UK: When jail doesn’t work

LONDON, U.K. — A month before Rebecca Smith was found dead in her cell in a British prison with a plastic bag tied around her head, she had told prison staff that she would end her life by self-suffocation. A subsequent investigation found that she had a history of mental illness, including several suicide attempts.

During the investigation authorities asked why prison officials had failed to keep her on suicide watch, and why she had been placed in a prison without an in-patient health care center, nearly 200 miles from her family, who could have given her much-needed moral support.

Her case underscores the current debate in Britain about the criminal justice system. Shortly after the coalition government took over in May, the new justice secretary Kenneth Clarke suggested that jailing people didn’t work.

"There is no link between rising levels of imprisonment and falling crime," he said as he launched his campaign against short prison sentences.

Prime Minister David Cameron has also described short jail terms as "meaningless" and has called for more community service programs.

Last year Britain spent 4.38 billion pounds ($6.79 billion) on its penal system and 20 billion pounds ($31 billion) on its criminal justice system, making it one of the most expensive in the world.

British Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, Nick Herbert, said in a recent speech: “We spend more of our GDP on criminal justice than France, Ireland and Italy.” 

Perhaps nothing more acutely illustrates the need for reform than the plight of female prisoners.

Not since the mid-19th century have there been so many women in British jails. Britain’s female prison population has increased 60 percent since 1997, compared with a 28 percent increase for men.

“Practically every country in the world, rich and poor, is seeing their social fabric disintegrate as more and more women are being charged and held in custody, often long distances from families,” the World Health Organization noted in a report last year.

While women make up only 7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons in the United States according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2000 and 2008, the female prison population in America rose by 23 percent. More than half of women in federal prisons said they were mothers.

In Australia, the imprisonment rate for women rose by 209 percent between 1984 and 2003, but only 75 percent for men, according to the report “New Gender Rights for Women Prisoners and Offenders."

A report by a British penal reform charity, The Prison Reform Trust, revealed that a staggering 70 percent of British female prisoners had two or more mental health problems; more than a third said they had attempted suicide at some point. More than half of women in British prisons had suffered from domestic violence and one in three had been sexually abused, according to the trust.

Despite these facts, and evidence that prison has more serious psychological implications for women than men, the specific needs of women prisoners are being overlooked, prison reform advocates say.

According to The Howard League for Penal Reform, which was founded in 1886, women account for around half of all self-harm incidents even though they constitute only 5 percent of the prison population overall. The problem appears to be getting worse: incidences of self-harm rose by nearly 50 percent between 2003 and 2007.

Based on an inspection of 14 women’s prisons, Anne Owers, chief inspector for prisons for nearly a decade, said that more must be done to protect vulnerable inmates. Owers, who retired earlier this month, raised concerns that prison staff were resorting to extreme measures to stop inmates from wounding themselves.

“More work is needed to create and properly use viable and more appropriate alternatives to prison,” she said.

Owers referred to a report for the Home Office three years ago that recommended women’s prisons be shut down, and that women should be held in small facilities near their families. 

Highlighting the need for an alternative to incarceration, such as community service, 68 percent of women in prison were serving time for non-violent offenses, according to parliamentary figures, and nearly three-quarters had sentences of less than 12 months. 

Nearly 70 percent of women in prison are mothers and each year 17,000 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment, according to the Prison Reform Trust. Advocates argue that community sentences are less destructive to families and society.

Studies also suggest that community service may be more effective in dealing with minor crimes.

Only 10 percent of women committed another offense following community service, as opposed to 64 percent of women who were repeat offenders after serving time in prison, according to The Howard League.