Publish date: 2023-12-11

CrimeRose George on the shocking rise in female prison suicides

At 8.10am on July 28, Rebecca Louise Turner said, "Yes please", when asked if she wanted breakfast in her cell at HMP Low Newton near Durham. By the time the officers brought the tray at 8.50, she was already hanging. At 9.15, she was declared dead. "They told me she'd hanged herself with a belt," says her mother, Janet Wade. "I said, 'That's daft, she didn't take a belt in.' Then I remembered she'd had one on her coat. She used that and hanged herself from the shower."

Turner was 22, and had been in prison for two days. She had been convicted for a non-violent offence, supplying drugs, and was typical both of the women who populate British prisons, and of those dying in them. The numbers are chilling. In 1997, one woman killed herself in prison. Last year, 14 did. This year, 13 have committed suicide so far.

Wade had no idea of the problem until her daughter added to the toll. "Rebecca was never suicidal," she says. "And she wasn't worried about going to prison. She'd done five days on remand, and she was fine." But, she says, "This time was different." A mother and daughter on the same wing knew Turner, and abused her verbally. On her first night in prison she phoned her mother in tears. "She was frightened, and she asked the governor to move her. But they didn't. I'm sure she hanged herself as a cry for help, so they'd take her seriously and move her. I think she thought the officers would be straight back with the breakfast tray." But they weren't.

Unlike large numbers of the women's prison population, Turner was not a self-harmer and had never before tried to commit suicide. But she was typical in other ways. About 80% of women in prison have drug, alcohol or mental health problems. Many have been abused, and the majority are imprisoned for non-violent offences such as theft.

"Rebecca was a registered addict," says Wade, "but she was on methadone. She said she didn't mind going to prison because it would get her off the drugs." If she'd stayed alive, she would probably have been disappointed in that, too.

"Sentencers see women repeat offending," says Frances Crook of the Howard League for Prison Reform, "and send them to prison because they think they'll be properly treated there." They're wrong. At HMP Styal in Cheshire, it took the deaths of six women in 13 months and two damning reports from the chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, before a methadone programme was introduced. Previously the prison had twice been turned down for funding for a detox unit. Women withdrawing from drugs - about 80% of Styal's population - were being given dihydrocodeine (DF118): as useful as treating an amputation with aspirin, says one professional.

Prison certainly didn't work for Anna Claire Baker. On November 26 2002, within an hour or so of receiving a hostile letter from her boyfriend, the 29-year-old was found hanging from her bunk bed on Styal's remand wing. At last month's inquest a prison staff member testified to having had no knowledge of the prison's suicide and self-harm prevention policy. There was evidence of poor, inadequate communication: Baker had threatened to hang herself a couple of weeks before, and on the day of her death was on an open 2052SH form, the document used to indicate that an inmate is at risk of self-harm. She was still placed alone in a double cell, with a bunk bed. "But the bed is a red herring," said a police officer. "If people wish to hang themselves, they will do it from door handles, windows, radiators. Anything."

The inquest revealed evidence of carelessness, but also of under-resourced, understaffed officers trying to cope with desperately troubled women. "You see women walking around with ligatures around their necks," one prison worker said. "Just loose, but it's still up to the staff to persuade them to take them off."

In 2002, there were 810 2052SH forms opened at Styal; or 810 instances of women threatening to harm themselves. Repeatedly. Some try 10 times a day. Staff are now routinely issued with "ligature knives". The day Baker died, there were 35 2052SH forms open on her wing.

"These women come to prison with a lot more baggage," testified one officer. "Often they're primary carers, they've got children, they're not expecting a custodial sentence. We're prison officers, not experts. The staff every day are saving lives, sometimes just by speaking to someone at the right time."

But another senior officer, when asked if it was not a serious matter that even the prison's suicide prevention coordinator had never seen the prison's policy document on self-harm and suicide, said, "I would not say serious. It would have been nice." "Nice?" says Frances Matthews, Baker's mother. "I wanted to say, it would be nice if I still had a daughter!"

Matthews was heartened, though, by the jury's findings. Since March, inquest juries are allowed to lay blame for deaths in custody with the prison system. This the jury in Baker's inquest did. The verdict was that she died because of an "inappropriate and insufficient detoxification programme", a "totally inappropriate" decision to leave her alone in a cell with a bunk bed, and "a total lack of awareness and staff training in the management of persons at risk of self-harm and suicide". It was bruising for the prison service, and enough for Matthews. "I really think that Anna is more at peace now," she says, and she wants to let her rest.

Other mothers whose daughters have died in prison continue to fight. Pauline Campbell, a retired lecturer from Cheshire, is preparing for next month's inquest into her 18-year-old daughter's death at Styal in 2002. Sarah swallowed more than 100 anti-depressant tablets. "I've got no husband to embarrass, no parents. Sarah was my only child, so I've lost the whole family in one blow." Her grief pushes her to fight. She has demonstrated outside each prison where a woman has died and been arrested three times."I had no idea of the appalling state of women's prisons before Sarah's death," she says. "People must speak out. It's medieval."

It is also a massive ministerial headache. It may have taken several years for the scale of the crisis to shock the government into action, but something seems finally to be happening. Paul Goggins, minister for prisons, appears genuinely concerned. "We're putting through the biggest reform of the prison and probation system in decades," he says. "And even in the midst of that reform, I know that this issue [of suicides in prison] is the biggest one I face."

After the death of Julie Walsh in August 2003, the sixth woman to die at Styal in 13 months, Goggins asked the prisons ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, to investigate Walsh's death, and to look at the context of the other five deaths at Styal. It is not the public, wide-ranging inquiry that campaigners want, but it is better than nothing. But 18 months after completion, it is yet to be published, though Goggins says it will be once all six inquests are complete.

Goggins says he is determined to improve things, and points to the £57m budget for drug treatment programmes in the prison service, to the £900m more a year being spent on prisons - though that is primarily to cope with the soaring prison population. The number of women in prison has increased 200% in 10 years. But this year there are 4,352 women, says Goggins, about 100 fewer than at the same time last year. It seems a paltry difference, but he is proud of it. He says it means the sentencers are taking notice. "The message from me and the home secretary is clear," he says. "Short-term prison sentences should not be used for non-violent offenders. Prison should be for the serious and dangerous."

Not, then, for women like Paige Tapp, who had tried to jump off Beachy Head several times, formed a strange obsession with the policewoman who saved her life, and was jailed for making threats to kill her.

"She was diagnosed as having schizophrenic tendencies," says her mother, Mel Buckley. "But she was assessed as not suitable for a psychiatric facility, so they sent her to prison." Tapp had already put a ligature around her neck in Holloway, but had been cut down. At HMP Send, her suicide watch was relaxed. On April 18 she hanged herself from a sheet tied to a door handle and pulled over the door. "If she'd been on the proper medication," says Buckley, "she might be alive."

New mental in-reach programmes are now in place in eight women's prisons, Goggins says. There are plans for "tougher" community sentences that can be alternatives to custody, and an "intermittent custody" pilot unit at HMP Morton Hall, whereby women can serve time on the weekends and so keep their families together. "I don't hide away from the fact that the numbers of deaths have gone up," says Goggins. "But the paradox is that we've never done more to address the problem."

This cuts little ice with campaigners who still see a justice system using prison as a dumping ground for society's most vulnerable women. "It's political: we have all three parties now competing to be tough on crime," says Crook of the Howard League. "It's a punitive debate of hate and fear. The line goes directly from the noose to the home secretary. We don't have capital punishment, but we are sending them there to die."

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