There appears to be no apparent or real need for such regulations to be in place and only serves to heighten the already immense pain that mothers in prison feel. Simple alterations to the prison service would alleviate at least, some of the pain, anxiety and frustration that imprisoned women feel. An example of this would be the introduction of mini-buses from main centres or shuttle services from nearby bus and train stations which would enable more people to visit imprisoned women and therefore would ease these difficulties (Morris et al 1995). This illustrates the relatively small steps that could be taken in order to make huge differences to these mothers. As a result some of the anguish that they feel is preventable making it all the more inhumane and inappropriate that they are made to suffer in the ways that they do.
As well as the responsibility mothers feel for their children when they go into prison, they also suffer more due to the separation it causes between them and their families. This brings into question the notion of prison as a punishment and as a way of gaining justice as this is not consistent across the genders. In this respect women are discriminated against as they are punished to a greater degree than their male counterparts for similar crimes.
If it is to be argued that the imprisonment of women is a fitting punishment then consideration needs to be given to all aspects of this – including the dependant children many incarcerated women have. If there is no appropriate solution to this and no option which can be regarded to be suitable to both the woman and the child(ren) then this mode of punishment as a whole cannot be looked upon as successful and therefore must be considered inappropriate to the needs of women.
The area concerning the imprisonment of women who have small children and those who are imprisoned whilst pregnant is one which offers many different views. I will look at three differing views concerning this in an attempt to question the imprisonment of women in a wider sense:
- ‘Opinion is divided about whether the experience of being in prison is more or less damaging to a young child than the experience of separation from the mother’ (NACRO 1991)
- ‘No pregnant mother or mother with a small child should be behind bars, with or without her baby’ (Devlin 1998)
- ‘Should a mother lose her right to be a parent when she is sent to prison?’ (Morris 1987)
With regards to the first view, the damage that is done to the child very much depends on the prison at which they are ‘brought up’. In this country there is a large amount of disparity between the different prisons as an inspection of the Mother and Baby Units found; the children at Askham Grange ‘have every opportunity to fulfil their potential’ while Holloway was given a damning report stating that babies were sometimes ‘confined to small rooms for more than twelve hours’ (NACRO 1991 p.25). Due to this if the unfortunate imprisonment of women must continue, for the time being at least, it cannot be allowed to continue in its present form as this is allowing children to suffer. Simple alterations and achieving consistent standards across all prisons would ensure imprisonment would be a more humanistic experience.
There were also frequent complaints about the regimes that the imprisoned women had to undertake as these failed to allow the mothers to develop their own methods of baby care (Devlin 1998; Carlen 1998, NACRO 1991). Dobash et al highlight that ‘regimentation is the characteristic feature…life in these unit is as regulated for the babies as it is for the mothers’ (Dobash et al 1986 p.198). This is a very negative aspect of the mother and baby units as such regimentation can reduce what little confidence some of the mothers already have in their abilities to cope with their babies outside prison (Carlen 1990). As a direct result of this, both in cases where the child is allowed to stay with the mother and those where the mother and child are separated, the woman is denied the right to be a mother to their child(ren). Should this be prohibited, therefore adding a further harrowing aspect to their imprisonment, or should this sanction remain the punishment that it is meant to be – the deprivation of liberty?
Although we can see that the conditions are at least unfavourable, there are steps that could be taken to improve these. More worryingly perhaps is the lack of stimulation that the babies received and the long-term effects that this can have. Therefore the opposite end to this argument is the effect that separation from the mother has on the baby.
Research evidence on the effects of a mother’s imprisonment on very young children found evidence of a gradual decline in cognitive development and locomotor development in babies whom stayed in mother and baby units, therefore causing long-term damage. Again alternatives to the present system, regarding the imprisonment of mothers of small children, must be found in order to cease this arrangement. It is inappropriate to allow children to suffer the effects of their mothers’ criminality. This leads to the second argument: that women with small children or those who are pregnant should not be sent to prison at all.
The Royal College of Midwives has joined the Howard league in stating that no pregnant woman or mother of a small child should be behind bars, with or without her baby (Devlin 1998). Indeed Francis Cook, Director of the Howard League thinks ‘we should be petitioning judges not to send women with children to prison at all...then something would have to be done’ (in Devlin 1998).
