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Walking to sixth-form each day, the burgundy bricks of HMP Holloway were a daily presence in my life. I couldn't help but wonder who lived in Europe's largest women's prison. No doubt, I would have been surprised to learn then, as you may well be now, that 80 percent of women who enter prison under sentence have committed a non-violent offence.

A recent report from the Prison Reform Trust has revealed the sharp disparity between male and female offenders. Women prisoners are twice as likely as men to have no previous convictions. As such, the vast majority of female inmates are imprisoned for non-violent, low-level crimes, with theft and handling offences being the main driver to custody. In short, women ultimately receive harsher treatment from the Criminal Justice System than men for equivalent crimes.

This is all the more shocking when you consider the life circumstances of female prisoners. According to stats from the Prison Reform Trust, not only have half of women in prison experienced domestic violence, 53 percent suffered abuse while they were children. On top of this, they are nearly twice as likely to suffer from depression as men in prison. Almost a third of female inmates had a psychiatric admission prior to entering prison.

Sophie Miller*, 35, has experienced the British prison system first-hand. "After being charged for internal company fraud, I spent eight months inside Holloway prison. Although my history was squeaky clean and I had no previous convictions, the judge said in light of your position, we need to make an example.

"My time inside was a chilling experience. I'll remember it forever," reflects Miller. "It was massively overcrowded and dirty with no real care and attention to detail apart from herding people around. The facilities are not even the bare minimum. I didn't have a mattress for the first few days, I was just sleeping on the bed frame.

"I think people forget that you go to prison to have your freedom taken away from you. Your punishment is not to have no clean environment to live in or no bed-sheets or fresh air and to not be able to read a book. Nothing in Holloway rehabilitates you."

During her time in prison, Miller encountered numerous women who were pregnant but many more who were already mothers. "I was continually told by inmates that I was very lucky that I didn't have children. Every single mother inside I met struggled with being so far away from her child."

On top of this, Miller also met an "inordinate amount" of inmates who suffered from mental health problems. "Once I saw them put a fire hose through the hole in the cell door to calm a woman down. But more often, they'd get riot guards to take women who were screaming and shouting away and then they'd bring them back and they'd be in their cell sedated for three days. These women shouldn't be in there in the first place."

Psychologically, Miller still feels the effects of prison on her day-to-day life. "It's been really mentally damaging. I just feel completely differently about everything. I don't like people standing behind me. I'm always vigilant and on high alert for everything. It's proven research that that's what prison does to you. I should have been given a community sentence. What is the point of me being in prison for a few months to traumatise rather than rehabilitate me?"

Like many, Miller has struggled to find work since leaving HMP Holloway. "I was in corporate banking before so I applied for lots of jobs that were equivalent to that and lower but I didn't hear anything. There's no way in the world that they wouldn't have interviewed me for those jobs before I went to prison. But when you have a criminal record, employers don't want to touch you with a barge pole."

In Miller's view, the social stigma towards ex-female convicts is far greater than male inmates. "Judges view women who commit crime differently to how they view men. They almost think that because you're a woman, you should know better - that you should have more responsibility."

Miller is not alone. Britain has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment in the whole of western Europe. There are currently 4,320 women serving time inside British prisons - twice the amount that there were 20 years ago. In addition to this, it is estimated that 17,000 children are separated from their mothers each year because of imprisonment.

It goes without saying that when a mother is sent to prison, her children's lives are turned upside down. Only 5 percent of children are able to remain in their own home. On top of this, it is often difficult for female inmates to see their children during prison visits - the dearth of women's prisons means women are held an average of 62 miles away from their home. And as life goes on, it comes as no surprise that the children of prisoners disproportionately suffer - they are twice as likely to have mental health problems and they are at a higher risk of offending in later life. And so history repeats itself.

What's more, it's worth noting that the majority of the women who wind up in British prisons have been failed by state services long before they are dragged into the criminal justice system. Plagued with mental health problems and histories of domestic violence and addiction, the female prison population is a deeply vulnerable and troubled demographic. To put this into context, women accounted for 26 percent of all self-harm incidents in prison in England and Wales even though they only represent 5 percent of the prison population.

And statistically speaking, female prisoners are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators. Their offending is more likely to be prompted by their relationships. For example, nearly half of women prisoners reported having committed offences to support someone else's drug use, compared to just 22 percent of male prisoners.

To make matters worse, once women leave prison, their struggle to readjust into society is even harder than their male counterparts. A mere 8 percent of women are likely to have positive employment outcomes when released, compared to 27 percent of men. As such, many female offenders are confronted with rising debt and struggle to access safe housing.

On Broadly: Why Filipinas Can't Get Birth Control - Even Though It's Now Free By Law

When you take all of the above into account, it becomes obvious that the majority of female inmates require support not retribution. The solutions to their problems lie in the hands of mental health services, domestic violence provision, safe housing and education, not inside the four iron walls of a prison cell.

The British prison system remains a male institution in every sense of the word. From Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons to the Governor to the screws on the wing, prison is a secure environment that was created by men for men. In turn, the difference in the crimes women commit and the care that they require continues to be ignored.

For this very reason, the recent briefing by the Prison Reform Trust has launched a drive to reduce the number of women in prison. With the help of a £1.2 million lottery grant, it urges the courts to increase the number of community sentences dished out for non-violent crimes and stop imprisoning women who pose no danger to society.

