Typically, this is how it goes: a woman on the street behaves erratically and police pick her up, concerned she might harm herself or others. Perhaps she’ll be held in a police car or cell for a while, charged with disorderly conduct, or perhaps she’ll be taken to hospital. But increasingly a lack of mental health beds means she is then taken to prison “as a place of safety” and there she’ll stay, unsentenced and without specialist care, sometimes lingering in a cell for more than a year.
In 19th-century asylums, women were offered very little mental health provision and patients routinely self-harmed. There are a series of unnerving and moving photos online by society photographer Henry Hering who took portraits of Bethlem patients, including Eliza Josolyne, admitted in 1857 with “overwork”. She “frequently tried to injure herself by knocking her head against doors and walls, and has slept in the padded room on this account”. Perhaps it’s unhelpful to keep returning to the Victorian asylums, but here is where my mind goes, aided in part by pictures of a prison currently housing women as “a place of safety” (the words catch on the tongue) – HMP Styal in Cheshire, which occupies a former “orphanage for destitute children” opened in 1898.
There were 11 suicides at HMP Styal between 2007 and 2024, more than any other women’s jail in England. One was 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson, who had been arrested in 2020 for stealing a pair of trainers and assaulting emergency workers who had intervened. When she was apprehended she poured petrol on herself and tried to drink it; instead of being offered psychiatric treatment, she was sentenced to 12 months at Styal.
Prison is not a place of safety. For women especially, it is a place of chaos and trauma where vulnerable people struggle to maintain their dignity, let alone sanity.
Source: Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’? | Eva Wiseman | The Guardian