Authors: Vicky Pryce
This is especially a problem given the small number of women’s prisons: there are 118 prisons for men compared to only thirteen women’s prisons (and in Wales, there is none of the latter). Data for 2009 showed that the average female prisoner was being held 55 miles away from her home. In 2009, around 753 women were held more than 100 miles away.
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A 2002 study from the Social Exclusion Unit found that only around half of the women in prison who had lived or were in contact with their children before they were sent to prison received visits from
their families, compared to 75 per cent of men.
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That is hardly surprising given that a 2006 study by the Revolving Doors Agency based in Styal prison found that 70 per cent of mothers who had been sent to prison had had their children taken away from them.
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Many girls in ESP told me that the visiting costs were prohibitive for families hoping to visit them in prison. Fortunately, for those who have passed their Facility Licence Eligibility Date (known rather amusingly by the acronym FLED) and are able to visit their families, the prison covers their travel costs – at least while the girls are not in paid employment during their prison sentence.
The practicalities for families of travelling long distances to remote prison locations by public
transport
can be challenging, more so with small children or where there are no visitor centres at the prison to provide refreshment and facilities after a long
journey
. At Drake Hall prison in Staffordshire the only facility for visitors is a waiting cabin outside the main gate.
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Where children are being cared for by family members who have work or other childcare responsibilities, or where children are in the care of the local authority, it may be extremely difficult for these carers to facilitate and support prison visits. Timings of the visiting schedule can negatively impact upon the number of visits a prisoner receives. In Holloway the visits were every fourteen days and held in the middle of the afternoon – hardly the best time of the day. I was lucky in ESP as the visits occurred each weekend and you could pick a Saturday or Sunday slot. However, in general,
evening
and weekend visiting slots remain rare across prisons as this does not coincide with the prison
regime and weekday daytime slots are difficult if family members are at school or work.
Women prisoners have commented that the prison environment is unsuitable for children and some elect not to have their children visit at all.
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Uniformed officers, routine searches, security measures and visits in large halls where women prisoners are not allowed any physical contact with their children can
undoubtedly
be bewildering and intimidating for young
children
. Recent efforts within the prison estate to make prisons more family focused and child friendly, such as the introduction of family days, have reportedly fallen victim to budget cuts.
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As a consequence, many women endure their prison sentence isolated and without any familial support. A prison governor recounted the different
experiences
of men and women upon release. ‘Most men were met at the gate by a welcoming party: partner, friends, drink. Almost all women walked alone from the prison gate.’
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Some of the latest government proposals for reforming prisons and improving rehabilitation do include recommendations for having special units for women attached to men’s prisons. But experts say the drawbacks may offset the benefits, something that will be discussed later.
This problem of being distant from family can also act as a disincentive to go for paid jobs, which are so important for ensuring the move back to the outside world goes smoothly. At times the cost of the fares to and from the job, and the loss of subsidy for home leave (particularly important for those with relatives far away), may be more than the payment the girls receive. The initial excitement at applying and then securing a
job with a much better wage than the jobs within the prison quickly dissipates when the girls realise how much of the wage they will actually retain. Income tax is subtracted (though they may be able to claim this back at the end of the financial year) and roughly 40 per cent is retained by the prison, something
introduced
by the Prisoners Earnings Act, implemented in September 2011, to go towards victim support.
Being able to care for your relatives is, of course, crucial even when inside. I was saddened when I heard that Mandy, a lovely South African girl who also sat at my table and who has four children to care for, was recently sent back to a closed prison and is facing more fraud charges because, possibly in desperation, she did not inform the authorities that her employer on the outside had moved her from a volunteer to a paid member of staff, and she had continued to receive all the benefits while not paying dues to the prison.
Inevitably over the next couple of months I got to know many women reasonably well and most just wanted to tell their stories. I was astonished how many felt they were not guilty and complained that they were given the wrong advice by their solicitor. And many had been remand prisoners or on bail, sometimes for quite an extended period, before they were sentenced. In many instances it seems they had become so depressed by this state of affairs that they had lost all strength to carry on fighting. Using the Freedom of Information Act the BBC asked for and received figures in late May 2013 which showed that there were 57,000 people on bail, with 3,000 or so, a number of them women, on bail for more than six months. As I spoke to people in ESP, a number of
the women there were in jail for fraud. Although the violent crimes category for women has the highest number of offenders in it of all categories if looked at individually, the percentage of the total crimes that are violent remains small. Women generally tend to commit non-violent crimes like fraud, and cases take time to be examined properly because they are usually complex.
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This may go some way to explain why 16 per cent of the female prison population at the end of June 2013 was on remand, in comparison to only 13 per cent of male prisoners.
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Aanjay, who was at ESP for fraud, told me how her solicitor had to ring up continually over a period of nine months to find out what the police were going to do after she was first arrested. During that period she had been free to travel but her ability to work and look properly after her five children and her Italian husband was destroyed. And then she was put in jail as they thought that she might instead try to abscond. She was on remand for a further eight months. She pleaded guilty as she was told that at least that way she would be assured of a 30 per cent reduction in her sentence and therefore be reunited quicker with her children, a decision she now apparently regrets. It seemed that this was a pretty common occurrence and that by the time these sorts of women get to trial they have generally lost all their
confidence
, have maybe seen their children threatened with being taken into care or already in care or are just missing them terribly (as has been noted, the first time in prison is often the first significant period of
separation
women have from their children) and accept that pleading guilty is their only move.
