as Holloway have been struggling with for some time. Angela Devlin, in her seminal book Invisible Women: What’s Wrong with Women’s Prisons?,37 points out the difficulty of caring properly for women in a building originally meant to be a hospital, with its twisting corridors built for pushing patient trolleys along. It makes supervision and control rather difficult and obliges the prison to have offices for prison staff in practically each corner to allow a proper view of what is going on. Lord Ramsbotham says that Holloway bears all the marks of a prison designed by a committee. And Nick Hardwick describes Holloway as ‘horrible and too big’. In his view, if the prison works it is only because of its location – people prefer to stay there rather than being relocated to, say, Reading prison or Bronzefield women’s prison in Kent because it keeps them close to their families. At least in Holloway there are lots of staff around who are visible for the prisoners to approach and discuss various matters. Nick Hardwick explained that in a number of the new private prisons, although you have a nice cell, a lot of gadgetry to order your food, a good canteen and anything else you might need including being able to make appointments for many prison services and education courses, the key element missing is human contact. This reduces the need for staff and also takes away the necessary interaction with other inmates and staff. In consequence nobody really knows you or understands your despairs and no one is able to correctly assess the risk you are in and the real help you need, and therefore care for you. Interpersonal relationships are reduced to a minimum in the quest for greater efficiency and lower running costs.
Liz Padmore is one of the best-known public sector non-executive directors. When still a partner at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) she took part in a scheme some years ago facilitated by Business in the Community, which encouraged big companies like Andersen Consulting, British Airways, Centrica and also the Guardian newspaper to ‘adopt’ prisons. Liz picked Holloway and she was one of the people who spent a lot of time with the then governor Tony Hassall, sharing knowledge and focusing mainly on how to manage the prison better and reduce the incidence of self-harm and female suicides. She certainly came away with the impression during her mentoring period that women were in jail for having committed much smaller crimes than men and that the impact on families and society of removing those women was, in her words, ‘draconian’ in relation to their crimes. The vast percentage of the female prison population she encountered and of which she heard of during her mentoring either had a drugs problem, which they were often introduced to by their ‘boyfriends’ or at times their pimps, or they were made to steal or push drugs for money to feed their and thei
r boyfriends’ drug habits, or they had been in an abusive relationship with boyfriends who coerced them into being ‘drug mules’. She came across cases of Colombian ‘mules’ who had been caught importing drugs and who were probably coerced to do so by threats to their families if they did not comply. And many other women were in for pretty short sentences during which they learned nothing to help them survive life on the outside, and instead gained a distrust of authority and bleak prospects for future employment. Indeed a report for the National Offender Management Service in 2012 suggested that only 8.4 per cent of women go straight into employment after short sentences of less than a year compared to 27.3 per cent of men.38
During her period of mentoring Liz explained that she supported Tony Hassall’s decision to close the rather large officers’ gym and have the officers share the inmates’ gym. The officers’ gym was then converted to a hairdressing salon – and they are now prevalent in all educational annexes of most prisons, allowing inmates to train and take NVQs while in prison and therefore offering some hope of employment after release. I later met girls who had been in Peterborough prison, for example, who also reported that the beauty therapy course there was extremely popular and a good preparation for the outside world. When I later moved to open prison, I found that there was indeed a lot of interest in beauty therapy and girls combined the classes with a business enterprise course, with many of them intending to run their own business in this area after they left prison. I had the chance to look at a number of the business plans the girls were using to raise external funding for their business and to pay for extra qualifications while they were still inside. And many had succeeded in finding potential funders. In the case of East Sutton Park, this was done with the help of the highly rated ‘Vision’ office, which acts as an interface for the residents and the outside education and employment worlds. Working Chance, a charity run by Jocelyn Hillman, is the main employment agency for women offenders and ex-offenders, and helps run a three-day course on employment skills: the girls apply for a dummy job, then someone comes in from the outside to ‘interview’ them and they then receive feedback on their performance and tips on how to improve. Working Chance operates inside prisons but also runs courses in its offices in Islington, which are very popular.
The girls on my landing were generally very friendly. Not only did they take care of me but they chatted non-stop whenever we were together. It would often be the case that as I was passing the two phone boxes in our landing girls would shout greetings from their mothers. That is, of course, the way that information sneaks out, unless it comes from the officers themselves. There was huge interest in the press in how I was coping and the story in the papers the following day was that I was fine and spending time socialising with other girls in their cells. It amazed me that anyone should be interested in that. I realised why a few days later once I got access to newspapers following my transfer to ESP. The expectation was that because of the high publicity of the case I would have a hard time in Holloway. In an article for the Telegraph a few days after my conviction, the crime writer Lynda La Plante wrote that given that my face was now as ‘familiar as a movie star’s’ what awaited me was likely to be quite sinister, ‘a frightening and alien environment’, with cat-calls and abuse ‘yelled over and over again’.39 She may indeed have witnessed that sort of behaviour when she was visiting Holloway and spending time talking with and observing inmates and staff, but in truth my own experience could not have been more different. It is true that there wouldn’t be many (if any) other women like me in Holloway but I encountered no animosity, sniping, bitching or negative treatment from anyone, either among my fellow inmates or from the officers. Instead there was huge sympathy from all and a general desire, it seemed to me, to make me feel better about being there.
