Michelle Barnes was serving two-year sentence at Durham’s Low Newton prison and was fighting for custody of her baby

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A prisoner found dead in her cell days after she gave birth was fighting to retain custody of her baby, an inquest has heard.

Michelle Barnes, 33, had warned a social worker two months before she gave birth, “if you take the baby, I will go too”, Durham coroner Andrew Tweddle heard.

Barnes, from Cumbria, was serving a two-year sentence for drugs offences at Low Newton prison, Durham, when she was found dead in December.

She was taking methadone in prison in a bid to beat her drug addiction, had mental health issues and a history of self-harm.

Barnes was jailed in June last year and found out she was pregnant while in prison.

The jail has no mother and baby unit but she hoped to be transferred to one of the five prisons in the country that had one, her solicitor Victoria Rowson told the jury hearing the inquest at Crook civic centre.

Rowson had a series of consultations with Barnes before the baby was born and was advising her on how to challenge the care proceedings brought by Cumbria county council, which were to be decided after the birth.

Rowson said: “Her intention was to be a good mother to her child.”

An interim care order was made after the baby was born in hospital, and Barnes returned to prison, but there was no final adjudication in the proceedings by the time she was found in her cell.

Rowson said her client had hoped to be transferred to a mother and baby unit and to stay there until she was released in the summer of 2016. She could have been released sooner than that with an electronic tag, the inquest heard.

The solicitor said Barnes “was not in a weak position”, thanks to the work she had done in prison to address her problems, so it came as a shock to hear that she had died.

Sara Driscoll, the baby’s social worker, said her view was that the infant should be placed in care.

She said: “We believed there was a very good reason, a historical reason, why we had to look at that being the only option.

“It was not a decision taken lightly at all. We believed there was no safe decision for the child, other than removing the child from birth.”

Driscoll recalled: “There was one occasion during one of my visits that she said: ‘If you take the baby, I will go, too’. I passed that on to her mental health worker.”

She agreed with the coroner’s suggestion that this was something said “in the heat of the moment”.

Earlier, the most senior governor at the prison, Alan Richer, said that the jail had room for 350 prisoners and there were 274 inmates at the time of Barnes’s death, so it was not overcrowded in December.

Barnes was living in a Psychologically Informed Planned Environment (Pipe) unit – an area of the prison for 40 inmates, aimed at helping them overcome issues with the help of specially trained staff.

Richer said 85% of women who come into Low Newton have misused drugs and their offending was related to drug and alcohol abuse. Between a third and a quarter of female prisoners self-harm, he said. His prison experiences 20 to 35 self-harm incidents a month, or around 330 a year.

Richer said self-harming appeared to be a “coping mechanism” for some of the female prisoners.

He said there were around 200 babies born to inmates every year in the UK and most Low Newton inmates who give birth are involved in care proceedings.

The inquest continues on Tuesday.

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.