And for those in doubt of the moral arguments, community sentences also make greater economic sense. According to Vicky Pryce - the former cabinet minister who was convicted for perverting the course of justice after taking speeding points for her ex-husband, Chis Huhne - moving just 1,000 women out of jail and giving them a community sentence would save the Ministry of Justice at least £12m a year. After all, the cost of placing prisoners' children in care is not just psychological. (For the record, Pryce only lasted four days in Holloway before being transferred to an open jail in Kent.)

It goes without saying that subjecting non-violent women to the penal torment and social stigma of prison does a hell of a lot more harm than good. In disrupting the lives of the most vulnerable in our society and irreparably disrupting maternal bonds, we are in danger of perpetuating a cycle of violence and crime.

More Like This On VICE:

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Why the British Prison System Massively Fails Women Criminals

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Walking to sixth-form each day, the burgundy bricks of HMP Holloway were a daily presence in my life. I couldn't help but wonder who lived in Europe's largest women's prison. No doubt, I would have been surprised to learn then, as you may well be now, that 80 percent of women who enter prison under sentence have committed a non-violent offence.

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Around 40% of guards in American women’s prisons are male, leading to abuses like beatings and rape.

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Around 40% of guards in American women’s prisons are male, leading to abuses like beatings and rape.

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Less than 2% of those on death row are women. The most infamous female death row inmate is Aileen Wuornos, a Florida sex worker who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990; she was executed in 2002 by lethal injection.

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Less than 2% of those on death row are women. The most infamous female death row inmate is Aileen Wuornos, a Florida sex worker who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990; she was executed in 2002 by lethal injection.

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48% of women are re-convicted within one year of leaving prison

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48% of women are re-convicted within one year of leaving prison

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This rises to 61% for sentences of less than 12 months and to 78% for women who have served more than 11 previous custodial sentences

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Up to 90% of women convicted of murdering a man were also the victim of abuse by said man.

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Up to 90% of women convicted of murdering a man were also the victim of abuse by said man.

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Rhona (not her real name) is in her late 20s and from Leeds. She says she has "done the circuit" of women's prisons in the north of England and confirms that sexual advances from prison staff - both male and female - are common. In 2005 she was in New Hall prison, near Wakefield, when a male officer "came on strong" to her. It began by him asking her if she had any burn (tobacco). When she said she had none, he gave her three Marlboro Light cigarettes. The next day, he searched her cell on his own, something officers are supposed to do in pairs; in women's jails, a female officer should always be present. He picked up an item of her underwear and rubbed it against himself. He then asked her to "bring him off" and held out a full packet of Marlboros.

"That was the start of it," she says. "For the rest of my stay there" - about three months, she thinks - "I would regularly give him hand and blow jobs." Her rewards increased from cigarettes to vodka, which he would bring in plastic bottles. "I was on smack [heroin], which he wouldn't bring in, but I could swap the vodka for gear."

Were other prisoners and staff aware of the relationship? "For sure. He wasn't the only one at it." And did she see the liaison as consensual? "In a way, I suppose. I knew what I was doing; but I wouldn't have looked at him on the outside and only did it for the burn and the vodka. He was a bit arrogant and there were times when I fantasised about biting his cock off."

Jade Thompson, 32, is a former drug addict who served several prison sentences for drug-related crimes. Last released in 2003, she has turned her life around, training and working as a drugs abuse support worker. She served time in four prisons - Holloway, Highpoint, Cookham Wood and Foston Hall - and says she witnessed and experienced sexual approaches from staff, male and female, in every jail.

"It was part and parcel of prison life, and very intimidating. If you are not going to buy into the approaches made by staff, you will not progress, you will not get the good jobs, or get on the courses that will help you get early release." Thompson says Holloway was the worst jail she was in.

Susan May, 64, served 12 years of a life sentence for the murder of her aunt in 1992. Released in 2005, she has always maintained her innocence and is currently fighting to get her case referred to the court of appeal for the third time. She has been imprisoned in six different jails.

May agrees with Jade Thompson that Holloway contained a number of predatory female staff. In every jail she was in, she says, there were illicit relationships between staff and inmates. "Some inmates complied, in return for cigarettes and other treats. But many of the younger, more vulnerable women were pressurised, with staff preying on their vulnerability." May says many women prisoners felt lonely and were more susceptible to the illicit approaches. (The average female prisoner is held more than 50 miles from her home, with around a quarter of them held more than 100 miles away, so visits from family and friends are often sparse.) May describes being strip-searched by female officers as akin to being forced to strip off in front of men.

Sara Taylor, 34, was released from Styal prison in 2007, having served a six-year sentence for robbery. She also spent time at Buckley Hall jail, now a male prison. She says she was frequently propositioned to have sex with both male and female staff during her sentence, and that one male officer promised to let her return to the prison from day release with drugs and alcohol in return for sex. Another asked her to perform a lap dance on him. She said some male officers at Styal would walk quietly to the cell doors and peer through the "Judas hole" - the small hole in a cell door - hoping to catch the women in a state of undress, and that officers would bring CDs and other small gifts for women who supplied them with sexual favours.

"The whole situation is horrific," says Taylor. "I have suffered sexual abuse in my life and do not expect to see it in prison, where they are supposed to provide care. It's pretty shit really."

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Female ex-inmates talk about prison abuse

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Rhona (not her real name) is in her late 20s and from Leeds. She says she has "done the circuit" of women's prisons in the north of England and confirms that sexual advances from prison staff - both male and female - are common.

