HOLLOWAY WAS IN CRISIS. The country’s largest women’s prison had too many prisoners locked up in too few cells. Michael Howard, as Home Secretary, had been warned that action had to be taken, but when I became Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995 nothing had been done. So I announced that an inspection would be held on Monday, December 11.
My inspection team and I were struck immediately by the filthy state of Holloway. Prisoners had thrown food, clothing, sanitary towels and other rubbish out of their cell windows, where they lay on the ground for days. Corridors, stairwells and lavatories were all dirty. Every inspector saw either rats or cockroaches or both.
Shortage of staff was put forward by everyone in the prison — even prisoners themselves — as the main cause of inmates being “banged up” every day in their cells, locked in and idle. Meals were served at impossibly early hours — lunch between 11 and 11.15am and tea at 3.15pm, after which prisoners received nothing until breakfast at 7.30 the following morning. The “association” periods, when they were allowed to be with other prisoners, were frequently cancelled, often at short notice, because there were not enough staff to supervise. This was of major concern since it was the only opportunity to telephone families. It was also the only time when prisoners could have a bath or shower or otherwise attend to their personal hygiene.
The women in Holloway told of physical and verbal bullying, both by staff and other prisoners, but seldom complained because they did not believe complaints against prison officers were taken seriously. The number of prisoners who harmed themselves for a variety of reasons including lack of self-esteem, hatred of themselves and personal distress, was also alarmingly high. Illegal drugs were said to be freely available, while at the same time it was virtually impossible to obtain treatment for substance abuse if you wanted it, and those from ethnic minorities were discriminated against. Excessive and unjustified body-strip searches were carried out without management authority.
In sum, Holloway was overcrowded and badly managed. Little or nothing was being done beyond containing prisoners, who were not treated in accordance with the rules. Worst of all, neither government ministers nor Prison Service headquarters appeared to have made any plans to rectify the situation.
Much of this I learnt from my colleagues. What I saw at first hand shocked me even more. In reception, the first person I saw was a young pregnant woman in tears, sitting by herself in a small, dark room. I asked why she was there and why no one was with her. I was told that, although she had not yet been “processed”, she had been brought in from the van because she was both pregnant and distressed. However, no one could be spared to sit with her because there were not enough staff. The outside temperature that day was minus four, and I asked how many other women were still sitting in the van. I learnt that there were six or seven, who had to be brought in one at a time because there was nowhere else to hold them until they had been processed. No exception could be made, even during extreme weather conditions.
I asked to talk to a woman who had been sent to the segregation unit for fighting. It was a tiny, bare cell, hardly longer than the 6in-high concrete plinth that passed for a bed, on which the prisoner, half covered by a blanket, had been lying before I entered, . The only furniture was a battered and unstable looking cardboard table and chair. There was no window worth the name, just a small, barred grille high up on one wall. On the wall opposite the plinth was a stained — supposedly “stainless” steel — lavatory and washbasin. The only possessions I could see were a book and a plastic mug.
The prisoner, all the time looking at the staff in the doorway, told me that she knew why she was there, and was being treated “OK”. She was meant to have one hour’s exercise outside every day, but did not always get it because Holloway was so short staffed. She was able to shower, and saw the chaplain and the doctor or a nurse every day. She was also visited by members of the Board of Visitors but, other than that, was left alone except for meals.
Staff told me the segregation unit also received women who had harmed themselves or tried to commit suicide, so they could be kept under close observation. This did not seem to me to be an appropriate use of a punishment unit.
Holloway was one of five women’s prisons with a mother and baby unit. The seven in the unit at the time of my visit were clearly waiting for my arrival, as they and their babies were gathered together in the main activity area. We exchanged a few generalities, but nothing prepared me for what came next. “Do you think it was right that I was in chains?” one woman asked.
“Chains when?” I asked.
“When I was having him,” she said, pointing to her baby son.
“Are you telling me that you were in chains while you were in labour?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“So was I,” said one or two others.
“Am I hearing correctly?” I asked the governor.
“It’s security requirements,” she replied.
One mother described how humiliated she had felt when attending an antenatal clinic in chains. Another described how embarrassing it was to have to go to the lavatory on the end of a long chain, attached to a male officer because there were not enough female officer escorts.
I can only describe my reaction to the Health Care Centre as one of intense disgust. As we moved down a dark corridor towards the office in which the staff were gathered, I heard shouts, sobs, sounds of people kicking or striking doors, and the dull, rhythmic thud of someone banging their head against the wall, coming from individual cells.
What I saw in Holloway was an affront to human decency. The memory will be with me for ever. It so appalled me that the following day I suspended the inspection, and my team and I walked out of the prison. Soon afterwards we published Women in Prison, and in June 2001, shortly before I retired, a follow-up report. I concluded that while the treatment of women prisoners in England and Wales had improved, Holloway remained the exception. I wondered what evidence was needed to make ministers realise that something was seriously wrong with a system that was failing, in exactly the same way and in exactly the same prison, as it had done for almost 20 years. They appeared not to want to listen to their own inspectors, nor to the evidence of experienced commentators and observers.
The story of Holloway is one of obdurate refusal to accept the evidence of failure as a justification and basis for real and sustained improvement. Only a change of attitude by ministers and the senior management of the Prison Service, and real determination to abolish a consistently failing management style, will ensure that Holloway’s future is not as unnecessarily unsatisfactory as its past and its present.
© David Ramsbotham
Prisongate, by David Ramsbotham, Simon & Schuster, £20, published on October 6. Available from Times Books Direct for £16 plus £1.95 p&p. Call 0870-160 8080
