It saw the suffragettes force-fed, and Ruth Ellis hanged. Now that the largest women’s prison in Britain is closing, campaigners calling for a new approach to female incarceration are seizing their moment

On her first night in Holloway prison, Jane slept in her clothes. “It was filthy. I didn’t even want to touch the bedding. For the first time for anybody going into that situation, it’s frightening. People aren’t that respectful towards you. You’re not given much opportunity to make adjustments. The prison officers, though not all of them, are really disrespectful.”

She wasn’t involved in drug abuse, and didn’t witness acts of self-harm, although she says it went on. Her experience was more about the everyday humiliations and casual cruelty. Things such as being moved to a different part of the prison without warning, or officers purposely dropping items on the floor instead of handing them to her. She made complaints about harassment, which she says were never investigated. She tells of sick women who waited hours for help, and prisoners who didn’t speak English and therefore didn’t understand the prison timetables, and who were punished for not following them. Most of the women she was in Holloway with, she says, were not violent. “There is no need for them to be in prison.” One woman she met, she says, “was given a 16-week sentence for the theft of a child’s jumper”.

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The announcement this week that Holloway prison would close has largely been welcomed (albeit that the Prison Governors’ Association declared it has “major concerns” about capacity for women prisoners). The original prison on the site was built in 1852, and it has seen many changes in how women are treated in the criminal justice system: its history is a record of brutality and progress. It was where imprisoned suffragettes on hunger strike were savagely force-fed. The last execution of a woman, Ruth Ellis – who was hanged in 1955 – occurred here. In the 1970s and 80s, it was rebuilt. “With admirable intent,” says Martin Narey, former director general of the prison service. “It was meant to not feel like a prison. It was meant to give more privacy, so instead of long Victorian wings, it has lots of small corridors. It was meant to feel like a hospital. But it is a claustrophobic and dangerous place. Even with excellent leadership, it’s just very difficult.

“I remember spending a lot of money reopening the mother-and-baby unit there, but it never felt right,” he goes on. “The architecture was all wrong. I couldn’t get it to feel anything like the mother-and-baby units we had in other prisons.” The unit closed in 2013. Closing the prison, he says, is “a symbolic move – it’s about saying we’re going to move these women into the 21st century and put them in places that are more modern and more humane.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowds gathered outside Holloway prison on the day Edith Thompson was hanged in 1923 for the murder of her husband, Percy. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice says that each woman in Holloway will be considered individually “to determine their requirements and where they should be held within the prison estate. We won’t move women from Holloway until we are assured that similar levels of services, including health and mental health services, will be in place at Downview [prison in Surrey] and the wider female estate.” Others have suggested that the change is partly motivated by the likely £200m value of the 10-acre site if it is redeveloped as housing.

What campaigners are hoping for, though, is a wider rethinking of how female offenders are treated. “We have to welcome the closure of Holloway,” says Jenny Earle, the director of a campaign at the Prison Reform Trust to reduce women’s imprisonment. “We are committed to helping reduce the number of women sent to prison every year and we need to see alternatives to imprisonment established for women. The kind of offending they are sent to prison for doesn’t really require the levels of security that Holloway provides.”

Campaigners, and an increasing number of politicians, say a custodial sentence for all but a small minority of offenders is not appropriate. There are around 13,500 women imprisoned every year, but since most are given short sentences, there are around 3,800 in prison at any one time. More than 80% have committed non-violent offences (for men, the figure is 71%); they are also twice as likely as men to receive a prison sentence for a first conviction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A prison officer and group of inmates at Holloway in 1947. Built in 1852, HM Prison Holloway became a female-only prison in 1903. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

“I think the argument is sometimes simplified. I would like to see fewer women in prison,” says Narey, “but I’d also like to see fewer men in prison.” In her 2007 report on the treatment of female offenders, following the deaths of six women at Styal prison in Cheshire, Baroness Jean Corston laid out the reasons why women should be treated differently from men in the justice system – a system designed for men.

When women are imprisoned, it isn’t just them who suffer. “The effects on the 18,000 children every year whose mothers are sent to prison are often nothing short of catastrophic,” wrote Corston. Because women are more likely to be their children’s primary caregiver, they are more likely than men to lose their children as a result of imprisonment (just one in 10 children of imprisoned women are looked after by their father in their mother’s absence).