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only 9% of children whose mothers are in prison are cared for by their fathers in their mothers' absence .
Maintaining contact with children is made very difficult by the distance that many prisoners are held from their home area.

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Most Women in Prison Are Victims of Domestic Violence. That's Nothing New

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Thanks to a unique historical record created by women in a Mississippi prison in the 1930s, it's possible to see the similarities between women's incarceration then and now

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HMP Askham Grange in Yorkshire and HMP East Sutton Park in Kent will close "in due course" because the changes will mean there is no longer a requirement for dedicated women's open prisons.

The mother and baby unit at HMP Holloway in north London will also close due to under-occupancy, the Ministry of Justice announced.

Female inmates will serve their sentences closer to home and will be offered skills to help find work on their release under the new reforms.

Low risk offenders will be encouraged to undertake practical training so they can seek employment following their jail term.

The reforms, announced by Lord McNally, the minister for female offenders, will mean all women's prisons will become resettlement prisons so that women are close to home and are re-integrated into society.

Lord McNally said: "When a female offender walks out of the prison gates, I want to make sure she never returns.

"Keeping female prisoners as close as possible to their homes, and importantly their children, is vital if we are to help them break the pernicious cycle of re-offending.

"And providing at least a year of support in the community, alongside the means to find employment on release, will give them the best possible chance to live productive, law abiding lives."

The MoJ said it will test a "pioneering" new open unit at HMP Styal in Cheshire aimed at helping women into jobs on release, with the prospect of a commercial run business at the prison that could provide training and employment for inmates.

In order to ensure there are enough prison places available for women, existing provision at HMP Eastwood Park and HMP Foston Hall will be refurbished and HMP Drake Hall will see modifications to some of its buildings.

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HMP Askham Grange in Yorkshire and HMP East Sutton Park in Kent will close "in due course" because the changes will mean there is no longer a requirement for dedicated women's open prisons. The mother and baby unit at HMP Holloway in north London will also close due to under-occupancy, the Ministry of Justice announced.

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46% of women in prison report having suffered from domestic violence
48% of women have committed their offence in order to support the drug use of someone else

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Women are a minority in the criminal justice system, accounting for approximately 5 per cent of the prison population and 15 per cent of those supervised in the community. The reasons that they end up involved in the criminal justice system are often very different to their male counterparts and their needs tend to be more complex.

The vast majority of women that are sentenced to prison serve very short sentences for non-violent offences. These sentences create chaos and disruption for women and their families and do nothing to help them turn their lives around.

In 2007, Baroness Corston published her seminal Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System, also known as the Corston Report. It concluded that imprisonment was disproportionate and inappropriate for the vast majority of women in prison and that women's centres and other community services were far more suitable for almost all women in contact with the justice system.

The Howard League provides administrative assistance to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Women in the Justice System, chaired by Baroness Corston and Fiona Mactaggart MP. The APPG works to ensure high quality debate and discussion on issues around women in the justice system in Parliament and continues to push for the full implementation of the Corston Report recommendations.

The APPG's latest report looks at the impact of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms on women's centres.

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The Howard League | Women in the Penal System

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Women are a minority in the criminal justice system, accounting for approximately 5 per cent of the prison population and 15 per cent of those supervised in the community. The reasons that they end up involved in the criminal justice system are often very different to their male counterparts and their needs tend to be more complex.

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Provided by Leticia Villarreal

When Leticia Villarreal, 42, began her prison sentence at McPherson Unit, a women's facility in Arkansas, she throbbed with anger and pain. She was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. She didn't speak English. No one visited, no one called. She deeply missed her children. She was, for the first time in her life, utterly alone.

And then, she found God.

Kenneth Dewitt, a charismatic prison chaplain, welcomed her into the Principles and Applications for Life, or PAL, program ― a religious initiative for inmates that's based on the teachings of disgraced evangelical fundamentalist Bill Gothard.

Women in the PAL program lived in a separate barracks and dedicated much of their days to study and prayer. It was quieter and cleaner than living with the general population, Villarreal said, an overall improvement in quality of life. And it was rumored among inmates that participating in the program looked good on a record, especially if parole was possible.

According to conversations with former PAL participants, Dewitt would give daily lectures on topics such as personal responsibility, curing impure thoughts and the importance of submitting to authority ― both within a family structure, meaning a wife should submit to her husband, and inside the prison where they were all stuck.

Villarreal grew hopeful about life, even though she faced a 40-year sentence for the manufacture, delivery and possession of a controlled substance.

" I began to apply myself to study, " she said. "I knew I needed to change, I just didn't know how."

After Villarreal had been in the program a few years, Dewitt invited her to receive individual training, and requested she report to his office at 6 a.m. one Monday. She was excited to be singled out, she said, and eager for advanced instruction.

When she arrived, Villarreal told The Huffington Post, Dewitt said he knew exactly what she needed: to be touched. Intimately. For a few minutes each morning, the guards in the hallway outside Dewitt's office left to perform an inmate count. The chaplain chose that moment to fondle her breasts and buttocks, she said.

That morning was just the beginning of her nightmare.

Villarreal said Dewitt would call her to his office every Monday and sexually victimize her, forcing her into oral sex and intercourse. And she wasn't the only one: Two other women in the PAL program also told state police Dewitt had subjected them to weekly sexual abuses. One woman reported that the assaults went on undetected for three and a half years. For Villarreal, they continued for about a year and a half, she said.

