On 15 November 2015, then-Chancellor George Osborne announced that HMP Holloway, the biggest women’s prison in Western Europe, and the only one in London, would be closed and sold for housing. The 534 women imprisoned there were given no forewarning. They found out via television reports or pieces of paper slipped under their door.
“It was a very sudden announcement,” says Jenny Earle, director of the programme to reduce women’s imprisonment at the Prison Reform Trust. “There was no sound reason for that prison to be sold in terms of what it was delivering.
“Holloway was closed without consultation with either the women directly affected or charities delivering services there,” said Dr Kate Paradine, Chief Executive of the charity Women in Prison (WiP) in a statement. “Despite this, we hoped that the decision signalled a change in public policy to moving away from prison to community alternatives. Sadly, the reality could not be further from the truth.”
Phillip Lee was the under-secretary for Offender Health, until he resigned in 2018 over Brexit. Writing in the Guardian, Lee says: “On visits to women’s prisons up and down the country, I was struck by how most of the women who get caught up in our criminal justice system are among the poorest and most vulnerable.”
The reality of women’s prisons
The treatment of the women detained in Holloway is indicative of how the female prison population, which has more than doubled over the past 25 years, is regarded by the government and society writ large: invisible, disregarded and forgotten.
Compared to male prisoners, women have overwhelmingly been handed short sentences for minor or non-violent crimes – only a very small minority of the female prison population pose a risk to the public.
In HMP Holloway, before its closure in 2016, 55 per cent of women were serving less than a year, and 26.3 per cent less than three months. In 2017, 40 women were even imprisoned for the non-payment of council tax. According to WiP, the number of community sentences issued to women has fallen by nearly half in the last decade. More and more women are sentenced to custody for low-level crimes, instead of being kept in their communities.
“The current justice minister absolutely understands the futility of short prison sentences and has admitted that prison is a costly and counterproductive response to minor offending,” Earle says, “especially minor offending by women.”
Criminalising vulnerable women does more harm than good. According to MoJ figures, 70 per cent of female offenders who served short-term sentences in 2016 reoffended within a year. Research conducted by WiP has shown that women account for a disproportionate amount of self-harm in prison; despite comprising only 5 per cent of the overall prison population, women prisoners accounted for 21 per cent of all incidents in 2016.
Vicky Pryce, an economist and former prisoner at Holloway, said in the Guardian that: “My experience [in prison] convinced me of the pointlessness of the way the system works. If anything, prison drives up criminality.”
Surely, then, the closure of HMP Holloway is a good thing. Earle says: “At the time, we were emphasising the positive aspects of the closure in terms of the opportunity for a change in approach to women’s imprisonment.”
For the 534 women in Holloway, life has been made more difficult by the prison’s closure
Countless stories from inside Holloway have also suggested that it was an unpleasant and unsafe place to be. In an interview with the Guardian, a former Holloway inmate named Jane detailed the everyday cruelty of the guards there. This ranged from being moved to a different area of the prison without warning to incidents of harassment. Prisoners who didn’t speak English were punished for not understanding the prison timetables.
As well as everyday cruelty, there were extraordinary cases of mistreatment. Before the prison’s closure in 2016, a 32-year-old woman named Sarah Reed took her own life and was found dead in her cell. Reed, who was seriously mentally ill, was detained in Holloway awaiting psychiatric assessment and was unable to access her anti-psychotic medication. The Guardian reported a jury at her inquest in 2017 identified serious shortcomings in her care.
Historically, it is Holloway where the hunger-striking suffragettes were brutally force-fed and where the last woman to be executed in the UK, Ruth Ellis, was hung in 1955.
For the 534 women in Holloway, many of whom were moved to other women’s prisons outside London, life has been made more difficult by the prison’s closure, despite stories of cruelty and inadequate care from inside.
Why did it happen?
It is also thought that the closure of Holloway had more to do with potential profit than with improving prison services for women: “It wasn’t closed because the regime was brutal,” Earle insists. “That isn’t the case at all, actually. Not to say that it was a nice place… but if you were going to close a prison for being in lousy condition, it wouldn’t have been Holloway. It was sold because it’s prime real estate.”
The move presented significant problems for Holloway’s prisoners, and some women found it devastating. ‘After Holloway’, a report from WiP and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, found that the closure caused “significant distress and anxiety among prisoners” and led to many women being imprisoned further away from home, at HMP Downview and Bronzefield in Surrey, which hindered visits from family and children.
Research conducted by the Prison Reform Trust has found that, on average, women are imprisoned over 60 miles from home and two-thirds of women in prison are mothers of children under 18 years of age. For the women who called London home, the move from Holloway was even more destabilising.
“I liked that you could see beyond the prison walls from the top floor [of Holloway],” one prisoner told WiP. “You didn’t feel so closed off, you could see and hear the outside world.”
“Some women felt a loss… a sense of their home,” says another. “Holloway in general was a good jail, just in need of a refurb.”
One woman, who was moved to Downview, attempted to take her own life: “I moved to Downview where nothing was up and running,” she says. “I tried killing myself twice because all the help and support was taken away from me. Holloway was the only prison where I saw progress. All that was taken away from me for no reason.” Another woman, Maria Burke, was found hanging in her cell at HMP Drake Hall in November 2016, just 8 days after she had arrived there.
“why are we sending so many women who shouldn’t be there to prison in the first place?” – jenny earle
“The year of Holloway’s closure saw the highest number of deaths in the women’s prison estate on record,” Paradine notes. “However, the whole experience of the closure has shown that women in prison are still completely invisible. They have been pushed further out of sight and continue to be harmed by the criminal justice system.”
WiP surveyed the opinions of women who had been moved out of Holloway, and asked them a crucial question: “Is there anything that you do not want to see be built on the site?” The unanimous answer; unaffordable private housing.
It was disheartening, then, that for the three years that followed, no promises to redevelop the site into affordable housing were made. The site was occupied by pressure groups including Sisters Uncut, who campaigned for it to be developed into genuinely affordable housing and services including a women’s centre.
However, on March 8 the Islington Gazette reported that the MoJ has sold the site to the Peabody Trust for £82 million, half of which was lent to the trust by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Of the 1,000 new homes, 60 per cent will be “genuinely affordable” – either offered at social rent, for the mayor’s London living rent or for shared ownership. A women’s centre and public green space will also be part of the development, which is due to begin in 2022 and finish by 2026.
Authorities have promised to use the Holloway site for good, but the question remains: what will happen to the women who were imprisoned there, and others like them? “We want to see resources from the Holloway sale ploughed back into supporting women,” Earle says. “The issue for me is, why are we sending so many women who shouldn’t be there to prison in the first place? There has to be much more of a focus on early intervention and diversion into women’s support services.”
Image credit: Fiona Hanson / PA
