Holloway Prison in 2008. Photo: Matt S/Flickr Creative Commons
The coalition government has made a plea for a revolution in the prison system—but so far not a shot has been fired. And yet radical leadership is required from the government. Let it start with the closure of Holloway Prison, the sale of the land and its investment in something better and more humane. For Holloway is just one of the many prisons in Britain that is catastrophically damaging its women inmates.
In December 1995, David Ramsbotham was appointed as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons. His first inspection was of HMP Holloway. After three days he walked out of the north London women’s jail and wrote to the head of the Prison Service and the home secretary saying the team would not return until conditions at Holloway had improved.
Ramsbotham was succeeded by Anne Owers, who in January 2004 on an inspection of HMP Styal, a women’s prison in Cheshire, discovered that women who had been self-harming were being detained in punishment cells—against the prison rules. One woman had been punished because she had tried to hang herself.
Later that year, the women’s wing of Durham prison, the country’s only maximum security unit for women, was closed after a spate of suicides and self-harm and a critical inspection report.
In July 2010 Owers was replaced by Nick Hardwick, the former chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Seventeen years on from Ramsbotham’s infamous walkout of Holloway, Hardwick lambasted the terrible state of many female prisons in an extremely critical lecture at the University of Sussex.
He too had gone to Styal and said that the level of self-mutilation and despair in one of the units was so severe it “kept me awake at night.” The Keller Unit was “more shocking and distressing than anything I had yet seen on an inspection.” He concluded: “I hope we will look back on how we treated these women in years to come, aghast and ashamed.”
In the last two decades there has been only one shaft of light in the darkness: the Corston Report of March 2007. Commissioned by the Home Office to write a report on the needs of vulnerable women in custody, Baroness Jean Corston, a former Labour MP, concluded that there was a need for a “distinct, radically different,” approach, which took into account the overall health of inmates.
But as the fifth anniversary of the report’s publication approaches, there is little evidence of progress towards, let alone the achievement of, Corston’s principles. The women’s prison estate, remains a prison system for men that locks up women. The statistics of women in custody remain shocking. There are 4,000 women in prison, a number that has doubled since 1995. Of these, 60 per cent are serving a term of less than six months. Half come in on remand with 60 per cent not going on to receive a custodial sentence.
The Prison Reform Trust regularly catalogues their vulnerability, as well as the threat of social exclusion and poor mental health. Few inmates are violent or dangerous, except to themselves. They are failed by the jails incarcerating them and they have been championed by no one since Baroness Corston’s report. Pleas for a Women’s Justice Board, along the lines of the long-established Youth Justice Board, have been firmly rejected by Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt. There is no money.
There is money however, for large, over-secure institutions where the focus is on stopping the escape of women with nowhere to go. Places that chief inspectors find oppressive, shameful, or so bad that they walk out in disgust. Places that do not reform or keep safe the vulnerable women in their care. But like motorways, we have them so we fill them up. Close them down and we free up money for things that work and still leave change for secure custody of the tiny few who might really threaten society.
The coalition government has made a plea for a revolution in the prison system—but so far not a shot has been fired. And yet radical leadership is required from the government. Let it start with the closure of Holloway Prison, the sale of the land and its investment in something better and more humane. For Holloway is just one of the many prisons in Britain that is catastrophically damaging its women inmates.
In December 1995, David Ramsbotham was appointed as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons. His first inspection was of HMP Holloway. After three days he walked out of the north London women’s jail and wrote to the head of the Prison Service and the home secretary saying the team would not return until conditions at Holloway had improved.
Ramsbotham was succeeded by Anne Owers, who in January 2004 on an inspection of HMP Styal, a women’s prison in Cheshire, discovered that women who had been self-harming were being detained in punishment cells—against the prison rules. One woman had been punished because she had tried to hang herself.
Later that year, the women’s wing of Durham prison, the country’s only maximum security unit for women, was closed after a spate of suicides and self-harm and a critical inspection report.
In July 2010 Owers was replaced by Nick Hardwick, the former chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Seventeen years on from Ramsbotham’s infamous walkout of Holloway, Hardwick lambasted the terrible state of many female prisons in an extremely critical lecture at the University of Sussex.
He too had gone to Styal and said that the level of self-mutilation and despair in one of the units was so severe it “kept me awake at night.” The Keller Unit was “more shocking and distressing than anything I had yet seen on an inspection.” He concluded: “I hope we will look back on how we treated these women in years to come, aghast and ashamed.”
In the last two decades there has been only one shaft of light in the darkness: the Corston Report of March 2007. Commissioned by the Home Office to write a report on the needs of vulnerable women in custody, Baroness Jean Corston, a former Labour MP, concluded that there was a need for a “distinct, radically different,” approach, which took into account the overall health of inmates.
But as the fifth anniversary of the report’s publication approaches, there is little evidence of progress towards, let alone the achievement of, Corston’s principles. The women’s prison estate, remains a prison system for men that locks up women. The statistics of women in custody remain shocking. There are 4,000 women in prison, a number that has doubled since 1995. Of these, 60 per cent are serving a term of less than six months. Half come in on remand with 60 per cent not going on to receive a custodial sentence.
The Prison Reform Trust regularly catalogues their vulnerability, as well as the threat of social exclusion and poor mental health. Few inmates are violent or dangerous, except to themselves. They are failed by the jails incarcerating them and they have been championed by no one since Baroness Corston’s report. Pleas for a Women’s Justice Board, along the lines of the long-established Youth Justice Board, have been firmly rejected by Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt. There is no money.
There is money however, for large, over-secure institutions where the focus is on stopping the escape of women with nowhere to go. Places that chief inspectors find oppressive, shameful, or so bad that they walk out in disgust. Places that do not reform or keep safe the vulnerable women in their care. But like motorways, we have them so we fill them up. Close them down and we free up money for things that work and still leave change for secure custody of the tiny few who might really threaten society.