Last week, the former chaplain who were involved in the PAL program, including Villarreal. While he was pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting three female inmates initially charged with 50 counts of third-degree sexual assault ― which could have meant spending up to 500 years behind bars ― he ultimately pleaded guilty to only three charges, one for each of the victims.

After working for the A rkansas Department of Correction for 13 years, Dewitt is expected to be sentenced to five years in one of the state's prisons. It's possible that he may be eligible for parole after serving only one-sixth of his sentence. In other words, he could be out within a year.

Jackson County Detention Center

"He's 67 years old. The average life expectancy of a man today is 77. So, five years to serve is half his life expectancy," prosecuting attorney Henry Boyce said when asked to explain the short sentence.

It's only been a month since the country exploded in collective outrage after Brock Turner, a former Stanford University swimmer, was sentenced to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.

The Dewitt case has failed to elicit similar widespread indignation, which is not especially surprising.

To start, two of the victims are still incarcerated and serving life sentences. (HuffPost is not naming them without their explicit permission.) They are essentially powerless to speak out about the pain inflicted on them. There is no viral victim impact statement to educate the public about the horror of being assaulted by a trusted authority figure, forced to live alongside them and unable to leave the scene of the crime.

But it may also have to do with who the victims are, said B renda V. Smith, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University. The public may have less sympathy toward incarcerated women because they aren't "perfect victims."

"I'm interested in where the outrage is about this," she said. "We are talking about someone who is supposed to be a spiritual guide. Not only is he a person who has authority vested in him by the correctional system, he has this moral authority that comes from his position as a prison chaplain."

Over the past four years, the rate of women incarcerated in the U.S. has risen dramatically . Many women in prison were physically or sexually abused prior to their incarceration, making them acutely sensitive to abuse by staff.

It's hard to know the number of women who are sexually assaulted while incarcerated. A n estimated 2.3 percent of female prison inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by staff in the preceding year, according to a 2011-12 survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics .

That's likely a low count, as rape is notoriously underreported and women have even more reason to keep quiet in prison, Smith explained. Incarcerated women may rightly fear that they won't be believed, she said, and that a false report could lead to them being disciplined or losing "good time," which means getting a shorter sentence because of good behavior.

"There are actual consequences related to making a report that no one investigates or believes," Smith said. "The person who is doing the abuse is much more powerful and has much more legitimacy than they do."

Villarreal said she did not feel comfortable coming forward to authorities until Dewitt resigned in 2014, after he had admitted having a sexual relationship with another chaplain who was also a former inmate.

I didn't say anything to anybody because I didn't trust anyone enough. Leticia Villarreal, who was sexually assaulted while incarcerated in Arkansas

McPherson Unit provides informational resources to inmates about what to do if they are a victim of sexual abuse, including how to report it, said an Arkansas Department of Correction spokesman. Methods include telling a staff member, calling a specific phone line and filling out an inmate grievance form.

The prison has made some changes since Dewitt's arrest, including knocking down office walls to improve visibility, Arkansas Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelley told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette .

"The Department will do everything in its power to protect the inmates in its custody from becoming victims of any form of sexual abuse," she said in a statement provided to HuffPost. "The Department cooperated fully with the investigation into Kenneth Dewitt's behavior and appreciates the work of the Arkansas State Police and Prosecutor Henry Boyce and his staff."

Villarreal fantasized about befriending one of the guards and begging him to put a camera outside Dewitt's office to catch him in the act. But she was too afraid of getting in trouble, she said, and she heeded Dewitt's warning that she would never get out of prison if she told anyone.

"I didn't say anything to anybody because I didn't trust anyone enough," she said. "It's not just fear, it's shame, it's everything."

In 2015, after serving 10 years of her sentence, Villarreal was released from prison and promptly deported. She now lives in a small village in Coahuila, Mexico, where she works at an orphanage and paints in her free time. She uses oil, acrylic and chalk, whatever is around.

"I want to touch people's lives," she said.

Villarreal said she is still struggling with the trauma of being sexually assaulted. She had a hysterectomy while in prison, and said Dewitt forced her to have sex with him even after her surgery. That was her lowest point, and she seriously considered suicide.

She is still religious and had to work to reconcile her faith with her anger at Dewitt.

"I used to have such horrible thoughts about him, but at the same time I would refrain myself because I knew it was a sin. How can you think something wrong about a pastor?" she said.

Villarreal said she considers Dewitt's sentence to be a slap on the wrist, but that she's glad the ordeal is over.

"I think he should do more time, but again, I don't have a voice because I'm not over there," she said. "Or maybe I don't have a voice because I'm not legal. That's how they treat people like me."

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Melissa Jeltsen covers domestic violence and other issues related to women's health, safety and security. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter.
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The Rape Victims Silenced By Their Prison Cells

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When Leticia Villarreal, 42, began her prison sentence at McPherson Unit, a women's facility in Arkansas, she throbbed with anger and pain. She was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. She didn't speak English. No one visited, no one called. She deeply missed her children. She was, for the first time in her life, utterly alone.

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For the past few years, America has started to take a closer look at our soaring prison population. Decades of tough-on-crime policies mean we now incarcerate 2.3 million people - the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. And who are the fastest-growing group of prisoners in the U.S.? Women and girls.

The U.S. makes up just 5 percent of the global population, yet nearly one-third of all the female prisoners in the entire world are here in America.