It would appear that it is not ‘appropriate’ to imprison women with young babies due to the effects that this is having on the mother and the children who are ‘cared for’ on the mother and baby units. Even those who fail to recognise, at the very least, the mass reform that these units need to undertake, I believe that even they would find it difficult to allow a system which in effect punishes the child as well as the mother. This practice therefore must be deemed unethical.
Although much of the prison system is inappropriate to women due to the fact that most prisoners are male and that prisons for women tend to have been developed as an after thought (Flynn 1998), there are some areas in which gender is taken into consideration. Ironically this is not intended to improve the way in which they are treated, it merely serves to undermine them further. As Dr Gillian Mezey (where’s this from – prob NACRO) points out, ‘if a woman commits an offence which is regarded as incompatible with the female status she has committed a double transgression’. When this happens there are several responses which she goes on to elaborate upon, ‘she may either be regarded as doubly bad, doubly evil…or, if she is not bad...she must be very mad and in need of psychiatric treatment’ (NACRO 1991)
It can be said that penal institutions therefore support this traditional inferior position of women as their deviance is seen as a mental or physiological imbalance (Smart 1976). A clear illustration of this is the transformation of Holloway into a psychiatric hospital where it was believed that the female offender was in some way sick and in need of treatment. This however, was ‘not proven’ (Heidensohn 1997) and the basis of this has since been questioned. Despite this such comparisons are still made as women in prison are continued to be regarded as ‘disordered’ and ‘abnormal’ (Dobash et al 1986, p.207)
An area which seems to go hand in hand with this, as regards to the treatment of women in prisons, is the mass over-prescribing of drugs in these institutions. This is something that was acknowledged by the Thematic Review (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons 1997); ‘the high level of prescribing in some establishments for women is a cause for concern’. The gross over-prescription of strong anti-psychotic drugs as a form of control was exposed in the 1994 scandal involving Ashworth high security special hospital. Nurses here became concerned with the levels of medication prescribed and so began to take records which they later showed to an outside pharmacist. The levels were found to be up to six times the recommended doses, ‘such high levels can also cause sudden death’ (Devlin 1998).
Some reasons for this are offered by Morris (1987), among many he suggests that female prisoners may be more likely to seek help from doctors than males or, he argues, that drugs may be sought to ease the pain of separation from their children. Although this does offer some explanation as to the amount of drugs prescribed, it does not explain why the dosages remain so high.
Despite this and attempts made at Holloway department officials came to admit that the majority of women in prison could not be presumed to be mentally ill (Carlen 1998). Although this may signal a small triumph for women in prison it appears that this ‘revelation’ has done little to change the way that incarcerated women are treated. It has been argued that this is to justify the ‘rigid and infantile regimes for female inmates’ (Carlen 1998). Several of the women who were interviewed by Carlen themselves believe that loss of liberty should be their punishment – not to be treated as if they were mentally ill. This again shows the irony that women are not treated differently to men in aspects of the prison service which would benefit them, only in areas where they are undermined as these regimes ‘would not have been tolerated in the men’s prisons’ (Carlen 1998).
It appears from the above that women who may be criminal are presumed to be mentally ill, if this was so it can be further presumed that officials believe that the best place for these women is prison. The Thematic Review (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons 1997) certainly acknowledge that custody is not the best setting for therapeutic work, even for those who are incarcerated and suffer from mental health problems as these can be ‘worsened by the effects of imprisonment’ (NACRO 1991). Therefore the inappropriateness of prisons as a form of punishment for women can be seen whichever way we choose to look at this problem
Nearly two thirds of the women interviewed in the Thematic Review were mothers with the majority having at least one child under the age of 16 (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons 1997).
Carried out by the Department of Health in November 1996, Inspection of facilities for mother and babies in prison.
This monitored the physical and psychological development of babies between one and eighteen months old who accompanied their mothers into mother-and-baby units compared with those of a similar age who were separated from their mothers and cared for by relatives or others. This research was carried out by Sussex university, commissioned by the Home Office