It is welcome therefore that the Law Society has
recommended that the period of remand should be capped at twenty-eight days to accelerate policing but also to safeguard the right of suspects who find themselves already in limbo and often having lost their livelihoods and who in any case may well be proved innocent at the end. And the state does not compensate for the loss of income and status and family relationships when the case finally collapses or when the woman is finally convicted and the
overall
sentencing perhaps fails to take into account the time spent on remand or bail. Remand prisoners are also not eligible for financial help following release if they do not receive a custodial sentence, which they often don’t, or help from the Probation Service when returning to the community, even if they have been on remand in prison for more than twelve months. They are forgotten by the resettlement system.
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The overall impact of such a long and difficult time has serious detrimental effects on the women in question and their families. In Angela Devlin’s
Invisible Women
, she quotes statistics that demonstrate remand prisoners were automatically assessed as being category B, in other words a risk to society, and should be kept under close supervision (my ESP open prison was at the lowest end – a category D prison).
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They are not risk assessed or assigned to the correct category until sentencing, which only adds to the hardship,
particularly
upon the women’s ability to retain contact with their children. Devlin also suggests that this is
particularly
harsh on women in general as only around 40 per cent of the women remanded in custody in 2009 were then sentenced and sent to prison – though they may have received cautions or suspended or community service sentences. Nearly half the women
in Holloway in 2006 were on remand. In 2010, the figure was apparently nearer the 60 per cent mark.
What is more, proportionately more women facing a charge than men tend to be remanded in custody; the ten years between 1992 and 2002 saw an increase of 196 per cent in women on remand compared with 52 per cent for men. The numbers continued to increase and although they have reduced slightly in the past couple of years as of end September 2012 women on remand were accounting for 17 per cent of the female prison population.
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What is particularly disturbing is that women usually receive short custodial services and therefore don’t tend to spend a long time in prison. And yet remand prisoners spend an average of around forty days in prison – nearly four fifths of the time I served. What is worse is that for those on remand there are higher rates of self-harm, suicides and mental-health problems, and, worryingly, half of all women on remand receive no visits from their family (compared to only one in four men on remand).
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Being on remand can have additional complications. The system of Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) entitles a prisoner to spend some time at an approved address once every month or so, granted after serving a considerable proportion of the sentence and
undergoing
a risk-assessment. They can spend, at first, two days and one overnight away, then three days and two overnights, then four days and three overnights up to a maximum of five days and four overnights. For Aanjay, however, she was struggling to demonstrate that the prison’s calculations of when her first ROTL was due were way off the mark as they should have started from when she first entered prison, not from when she was sentenced. We had to spend a lot of
time consoling a very frustrated and tearful woman just trying to see her children and husband, as she was rightly entitled to do. It was not a very clever way to proceed.
Finally the risk-assessment board allowed Aanjay to return home every eight weeks under what is termed the Childcare Resettlement Licence (CRL); this allows mothers who have children under sixteen to go home no more than three nights every two months. It sounds good and it should be. Yet it is exercised in a way that causes resentment because it applies only to women who have ‘primary’ responsibility for their children, essentially single parents, and remain responsible for them even if the children are staying with relatives. If, however, a woman is still in a loving relationship with a husband, boyfriend or girlfriend and the child stays with them and is looked after by them in the mother’s absence, then they are not entitled to CLR. Many mothers could not understand why keeping a relationship with their child was not considered important if their relationship with their partner had not broken up.
Despite appearing calm for the most part, many of the women I met in prison were at breaking point. Some were facing confiscation orders as a result of their crimes and in some cases were losing their homes and their pensions; others were fighting residency orders from their husbands or divorcing or being divorced by them (generally, 45 per cent of all
prisoners
lose contact with their families while in prison, with many separating from their partners
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). In some cases the husband, boyfriend or partner was also in prison and that complicated things no end, especially arranging times for supervised phone calls between prisons – a real logistical nightmare.
Being on bail for any length of time seemed to have affected many of the women I met. Another resident who arrived from a closed prison just before I left, Tracy, had been working as an administrator at a school for a long time with a £1m budget and was wrongly, she maintained, fingered for falsifying accounts and fraud. She disputed it, was on bail for a year and when it came to being committed to trial she was already hugely stressed, was eating too much and had put on 2 stone in weight. She was told that if she didn’t plead guilty she would get a five- or
six-year
sentence and be away from her kids for ages. So she pleaded guilty and got three. She bitterly regrets it now. The erratic, inconsistent and arbitrary nature of sentencing is especially hard on women who are primary carers.
Back in ESP, that first evening I made my first acquaintance with my fellow ‘residents’, as we were called. The term ‘resident’ was strictly used – the Tannoy messages that were used for both staff and for us always referred to ‘residents’ announcements’ if they were aimed at the girls and ‘staff announcements’ for the staff. There were only two times when ‘prisoner’ was used. The first was when one had to fill in the prisoner number in the ‘apps’ – not some sort of computer programme but rather the ironic abbreviation for the good old-fashioned handwritten application form. The other was on the inside rim of envelopes where the name and prison number needed to be inserted for identification purposes when sending letters out.