There are more than 200,000 women and girls incarcerated nationwide, a number that has increased by more than 700 percent since 1980. Men still make up the vast majority of inmates, but women in prison face unique challenges. Most are mothers. Prisons limit or charge money for basics like tampons and pads. Women are also more likely to be sexually assaulted, particularly by guards.

To hear these stories, Teen Vogue and The Marshall Project sat down with Ayana Thomas and Sarah Zarba, who were both formerly incarcerated; Kyndia Riley, a student whose parents have been in prison since she was a toddler; and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey who introduced legislation this summer to ease some of the burdens for women in federal prisons.
Parenting from Prison
In this first video, women talk about struggling to stay in contact with their families while behind bars.

Many studies have shown that prisoners who maintain close contact with family do better once they are released and have lower rates of returning to prison. Kyndia Riley, whose parents both went to distant federal prisons when she was 2 years old, never got to have a real relationship with her parents. Phone calls were expensive, and money was tight, so Riley's visits became increasingly rare. As a young girl growing up, she would purposefully get herself in trouble, thinking it would get her arrested so she could finally reunite with her parents.

About 60 percent of women in state prisons have children under 18. Ayana Thomas missed out on mothering her children over the two and a half years she spent locked up. She was living in Virginia, but served her time at a facility in Connecticut. She says that even when her children could visit, they weren't allowed to embrace or hold hands for long before a guard would break them apart. (For security reasons, many prisons limit physical contact during visits.)
The Needs of the Incarcerated
In this video, the women explain how prison fails to meet both basic and complex needs.

When women spend money on basic necessities like tampons and pads, it takes away from savings that could be spent on in-person visits. And because incarcerated people make very little hourly at their prison jobs, they depend on their family and friends for the money to buy what they need. Kyndia Riley sent her mother money to help her buy supplies - but that meant there wasn't money to travel to see her mom.

Sarah Zarba was addicted to heroin when she was sent to jail, which did not help her with withdrawal symptoms. Getting off heroin can be dangerous. The number of people who have died from this is not tracked, but media reports show there have been at least 20 lawsuits filed between 2014 and 2016 that claim a prisoner died due to complications from opioid withdrawal.

Zarba was also surprised by how few female officers worked in the jail, and says that male staff looked at her when she was changing or using the bathroom. Often referred to as "cross-gender supervision," men guarding women, as well as women guarding men, is supposed to be limited under existing laws, and yet it continues. About half of women coming into prison or jail have already been the victims of sexual abuse, and too often that abuse continues. Females are the victims of one-third of all sexual abuse cases committed by prison staff, despite making up just 7 percent of the prison population.
Returning to Society (or Picking up the Pieces)
In this video, the women speak about the obstacles people getting out of prison must surmount.

When Ayana Thomas was released, her house had been foreclosed on, so she went to a shelter with her two kids. There are about 65 million Americans with a criminal record, which often carries with it restrictions on employment, education, and housing. According to the American Bar Association, there are about 40,000 such barriers across the country for people with previous convictions.

But even when people are upfront about their past, the stigma of a conviction is difficult to overcome. For Sarah Zarba, it meant getting turned down again and again for jobs, including by one employer who Googled her name after she applied for a job in medical billing, a skill in which she had received training. She was asked to leave to protect the patients.

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What Is Prison Like for Women and Girls?

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The Marshall Project teams up with Teen Vogue to listen.

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There should be greater visible direction in respect of women in custody and a much higher profile.

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There should be greater visible direction in respect of women in custody and a much higher profile.

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In recent years, there has been a greater focus on women in the criminal justice system, including a Justice Select Committee inquiry into women offenders, a women-specific 'Expectations' document based on the Bangok Rules, drawn up by HM Inspectorate of Prisons and the establishment of a Ministerial Advisory Board on Female Offenders in 2013. As PM, David Cameron called for a rethink on how mothers and babies are treated in prison and, as the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove stated that "We need radically to reform how we treat women offenders to "ensure fewer women are sent to prison in the first place".

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Percentage of total prison population in
U.S.A: 9.8%
England & Wales: 4.6%

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Fewer women will be sent to prison under a new programme to try and curb growth in crime among Kiwi females.

Corrections Minister Louise Upston launched the women's strategy at Christchurch Women's Prison on Monday. It aims to reduce reoffending among women by 25 per cent.

Main components of the strategy included sending fewer women to prison, providing accommodation for women on remand and training offenders for jobs.​

The female prison population has increased by more than 150 per cent since 2002 when there were 275 female prisoners in New Zealand.

There were now 739 female prisoners spread across three prisons: Auckland Region Women's Corrections Facility (ARWCF), Wellington's Arohata and Christchurch Women's. More than half of the women prisoners were Maori.

The strategy said women's pathways to offending often differed from men's, which meant the responses to it also needed to differ.

Probation officers' reports to the courts would have "greater emphasis on identifying and understanding women's circumstances" so that more convicted women were sentenced to home detention rather than prison.

In the strategy document, Corrections chief executive Ray Smith said the justice system had been built around male offenders' needs, but research had shown women responded differently to treatment and management.

"Our women's strategy redresses that imbalance, based on international best practice and our own research into what works best.

"It recognises that women have different needs to men and sets out a new approach for Corrections that will give women the treatment, encouragement, counselling, skills and support they need to shape better futures for themselves, their children and families."

Upston denied the strategy meant more lenient punishment for women.

"Women will often have more responsibility in terms of raising their families so that's a more significant need than others," she said.

