Time to care
Today’s (5 February 2025) new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, based on research carried out in four women’s prisons, concludes that officers too often failed to provide enough support, women struggled to keep in contact with their loved ones and too many spent long periods locked in their cell with nothing to do. There were also astonishing gaps in basic decency and an overreliance on using physical force to manage women in acute and obvious crisis. The thematic review is titled: Time to care: what helps women cope in prison?
Context
The inspectorate undertook this thematic review because of concerns about the very high and increasing levels of self-harm in women’s prisons, the paucity of regimes, the difficulties in enabling visits, the lack of training or support for officers and a failure to help women cope.
The focus of this report is on what practical support can be offered by officers and leaders, rather than specific health care interventions.
The findings are deeply depressing, with inspectors concluding that individual jails and the prison service are not doing enough to understand the needs of this population or take action to make sure that women receive appropriate support.
Between 2013 and 2023, rates of self-harm in women’s jails rose from 1,545 to 5,624 per 1,000 prisoners, and this dramatic increase is indicative of the levels of distress among women in prison.
Findings
In the surveys carried out during inspections and the fieldwork for this report, women told inspectors what would help them to cope better. Much of what they describe could be readily achieved with more imagination and determination from both governors and the prison service.
Inspectors describe a vicious cycle whereby officers are spending so much of their time helping women who are suffering acute crises, that they are unable to provide the less intensive support other prisoners need to prevent them from deteriorating.
Staffing
All this is despite the fact that the staffing position in women’s jails is now much healthier than it has been in recent years and many officers interviewed by inspectors said they wanted to provide prisoners with the support they needed. However, they were unable to complete much of the day-to-day work that is essential to maintain safe, respectful and purposeful jails because they lacked the time or capability to do the job effectively.
Many prison officers remain inexperienced and the lack of training they receive is a recurring theme in this report. They were doing their best in often very distressing environments, yet only those working in specialist units received clinical supervision.
Officers described the toll it took on them, including feeling traumatised by and eventually desensitised to the shockingly high levels of self-harms and mental illness they witnessed.
Contact with family
This report also show that there is a failure to offer opportunities for women to stay in contact with their families, particularly children, for whom many were the primary carers.
Phone credit was often not available during women’s first, crucial days in prison, visits were too short, video calls were restricted and visitors themselves were given little support, despite having to travel often long distances with young children. Despite their importance, there was a lack of ambition or creativity in helping women maintain good family ties. Inspectors noted that they saw far more impressive support in the best men’s prisons.
Wide range of concerns
The report lists a wide range of basic issues which women’s prisons were mainly failing to deliver:
There was insufficient use of peer support, which could have benefited both supporters and those supported.
The limited regime, caused, in part by officers being deployed to other duties, meant that many women were spending long periods of time locked up with nothing to do. This isolation increased their distress and was likely to have been the cause of self-harm for some. Women told us that they often were not able to eat together and that much of the activity they were assigned to was mundane, unsuitable and regularly cancelled.
Women still could not get access to suitable clothes and many had to wear ill-fitting, prison-issue clothing designed for men because, astonishingly, there was little provided specifically for them. One indication of the apparent lack of respect for women in prison is the fact that prison leaders recently told inspectors “that the bizarre rule that has prevented women from washing their underwear in a washing machine is to be changed.”
Women who are in acute crisis and self-harming require support from well-trained and confident staff. In our fieldwork, inspectors often found officers who did not know how to respond to these difficult circumstances and quickly reverted to the use of physical force and anti-rip clothing.
Conclusion
Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor’s blunt conclusion could not be more damning:
“There is no doubt that our prisons contain some very unwell women who are expressing their distress with extreme, risky self-harm and yet in this report we highlight a gulf between their level of need and the skills and capability of staff.”
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here