I had always thought that the main impact of being sent to prison was that it took away your liberty for a while. And that should be enough and allow you to pay back society for whatever you may or may not have done, or at least satisfy people that justice was being served. But soon after I went to prison, a number of girls told me that in fact their worst moments were during the trial, where things were said about them that they didn’t recognise. During the coverage of their trial they felt they had been singled out by the judge and the press for being a ‘bad’ female – a rare thing. And once in prison there is the added frustration of having little control over external events. With no mobile phone and no internet, there’s no awareness of what may be appearing in the press and little opportunity of putting forward a defence or reassuring beleaguered family and friends. Reputations may be shattered; some girls were so worried about what was being said about them in their local papers they had no idea how they could ever possibly return to their homes. But one just had to put up with it and trust that friends and relatives would rise above it all and learn to cope. Worrying about how their children were coping in their absence was a major preoccupation of all the women with children I met in prison. At least mine were grown up and able, in general, to take care of themselves and make their own decisions. Many others were not in that position.
As I have mentioned earlier, 66 per cent of women prisoners have dependent children (of which 34 per cent have children under five years old40), and for 85 per cent of women prisoners, their time in prison is their first prolonged period of separation from their children. 41 Mothers in prison experience a high degree of emotional distress and trauma from the separation and their inability to care for their children. One mother reported, ‘If I ever received news from home about my son having problems, it drove me to despair. I would be really distraught at not being able to do anything for him.’42 The consequences of this trauma can be profound. A female prisoner interviewed by the Women’s Justice Taskforce said, ‘I went into prison as someone with no mental health issues. I became someone that began to self harm … the pain inside me from being separated from my daughter was so intense that the only way to stop that would be to bang my head on the wall and to cut to give myself physical pain to stop that in my tummy.’43
In 2007, Baroness Corston headed an inquiry into women in prisons after the deaths of six women at HMP Styal within the space of twelve months. Approximately 2,200 children of imprisoned mothers are taken into care each year44 and the evidence so clearly suggests that the short- and long-term impact on those children can be devastating. Children in care have a very high propensity to become offenders themselves. Less than 1 per cent of children overall in England were in care in March 2011.45 And yet conservative estimates are that up to half of under-eighteens in young offender institutions have at some point been in care.46 Children with imprisoned parents may feel emotions of anger, distress at separation, low self-esteem, confusion and fear, all of which may translate into defiant, destructive and attention-seeking behaviour.47 A study of thirty-six children with imprisoned mothers in the US found that 75 per cent of the children exhibited behavioural symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Imprisoning mothers for non-violent offences is estimated to cost the state £17m over ten years, with the biggest expense coming from increased numbers of young adults whose mothers have gone to prison becoming NEETs – ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ – drug users or involved with crime.48 Even after taking into account the effects of parental convictions and other childhood risk factors, children who are separated from a parent due to imprisonment are four times more likely to display a whole range of antisocial coping behaviours, including fighting, drinking heavily, taking illegal drugs, poor relationships with parents and partners, divorce, separation from their own children, being frequently unemployed, increased levels of delinquency, and an increased likelihood of being convicted themselves for criminal offences. What’s more, this behaviour is likely to persist as the children enter adulthood.49
In short, as Baroness Corston noted in her investigation into the problems of women’s imprisonment, the effects of unstable, uncertain care arrangements in place for
the children are ‘often nothing short of catastrophic’.50
Yvonne Roberts, writer for The Observer and commentator and trustee of the charity Women in Prison, says that many women are too scared to tell the system that they have children when they are arrested as they fear that they would lose them. This was reinforced in discussions with Jacquie Russell of Women’s Breakout, a charity representing forty-seven women-focused organisations around the country. I was astonished. I had not encountered such behaviour since the mid-1970s, when I became manager of the economics office at a Scottish bank. One of the women who worked for me, though some years older, confessed that she had successfully hidden from her employers for over a decade the fact that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter, fearing discrimination and quite possibly the sack if she came clean as the equal opportunities law did not exist when she first started working. Because she finally had a woman boss she felt she could tell me.
Though some women facing a custodial sentence make arrangements to have their children looked after by a family member, interestingly research suggests that a large percentage, possibly some 50 per cent of women, don’t expect to be sent to prison at all.51 I spoke to girls myself who had been assured by their solicitors that they would be spared prison and who also trusted that their pre-sentence probation report, which recommended alternatives to custody, would be taken seriously. The result, I am told, is that they often go to court to be sentenced having left their small children in the care of neighbours for the day, fully expecting to be back to pick them up that evening. One woman I met, who had been a HR manager in a software company, told me how when she went to be sentenced for what she thought was a minor fraud charge she had been assured by those who wrote her pre-sentence report and by her solicitor, who she trusted, that there was no way she was going to be sent to prison. She remembers looking at other women who were turning up with bags with clothes and other personal items to take in with them and thinking how sad that must be. When the sentence of eighteen months was passed she was shocked. Not only had she not prepared her husband and children for it, she had nothing of use with her when she went in. All she had in her handbag was a deodorant and a makeup powder container with a mirror inside which the officers removed because it was dangerous and could be used for attack or self-harm. One can imagine the heartbreak, stress and agony these women feel when they are unexpectedly sent down as they have often made no arrangements for their family to survive while they are away and therefore the chances of the children being taken into care increase markedly.