"The reality is the women's strategy is about dealing with the realities, for example, of childcare. So if there are programmes that are scheduled, taking into consideration some of the practical challenges of those with children.

"So not having things start at 8.30 in the morning if offenders are trying to get their kids off to school and the same time finishing at 2.30pm so they can pick them up.

"This is all about making sure that women actually finish the programmes and finish their sentences and comply. So it's about making it easier for them to do that."

Providers had been contracted to provide supported accommodation outside of prison for women on remand, who would be electronically monitored, the strategy document said. The service, Community Alternatives, would cost $2.2m over three years.

The strategy also aimed to train convicted women for jobs in the construction industry, hairdressing, beauty therapy and hospitality, with more options possible in the future.

Four counsellors had been employed to work one-on-one with women who were suffering from the ongoing effects of trauma.

Other programmes on offer from the strategy were teaching women about cooking, budgeting, road safety and obtaining a driver's license, violence prevention and parenting.

Many of the social programmes were already in place in women's prisons, but would be boosted with the strategy and would target the substantial mental health and substance abuse problems that were widespread among the prisoners.

According to Corrections, 62 per cent of women in prison had both mental health and substance disorders in their lifetime, compared to 41 per cent of the male prison population.

Seventy-five per cent of women in prison in the last year had diagnosed mental health problems, compared to 61 per cent of male prisoners.

Corrections also monitored 6000 women outside of prison, such as those who were being electronically monitored or completing community work sentences.

- Stuff

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Fewer women to be jailed under new Government strategy to curb growth in crime

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Fewer women will be sent to prison under a new programme to try and curb growth in crime among Kiwi females. Corrections Minister Louise Upston launched the women's strategy at Christchurch Women's Prison on Monday. It aims to reduce reoffending among women by 25 per cent.

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Many women in jail sufferer from mental health problems, but with the prison system under pressure there are concerns some do not get the care they need.

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Considering our nation's merciless criminal justice policies, it comes as no surprise that the United States has the largest prison population and highest incarceration rate in the world.

What you may not know, however, is that women are a fast growing demographic of the prison population. There are currently 219,000 women - mostly mothers - behind bars in our nation's overlapping criminal justice systems, according to a new report released last week by the Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU's Campaign for Smart Justice. To put that in perspective: Only five percent of the world's female population lives in the U.S., yet nearly one-third of all the female prisoners in the entire world are here in the United States.

Nationwide, the criminal justice system is failing communities, hurting the economy, and destroying families - and putting women and mothers disproportionately behind bars for drug and property crimes. We've narrowed down some of the most horrific impacts the United States' culture of incarceration has on women and mothers:

Many states still shackle women during labor and delivery. You read that right. Some women are shackled while being transferred to the hospital and even in their beds while giving birth, making labor and childbirth all the more challenging. Even in states where anti-shackling laws have been put in place, this inhumane practice continues to occur all too often.

Women are separated from their children. Eighty percent of women in jails are mothers. Most of them are primary caretakers of their children. Excessive incarceration hurts innocent children the most, causing them to experience severe feelings of isolation and trauma. And, since the criminal justice system disproportionately locks up people of color, children of color also disproportionately suffer. As a society, we should know better than this. Period.

1. Economic impact. This country's pay gap problem - the yawning gap between the wages of Black women and white men - can have especially onerous implications in the criminal justice system. Economically disadvantaged Black women have fewer resources to make bail, causing them to wind up behind bars for far too long, even for crimes they've only been charged with and often are not found guilty of.

Sixty percent of women in jail, according to the ACLU's Smart Justice Campaign and the Prison Policy Initiative, have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial. That means that poor people are automatically criminalized more often and for longer periods of time. This extra time in jail can lead to a seemingly never ending downward financial spiral. Defendants can lose their jobs, along with access to benefits and even their housing. In short, incarcerating a woman who is poor will only make her poorer.

2. Too many women in prison are there for drug offenses. Twenty-five percent of the women in state prisons are serving nonviolent convictions related to drugs. Strict penalties designed to combat the distribution of illegal drugs have done little to stem the drug trade. Instead, these overly harsh penalties have swept up people experiencing challenges related to drug addiction into an ever-expanding criminal justice system. These folks need treatment and counseling, not jail time.

We must divest from mass incarceration and invest in our families and children instead.
This article is part of a series featuring women's perspectives on incarceration. Read a report on the drivers of women's incarceration.

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Here's How Prison and Jail Systems Brutalize Women, Especially Mothers

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Jump to navigation Skip navigation Considering our nation's merciless criminal justice policies, it comes as no surprise that the United States has the largest prison population and highest incarceration rate in the world. What you may not know, however, is that women are a fast growing demographic of the prison population.

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Charities working with women released from prison say that some are breaching their parole conditions or committing further crimes so that they will be returned to jail - because their lives on the outside are so bleak.

Many of the women seek a return to prison because they have nowhere to live, fear an abusive partner or have unmet mental health needs.

The trend - which is particularly notable around Christmas - highlights what campaigners say is a chronic lack of concern for the women's welfare upon release.

"Christmas is a really difficult time if they haven't got family," said Joy Doal, who runs the Anawim project in Birmingham, which helps female prisoners. "Many have come from care and have been in and out of prison. For some, prison is a place where they will feel safe. They get three meals and a bed for the night."

Many of the women released from prison have served short sentences for non-violent crimes that often they had committed to pay for a partner's drug habit.

