More prisons are not the answer

More prisons are not the answer

By Mary Riddell

Petra Blanksby took five days to die. Her failure to end her life instantly was not for want of practice. A veteran, at 19, of attempted suicide, she had swallowed razor blades and overdoses, but someone was always there to save her. In prison, there were no protectors.

She hanged herself at New Hall jail in West Yorkshire, where she had been remanded on a charge of arson with intent to endanger life. This sounds a serious offence. Harriet Harman, pictured walking the mean streets of Peckham in a stab jacket, might be reaching for a fire-fighter's suit in the face of such a threat to the community at large. But, as usual, the only existence at risk was Petra's.

The emergency services found her slumped in a doorway, her hair ablaze, after she had doused herself in petrol and struck a match.

Petra Blanksby was hardly Rose West-in-waiting. Depressed and mentally ill after childhood abuse, she had no criminal convictions. Not long before she took her life, she had given up her baby for adoption. Her medical notes recorded that, with her son safe, she felt "free to go".

Her identical twin, Kirsty, flew in from Tenerife to speak at yesterday's launch of Dying On The Inside, an analysis of suicide in women's jails. Since 1990, 89 female prisoners have died at their own hand. The female prison population has almost doubled in the time that Labour has been in power, to 4,430. Most inmates have mental health problems, and self-harm is rife. Nine out of 10 female convicts have committed non-violent offences.

Kirsty Blanksby told cross-bench MPs and peers why she is angry. An inquest, which finished a few weeks ago, divulged little more than she knew in 2003, as she kept vigil at her twin's deathbed. "People are still dying," she says. "And no one listens." The twins owed their respective fates to little more than the toss of bureaucracy's dice. Put into care by their mother, both had wretched childhoods and histories of self-harm. Kirsty got medical intervention at a treatment centre; Petra, denied psychiatric help, went to prison and to her death.

Women's prisons belong in the shadowlands of national scandals. You may never encounter the silent legions who end up there. They won't be smashing your car windows, or mugging your child, or standing next in line at the Waitrose fresh fish counter. I hadn't met them either, until I visited Holloway with a former Home Secretary.

Some prisoners had arms latticed with cuts. Others had babies. One mother was saying goodbye to her son, who had reached nine months, the age at which he must go to relatives or local authority care. She would never lose him, she said, but she didn't look as if she believed it.

Fifteen inmates have killed themselves in that jail since 1990. As the then-governor told me, it was a "miracle" the figure was so low. His officers were cutting down three people from makeshift nooses every day.

Everyone recoils at women trying to end their lives with knotted J cloths. But this is about logic, not sympathy. A jail place costs about £41,000 a year, while community alternatives are cheap. Nearly 18,000 prisoners' children are separated from their mothers each year, and 50 have been orphaned by a mother's suicide in the last decade. Such children are not earmarked for lucrative careers at Goldman Sachs. Their destiny, though not inevitable, is more likely to be the social scrapheap.

Obviously, it costs money to provide alternative treatment for drug addicts and mentally ill women who have committed no grave crime. Luckily, Jack Straw has plenty. The Treasury has given him £2.3 billion, with which he plans to build 10,500 new prison places by 2014, on top of the £1.5 billion already allocated for 9,000 extra beds. To ease a system at breaking point, with more than 82,000 inmates, Straw plans three "Titan" prisons, each housing 2,500 inmates.

At a briefing yesterday, I asked Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, what he thought of Titans. He sounded lukewarm. Some people, he said, believed they would improve matters because prisoners were closer to home: "I've also heard some say they will have exactly the opposite effect." Rob Allen, the director of the International Centre for Prison Studies, is unequivocal. Titans, he says, are four times the size considered by other countries to be safe and capable of rehabilitation. Lord Carter's review, which recommended this model to the Government, is, in Allen's view, "a shoddy piece of work".

The Brown administration has another plan before it. Commissioned from Baroness Corston, it recommends scrapping women's prisons and replacing them with small local units. Deborah Coles, co-author of Dying On The Inside, urges the Government to comply. If the Corston model works, it could offer a way out of the English love affair with prisons.

While not free, it would cost a fraction of Straw's budget, besides releasing places to ease the current crisis, Lord Phillips reiterated his antipathy to the over-use of jail. "I've always made it plain that you shouldn't put people in prison if there's any other way of dealing with them," he said.

But as Mr Straw plans his prison boom, schemes to punish people in the community are said to be foundering for lack of cash. I asked Lord Phillips what he thought of such an imbalance "That would concern me enormously," he said. Although there was an "urgent demand" for prison places, "in an ideal world, one would like it [the money] used for alternative rehabilitation".

This isn't a liberal fantasy. Nor, despite a mismatch between a 30 per cent reduction in crime and heightened fear, is violent crime a populist myth. Children are killing one another with chilling regularity. As I write, a student is fighting for his life after being knifed by muggers demanding he buy them a £1.99 Big Mac. Juvenile assassins are not simply damned by bad and loveless homes: they are also the product of an official viciousness that taints a nation priding itself on its genuflection to justice and the rule of law.

Of course violent and dangerous people should be locked away. Those who commit crimes must pay. But using prisons to turn sad lives into tragedies is cruel and pointless. Nor is it what most law-abiding people want, although get-tough governments always think otherwise. Surveys show that citizens prefer non-violent offenders to be punished in the community, rather than being made worse in seething jails. At this rate, Straw's Titan prisons will be full almost before they are built.

We are back in the days of Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens's satire on the self-defeating policy of a government that imprisoned debtors, without hope of work, until they could reimburse what they owed. None the less, Amy Dorrit got her happy ending. No such good fortune for the four women inmates whose inquests open next Monday, or for Petra Blanksby. Her sister explained why one twin lived and the other died. I hope the Ministry of Justice was listening.