Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
It was hoped that those deaths marked a tragic turning point and they did, to a degree. In 2005, First Night centers opened in women’s prisons, the first, poignantly in Styal. The centers operate mental health assessment programs and detoxification units, aimed at better identifying women at risk when they arrive.
Then, as now, the particular problems facing women in prison were well known. Many female prisoners have been sexually or physically abused as children, and experienced domestic violence as adults. Around a third were in care as children.
Many female prisoners are mothers and primary carers. Every year, around 18,000 children are affected by their mother being sent to jail. As women are usually the main caregiver, many end up in care. We can only guess how much that adds to the anguish of mothers behind bars. When the First Night center at Styal opened soon after Mothers’ Day the then governor said that 41 women had tried to kill themselves in his jail on that day.
In 2006, the government commissioned Baroness Jean Corston to carry out a review of vulnerable women in the Criminal Justice system. Her report made 43 recommendations and all bar two were accepted by the then labor government. Prison sentences should be reserved only for “serious or violent female offenders” she argued and women’s jails should be replaced, over time, by “geographically dispersed small multi-functional custodial units” which would help with mental health problems, addictions, housing and employment. This would help keep families together.
Eric Allison, writing in The Guardian, said:
Although the government rejected her advice to scrap large women’s jails, for a time, it appeared as though things were improving. The death toll dropped, with the next decade averaging three self-inflicted deaths a year. But these latest figures show the system lurching back towards the death tolls we hoped Corston’s legacy had left behind for good.
Why the upsurge? We know the prison service is in crisis, staff cuts and overcrowding are a toxic mix, but with female prisoners particularly, we have to look at one glaring fault – one warning that was ignored.
Despite all the evidence that smaller jails are better at reducing reoffending among female prisoners, of the 10 closed women’s jails in England, only one holds less than 300 women (282), the rest house 300 plus, with the largest holding 527.
In May, Michael Gove told the Radio Times that the the Archers storyline, of a woman locked up for stabbing her abusive husband, “reinforced the case for reform of women’s prisons” and that “too many women are in jail”. But his planned prison reforms barely touch on the plight of women prisoners. All of the six new reform prisons are male institutions and, apart from the closure of Holloway, women inmates barely rate a mention in the proposed changes.
Another country, close to home, has shown us the way. Last year, Scotland’s justice minister, Michael Matheson, scrapped plans to build a new large women’s prison and replaced it with a smaller one, holding just 80 inmates. Other female offenders are being placed in five small regional units offering help with drugs, alcohol, domestic abuse and mental health problems. And this in a country that has seen just one recorded suicide of a female prisoner in 10 years.
It is widely accepted that female prisoners are disproportionately likely to die in jail, but successive governments have ignored all the warning signs. We now have a female prime minister and justice secretary. Will they work together to stem the tide of deaths of female prisoners that should shame us all?