When they emerge from prison, an increasing number are struggling to access benefits or find accommodation because of cuts to support services. A report by HM Inspectorate of Probation published this year said dedicated funding for women's services has virtually disappeared under the government's Transforming Rehabilitation programme.

"Homelessness is one of the biggest contributing factors behind why many women are in prison," said Claire Cain, policy and campaigns manager at Women in Prison. "It can be a direct cause, when sleeping rough breaks an antisocial order for example, or indirectly, when women reach such a point of desperation that they will commit an offence to get a roof over their head. Around 60% of women leave prison homeless and it is a near impossibility out there to find even safe temporary accommodation."

Cain said her organisation regularly supported women for whom prison was a preferable option. "We support women all the time where their only options are to stay in an abusive and exploitative flat, surrounded by drugs and alcohol that they are trying to keep free from, end up on the streets, or reoffend and go back to prison in the hope that there will be more options and a different path to take on release next time," she said.

There are about 3,900 women currently in prison in England and Wales - 2,300 more than in 1993. Figures show that nearly half (48%) of them - , compared with just over a fifth of men - said they had committed offences to support someone else's drug use. More than half (53%) of female prisoners have experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse.

Cain said the fact that some women were attempting to return to prison underlined the desperate nature of their situations. "It must be understood, the risk women are taking in seeking refuge in prison. Prisons are harmful: 22 women have died in prison this year, the highest on record certainly since 1990. Most of these women took their own life."

The issue of women being returned to prison has become a mounting cause for concern among penal reform campaigners.

The number of women recalled to custody while under supervision following their release has increased by more than 80% since the end of 2014, when the Transforming Rehabilitation programme was introduced. Almost 1,400 women were recalled in the year to June 2016.

Under the programme, any offender who breaches their licence within 12 months of release is returned to prison for two weeks. Charities say this means an offender will be returned to prison simply for missing an appointment with their probation officer. The stipulation makes it easy for vulnerable women to end up "choosing" a prison cell over an often chaotic life outside.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "This increase coincides with changes that mean we are now monitoring more offenders than ever before and providing them with the support they need to turn their back on crime. The justice secretary has been clear that we must simplify the probation system, with specific outcome measures such as getting offenders off drugs, improving educational standards and getting offenders into apprenticeships and work."

Jenny Earle, director of the Prison Reform Trust 's three-year programme to reduce women's imprisonment, said the criminal justice system was failing to support women leaving jail. "It's a sad indictment of society that women seek refuge in prison because the services they need in the community are so under-resourced and over-stretched," she said.

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Vulnerable UK women choosing prison over life on the outside

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Charities working with women released from prison say that some are breaching their parole conditions or committing further crimes so that they will be returned to jail - because their lives on the outside are so bleak. Many of the women seek a return to prison because they have nowhere to live, fear an abusive partner or have unmet mental health needs.

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In the last few years, America's out-of-control incarceration boom has finally started to get the sustained public scrutiny, and condemnation, that it deserves. But one key element of the story still receives too little attention: the number of women in the nation's prisons and jails.

Men account for more than 90 percent of those behind bars. But the number of female inmates, most of whom are mothers, has been growing at an even faster rate than the overall prison population. In 1980 there were just over 15,000 women in state prisons. By 2010 there were nearly 113,000. When jail inmates are added in, there are about 206,000 women currently serving time - nearly one-third of all female prisoners in the world.

This soaring population is largely a result of the war on drugs; the vast majority of the women behind bars were convicted of low-level drug or property crimes, rather than violent crimes. Many of them were swept up in larger conspiracy prosecutions targeted primarily at drug dealers they were living with. Many suffer from mental illness or drug addiction. And as is true with men, the racial disparities are severe: Black women are locked up at almost three times the rate of white women.

A new report by the Prison Policy Initiative quantifies just how extreme an outlier the United States is. Thailand is the only country with a higher incarceration rate for women than the United States over all. But individual states are far worse. West Virginia has the highest rate in the world, imprisoning 273 of every 100,000 women, with nearly two dozen other states not far behind.

The burdens of incarceration to women are particularly heavy. A large percentage of female prisoners have experienced physical and sexual abuse in their lives. One 1996 study of California prisoners found that 92 percent of women in prison had been abused, and often that abuse continues inside prison walls by male guards.

Pregnant women face their own gantlet of humiliation behind bars. In 28 states, women may be shackled during labor and delivery, and while caring for their newborns - a "barbaric" practice that continues despite the lack of any evidence that they pose a threat. Most of the newborns are immediately separated from their mothers after birth.

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In the last few years, America's out-of-control incarceration boom has finally started to get the sustained public scrutiny, and condemnation, that it deserves. But one key element of the story still receives too little attention: the number of women in the nation's prisons and jails.

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Women must never be sent to prison for their own good, to teach them a lesson, for their own safety or to access services such as detoxification.

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Women must never be sent to prison for their own good, to teach them a lesson, for their own safety or to access services such as detoxification.

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Unfortunately, we hear of women being sent to prison or being called for probation for their own good or for their own safety. Recent research indicates that prisons are being used as a place for safety for some women with complex mental health needs.
Some women we work with tell us they intentionally commit crimes in order to go to prison as the reality they face on release is so bleak that they cannot cope, most notably in the case of street homelessness. It is also difficult for women to get residential rehab as an alternative to prison. This therefore means that for women prison is the only establishment where they access detoxification services. This is a tragic reflection on the lack of support, care and safety in the community available to women with complex needs.

