Choking to death: should we stop sending women to prison?

Even if many politicians are convinced by the ethical and economic case for closing women’s prisons, many feel they need to appear “tough on crime” to a public that demands punishment and retribution.

By Sophie McBain

No place for a girl like you: inmates protest from behind bars at HMP Styal. Photo: Don McPhee/Guardian News and Media.

Gemma learned a lot from prison. On her first day in HMP Styal, eight years ago, she learned how to take heroin and crack cocaine. “I didn’t tell the girls I hadn’t done them before – I just wanted to fit in,” she tells me when we meet at Brighton Oasis Project, a charity for women with drug or alcohol addictions. By her second jail sentence, at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey in early 2013, she’d been taught how to “load up” with drug-filled condoms before her court date and how to avoid being “decrotched”: “when someone watches the cell door and they use a spoon to take the drugs out from inside of you”.

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Sophie McBain

@SEMcBain

Sophie McBain is associate editor of the New Statesman and writes on psychology, society and the science of us. She has reported for the New Statesman from the US and Middle East and her writing has earned her two British Society of Magazine Editors awards and the 2016 Amnesty International Award for best feature.