Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’? | Eva Wiseman
submitted by https://sh.itjust.works/u/HellsBelle
Typically, this is how it goes: a woman on the street behaves erratically and police pick her up, concerned she might harm herself or others. Perhaps she’ll be held in a police car or cell for a while, charged with disorderly conduct, or perhaps she’ll be taken to hospital. But increasingly a lack of mental health beds means she is then taken to prison “as a place of safety” and there she’ll stay, unsentenced and without specialist care, sometimes lingering in a cell for more than a year. These patients include (wrote Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, in a report last year) people whose psychosis can make them violent, meaning they’re held in isolation, and people so driven to harming themselves, “They have repeatedly blocked their own airways with bedding, removed teeth or maimed themselves to the point of exposing their own intestines.”
There were 11 suicides at HMP Styal between 2007 and 2024, more than any other women’s jail in England. One was 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson, who had been arrested in 2020 for stealing a pair of trainers and assaulting emergency workers who had intervened. When she was apprehended she poured petrol on herself and tried to drink it; instead of being offered psychiatric treatment, she was sentenced to 12 months at Styal. A woman detained there at the same time told the BBC that it was “no place for a vulnerable young woman” and that Anderson “needed help, yet found herself in the same pit of monsters as me”.
Other prisons house more tragedies. Last year a jury concluded that Eastwood Park prison in Gloucestershire failed to provide for 36-year-old Kay Melhuish’s “basic human needs” and that neglect (including a 10-day wait for clean underwear) contributed to her death by suicide. Melhuish was being held on remand during an acute mental health crisis – campaigning for access to her children, she was arrested holding a knife to her own throat. The prison was aware of her history of suicide attempts and self-harm, and had been warned that her autism and PTSD made prison (with its noise and regular use of force) particularly difficult for her to cope with. Less than three weeks after she arrived, she was dead. Her daughter told the Guardian, “Mum was ill, not bad.”