Every now and then I learn something about the world today that sticks into me like a fish hook and I find myself asking friends, colleagues, “Wait, did you know this? Did you know this was happening?” The most recent felt like a horror-movie trope. It’s the part of the film, about a third of the way in, where a woman is locked up with the lie that the incarceration is for her own good.
It’s not just films, of course, not just fiction – countless women were institutionalised in the 19th century for “abnormal” behaviours, like disagreeing with their husbands, or following “unnatural” sexual impulses. Some were locked up for postnatal depression, some alcoholism, some “moral insanity”, which meant, somehow, infidelity. But what shocked me even more than historical reports on women like Elizabeth Packard, who was incarcerated by her husband in 1860 (the doctor’s reasons included her refusal to shake his hand and the fact that she was above the age of 40), what got me asking, saying wait, was the knowledge that something similar is still happening daily, in prisons across the country.
Typically, this is how it goes: a woman on the street behaves erratically and police pick her up, concerned she might harm herself or others. Perhaps she’ll be held in a police car or cell for a while, charged with disorderly conduct, or perhaps she’ll be taken to hospital. But increasingly a lack of mental health beds means she is then taken to prison “as a place of safety” and there she’ll stay, unsentenced and without specialist care, sometimes lingering in a cell for more than a year. These patients include (wrote Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, in a report last year) people whose psychosis can make them violent, meaning they’re held in isolation, and people so driven to harming themselves, “They have repeatedly blocked their own airways with bedding, removed teeth or maimed themselves to the point of exposing their own intestines.”
In 19th-century asylums, women were offered very little mental health provision and patients routinely self-harmed. There are a series of unnerving and moving photos online by society photographer Henry Hering who took portraits of Bethlem patients, including Eliza Josolyne, admitted in 1857 with “overwork”. She “frequently tried to injure herself by knocking her head against doors and walls, and has slept in the padded room on this account”. Perhaps it’s unhelpful to keep returning to the Victorian asylums, but here is where my mind goes, aided in part by pictures of a prison currently housing women as “a place of safety” (the words catch on the tongue) – HMP Styal in Cheshire, which occupies a former “orphanage for destitute children” opened in 1898.
There were 11 suicides at HMP Styal between 2007 and 2024, more than any other women’s jail in England. One was 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson, who had been arrested in 2020 for stealing a pair of trainers and assaulting emergency workers who had intervened. When she was apprehended she poured petrol on herself and tried to drink it; instead of being offered psychiatric treatment, she was sentenced to 12 months at Styal. A woman detained there at the same time told the BBC that it was “no place for a vulnerable young woman” and that Anderson “needed help, yet found herself in the same pit of monsters as me”.
Other prisons house more tragedies. Last year a jury concluded that Eastwood Park prison in Gloucestershire failed to provide for 36-year-old Kay Melhuish’s “basic human needs” and that neglect (including a 10-day wait for clean underwear) contributed to her death by suicide. Melhuish was being held on remand during an acute mental health crisis – campaigning for access to her children, she was arrested holding a knife to her own throat. The prison was aware of her history of suicide attempts and self-harm, and had been warned that her autism and PTSD made prison (with its noise and regular use of force) particularly difficult for her to cope with. Less than three weeks after she arrived, she was dead. Her daughter told the Guardian, “Mum was ill, not bad.”
Prison is not a place of safety. For women especially, it is a place of chaos and trauma where vulnerable people struggle to maintain their dignity, let alone sanity. A new report found that “the frustrations of day-to-day life” and a “lack of basic care” (including not being allowed to clean their underwear in washing machines) were driving women in prison to hurt themselves – the self-harm rate is 5,785 incidents per 1,000 prisoners, more than eight times higher than in men’s prisons.
And into these containers of suffering are dropped women whose only crime is mental illness, who are not only locked inside bodies that are attacking them, but inside cells that inspire violence. Their presence imports further vulnerability to the prisons, to both prisoners and to staff, unequipped to deal with either complex mental health problems or the violence they might provoke. The women’s justice board’s plans to reduce the number of women in prison cannot come soon enough and should be only the beginning – prison is not a place of safety, it’s a place often, of dark and utter terror.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
