Yet Holloway has not been not full of happy,
healthy women. Half of those there have suffered domestic violence, and one in three has experienced sexual abuse. Three in ten have been in local authority care. Half of women in prison suffer from anxiety and depression and a quarter report symptoms indicative of psychosis—compared with 4 per cent of the general population.
Nearly half of women who are imprisoned will already have attempted suicide. Women, who make up only 5 per cent of the prison population, account for a quarter of the incidents of self harm in custody.
Sufragette sent to Holloway Prison
Holloway is soon to close, but selling it off as prime real estate is the clearest message to the courts that prison is not the place to dump vulnerable women who have committed petty, non-violent offences and who have so often been victims of serious crime themselves. Women’s prisons have become stopgap, cut-price providers of drug detox, social care, mental health assessment and treatment – a refuge for those failed by public services.
Juliet Lyons, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said:
We are still locking up our most damaged and vulnerable women in bleak, under-resourced institutions, from which, despite the best efforts of staff, they are almost bound to emerge more damaged, more vulnerable.
When women do go to prison, it has a huge impact on family life because most are primary carers. As to their children, though only a minority are taken into local authority care, most are farmed out to relatives and friends. Imprisonment will cause a third of women prisoners to lose their homes, reducing their future chances of employment and shattering families.
Alternatives to incarceration do exist, but need to be developed. Across the UK, women’s centers, police triage schemes and liaison and diversion health services respond effectively to women offenders in the community. Unlike prisons, which diminish responsibility and increase dependence, these succeed in enabling vulnerable women to take responsibility for their lives. London, where there is the highest disproportionate use of custody in the country, is particularly short of these community sentences that command the confidence of the courts.
What is certain is that simply decanting women from a not-fit-for-purpose Holloway up the road to leafier Surrey will not do enough to reduce the needless use of imprisonment for women.
Lyons asked:
Do we really need women’s prisons on this scale at all? Small custodial units could be developed for the few women who have committed serious and violent offences and the sum raised from the sale of the prison could be invested in community sentences and women’s centers – not just funneled down the prison building drain.
This would give women who have offended their first real opportunity to beat drugs, drink, mental illness and crime, and take responsibility for their lives, and those of their children. Most will take it.