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It's a weekday morning, and in a packed lecture theatre in central London, author and consultant Stephanie Covington is telling about 100 people who work in Britain's jails why prisons fail to rehabilitate women. Along with other prison campaigners, Covington believes something must be done about the fact that eight in 10 women behind bars have been convicted of a non-violent offence and yet, once incarcerated, one in two will reoffend within a year. Locking up a mother or caregiver will also hugely increase the risk of her children having mental health problems or getting caught up in the criminal justice system themselves, she adds.

Covington believes that, in an ideal world, only a handful of women - those who are truly dangerous - would be incarcerated. If changing policy on imprisoning women who pose no threat to society is a long-term goal, however, Covington's UK workshops aim to reduce the damage done by prison by teaching frontline staff about the benefits of what she calls "a trauma-informed culture". "It's not difficult and it's not expensive," she says. "But it does demand a real mindshift within prisons."

Covington is in Britain at the invitation of the Women at Risk coalition, a group of experts including academics, psychologists and criminologists intent on making society more aware of the needs of the women who get caught up in the criminal justice system. At present, she says, prisons are run on the basis that the women inside them are "bad" and that "kicking off" or disruptive behaviour is controllable on their part. The truth is that almost all female prisoners are trauma victims, says Covington, and if they were handled with that in mind, prisons would become far safer for everyone inside them.

Compared with women in the general population, says Covington - a Californian psychologist who works with the National Institute of Corrections in Washington DC, and who became aware of the issues around women in jail after a prison warden attended one of her trauma conferences - women in custody are five times more likely to have a mental health problem, and almost eight in 10 exhibit some level of psychological disturbance on admission. One in three have suffered sexual abuse, and more than one in two have suffered domestic violence; half have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. "And going into prison retraumatises them - so basically, we are amplifying or compounding their problems," she says.

"Taking as the default that you're dealing with a woman who is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome makes perfect sense, because the chances are very high that you are. What that means is working hard not to trigger trauma in a woman: understanding how she might feel when male officers are with her or go behind her, for example, because that might take her back to situations where she was abused."

One prison that has adopted Covington's trauma-centred approach is Framingham Institution for Women in Massachusetts, whose successes she cites in her presentation to UK prison staff. The changes at Framingham over the past few years, says Covington, have been pivotal. "There's been a 46% drop in crisis situations, and the number of prisoners on days when they're having to be watched constantly because of fears over their mental health is down by a third. There's been a 20% drop in transfers to psychiatric hospitals, and a 15% drop in self-harm."

And Framingham is safer for everyone, she says: inmate-on-staff assaults are down by 62%, inmate-on-inmate assaults by 54%, and inmate-on-inmate fights by 46%.

Most of the women in the criminal justice system have suffered trauma almost unimaginable to the rest of us. Covington says: "Understanding that trauma, and changing the prison experience to reflect an understanding of it, could give these women the first break they've ever had - and that could really change them, and we'll all reap the rewards."

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It's a weekday morning, and in a packed lecture theatre in central London, author and consultant Stephanie Covington is telling about 100 people who work in Britain's jails why prisons fail to rehabilitate women.

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The number of women and girls in prison around the world has jumped by more than half since the turn of the century, according to a new report.

Researchers calculate that more than 714,000 females are held in penal institutions, a 53 per cent rise on the 466,000 estimated to be behind bars in 2000.

The number includes those on remand and awaiting trial as well as inmates who have been convicted and sentenced.

By comparison, the assessment finds the number of male prisoners globally has gone up by around a fifth over the same period.

Women and girls now make up 6.9 per cent of the global prison population, says the study published by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

The analysis, based on the latest available information at the end of September, puts the number of females locked up in the United Kingdom at around 4,400.

This number includes 3,974 in England and Wales, 51 in Northern Ireland and 360 in Scotland.

These were all up compared with 2000, when they stood at 3,350, 23 and 203 respectively, amounting to an overall rise of more than 800 since the start of the century.

The fourth edition of the World Female Imprisonment List says the female prison population has risen in all continents in the last 17 years.

It says: "In Africa the rise has been somewhat less than the increase in the general population of the continent and in Europe the increase in prisoner numbers has been similar to the general population increase.

"By contrast, rises in the female prison population in the Americas, in Asia and in Oceania have been respectively about three, four and five times the increases in the general population of those continents."

More than 200,000 female prisoners are in the US, followed by China (more than 107,000) the Russian Federation (48,478), Brazil (about 44,700), Thailand (41,119) and India (17,834), according to the report.

It also points to variations in trends seen since the last edition of the research was published two years ago.

The female prison population levels in Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey have risen sharply, while substantial falls have been recorded in Mexico, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Roy Walmsley, director of the world prison brief at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, said: "The surprisingly sharp rise over recent years in the number of women and girls in prison, the substantial variations in female imprisonment levels between neighbouring countries, between different regions and between different continents, and the fact that female imprisonment levels have been increasing at a very much faster rate than male imprisonment levels should prompt policy makers in all countries to consider whether it is really necessary to hold so many women and girls in custody.

"Female imprisonment has a high financial and social cost, and its excessive use does not contribute to public safety."

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Shocking rise in the number of women in prison around the world

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The number of women and girls in prison around the world has jumped by more than half since the turn of the century, according to a new report. Researchers calculate that more than 714,000 females are held in penal institutions, a 53 per cent rise on the 466,000 estimated to be behind bars in 2000.