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 momentOn her first night in Holloway prison, and 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 originate adjustments. The prison officers, though not all of them, and 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 approximately the everyday humiliations and casual cruelty. Things such as being moved to a different section of the prison without warning, and officers purposely dropping items on the floor instead of handing them to her. She made complaints approximately 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, or 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, or she says,“was given a 16-week sentence for the theft of a child’s jumper”.
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Source: theguardian.com