Corston also highlighted how many female prisoners could be legitimately viewed as victims rather than criminals. More than half of women prisoners have suffered sexual or physical abuse as children, and report domestic violence and coercion as adults. Around a third were in care as children. “[These] women have high levels of mental illness, a great deal of self-harm,” says Narey. “A very high proportion of women coming into prison have tried to kill themselves. Their care is very demanding. The incarcerated women’s population is not a healthy population – they have lots of very complex needs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The mother-and-baby unit at Holloway never felt right,’ says former prisons director Martin Narey … the unit at Holloway closed in 2013. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Kate Paradine, director of the charity Women in Prison, agrees. “What is clear to us from all the work we do is that for the most part, women in prison are very vulnerable, with histories of mental health and substance abuse,” she says. “Most of the offences are non-violent and there aren’t issues with risks to the public, that’s not why they’re in prison. What has led women to prison is often poverty and other vulnerabilities. Holloway is full of vulnerable women. That’s why our concern is around what [the closure] means for them.”

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Jane, who was released from Holloway in September, says she has been given little help from probation services. “The only thing that has been helpful and conducive to me having a fresh start and a good future is Working Chance,” she says, of the charity that helps women with convictions find jobs. According to Paradine, simply closing Holloway and moving women outside London, further away from their families, and away from support organisations, could make things far worse.

Scotland recently faced a similar situation when it announced the closure of its notorious women’s prison Cornton Vale, but it has different plans. Scotland’s justice secretary, Michael Matheson, stopped a proposal to replace it. Instead, a smaller, 80-bed prison will be built, with five smaller custodial units to keep women nearer their homes and families, which will support women with treatment for mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction, and to overcome issues related to domestic violence. “I’ve seen various justice policies labelled as ‘soft’ or ‘tough’ in recent years, but I think the time is right to move away from this kind of narrative – what we are doing here is taking a ‘smart’ approach,” said Matheson in June.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Closing the prison, says Narey, is about ‘moving these women into the 21st century’ … the first-night dorm, photographed in 2010. Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures/Corbis

“That’s exactly what could have happened here,” says Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform. “That would have saved the taxpayer a fortune and would help the women to sort their lives out. Quite often they have very complicated needs that in no way get helped by a prison sentence.”

The Corston Report made more than 40 recommendations, including the closure of women’s prisons and their replacement by smaller units for dangerous offenders, and stopping the imprisonment of women who pose no risk to the public. They would be better served by women’s centres with access to help for mental health, addictions, housing and employment, which could break the cycle of deprivation, addiction and crime, and keep families together.

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The economic arguments are also convincing. It costs more than £44,000 to imprison a woman for a year; a community order costs around £2,800. “They are much less likely to reoffend if they are given the opportunities to engage in community orders and local support services,” says Earle. It isn’t just the long-term savings made by, for instance, keeping their children out of care, or reducing the chance of them committing crime. A report by the New Economics Foundation found that in one year of funding prison alternatives, if reoffending was reduced by just 6%, the state would have recouped its investment.

“The hard work that the government really needs to do is make sure there is a fabric of support services in the community, which is much more cost-effective in the long run, but it requires political will and continuity of funding,” says Earle. “There has been a lot of uncertainty and instability, and a lot of women’s services are facing funding reductions.”

But there are glimmers of hope. Caroline Dinenage, the minister responsible for women offenders, wasn’t available for an interview, but in July she said she was committed to reducing the number of women in prison. In the Conservative party’s manifesto, they promised to “improve the treatment” of female offenders, looking at how monitoring could mean more women with young children could serve a community sentence. The Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 requires the justice secretary to make arrangements to meet the needs of female offenders.

But real change is extremely slow. There is talk, says Crook, but no action. “I think they need political courage. I’m disappointed because the rhetoric coming from [the justice secretary] Michael Gove showed that he did have political courage, that he believes in redemption and wants to give people a second chance. I want to see some action on that. It’s no good shuffling people around the system.” Simply moving women in order to sell off land during London’s seemingly unstoppable property boom, she says, is “not courageous”.