Why prison doesn't work for women

Credit: Prison Reform Trust

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Many years ago, fellow journalist Loren Stein and I worked with the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco on a year-long investigation into the alarming number of miscarriages among pregnant women in US prisons and jails. Packed into routinely overcrowded, understaffed and ill-equipped facilities, pregnant inmates were often denied essential pre-natal and emergency care. As a result, more than 30 percent of the imprisoned pregnant mothers lost their babies – in one prison, it was 80%.

We found that because women formed a small proportion of the US prison population, the system was generally ill prepared and ill equipped to look after them - and there was very little thought about the impact their incarceration had on their families.

A couple of decades later and on the other side of the pond, it looks like little progress has been made:

A day-long conference at Northumbria University, Newcastle, this Thursday (11 December), will address why prison doesn’t work for women.

Former prisoners, prison reform campaigners and criminologists will examine the impact that imprisonment has on women and their families.  They will also discuss effective alternatives to imprisonment that could help solve the problem of increasing reoffending rates for women.

Keynote speakers include Vicky Pryce, who served a prison sentence for perverting the course of justice and has recently authored Prisonomics, a book calling for reform for women prisons; Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Vera Baird; and Jenny Earle, director of the Prison Reform Trust’s programme to reduce women’s imprisonment.

Louise Ridley, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Northumbria, will argue that the prison system has been designed for men and isn’t suited to the needs of women offenders.

“Women are mainly imprisoned for low level crimes, such as theft or handling stolen goods, which are often linked to their domestic situation. When men are imprisoned there is often a network of women – mothers, girlfriends, wives – who are caring for their children, paying the bills, and keeping their lives going so that they can more easily slip back into their family life when they are released. When women come out of prison they need support to rebuild their lives.”

Ridley argues that there is greater cost to the state when women are imprisoned as there is often the need to support their children in care during the custodial sentence. There also appears to be a larger domino effect when women with families are sent to prison.

 “Studies have found that children with mothers in prison are more likely to go on to offend than those with just the father in prison.”

The event is organised by The Centre for Offenders and Offending at Northumbria University, NEPACS, a regional charity providing support to prisoners and their families, the Prison and Offender Research in Social Care and Health Network (PORSCH), and OpenGate, a charity providing mentoring and support to women offenders returning to their community. 

You can follow the conference on Twitter: @PrisonNU & #wiprison

Iran Tribunal to Uncover Iran's Srebrenica

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This picture is part of Prison Memoir in Painting by Iranian artist Soudabeh Ardavan. She spent eight years in Iranian prisons and survived the 1988 massacre. She painted this and many other prison's paintings by using her hair as a brush and toothpaste or tea as paint. She now lives in exile in Sweden.

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A People’s Tribunal will sit at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London on June 18-22 to unearth secrets the Iranian regime have managed to keep buried for more than two decades.  Survivors of torture and families of murder victims have managed against all odds to set up this international court to investigate the Iranian regime’s biggest state crime.

“When they took me to the death committee in Gohardasht prison, the lobby was piled high with sandals, glasses and blindfolds. That’s all that was left of our friends. They are all gone and I am alive. I am alive to tell their story. That’s my only goal,” says Mehdi Aslani, 53, who survived a mass massacre of political prisoners in Iran the summer of 1988.

Aslani and thousands of other victims have waited 24 years for this, but now they will finally have their day in court.

“The Tribunal’s main purpose is allowing evidence to be heard and allowing the world to find out what really happened in the 1980s in Iran,” says John Cooper, QC, chair of the Iran Tribunal’s steering committee. “It is incredible that torture survivors and families of murder victims have managed to achieve this on their own - and it is shocking they had to do this all on their own – that the UN did nothing.”

In the summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran executed in secret an estimated 5000 political prisoners across the country. The killing, ordered by an extraordinary fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini himself, was relentless and efficient. Prisoners, including women and teenagers, were loaded on forklift trucks and hanged from cranes and beams in groups of five or six at a time in half-hourly intervals all day-long. The victims were intellectuals, students, leftists, members of opposition parties and ethnic and religious minorities. Many were jailed for no more than distributing leaflets, having a banned book or being accused by “a trusted friend of the regime,” according to Amnesty International.

The massacre was the climax of a massive elimination campaign conducted by the regime from 1981 to 1989: during that bloody decade around 20,000 political prisoners were executed across Iran.

“It is what I would term (based on my past work with the UN in Bosnia) ‘Iran’s Srebrenica’: a monumental atrocity that cannot remain unanswered,” says Payam Akhavan, professor of International Law at McGill University, first UN war crime prosecutor at The Hague and member of the Iran Tribunal.

The deliberate and systematic manner in which these executions took place constitutes a crime against humanity under international law, according to many human rights lawyers. (Widespread and systematic executions of a civilian population across the country, planned and ordered by the highest ranks of the Iranian government.)

Yet, to date, more than two decades after the massacre, there are still no investigation into this crime, no international pressure on the Iranian government to do so, and no recognition from Iran or the international community. In fact, many of the perpetrators are still in power and the international media seem to deliberately avoid covering this issue.

Over the past decades, survivors and families of the victims – many are mothers because the majority of the victims were very young - have campaigned for justice.  They have sent petitions to the UN, organized rallies and seminars and disseminated information on the Internet – but no one is listening.

After the massacre/ Soudabeth Ardavan

 “We are in the information age: with a click of a mouse, you can know what is happening in the far corners of the world. Yet more than 5,000 people were killed in two months in Iran and no one knows about it. It’s like nothing happened,” says Aslani, who lives in exile in Germany.

So the survivors and families of the victims have taken the matter into their own hands.   In 2007, they have come together to form the Iran Tribunal, modeled on the Russell Tribunal set up by British philosopher Bertrand Russelland French writer Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966 to examine American intervention in Vietnam, and the subsequent Russell Tribunals on Chile, Iraq and Argentine. Like these tribunals, the Iran Tribunal won’t have any legal status, but will act as a tribunal of conscience to deal with violations of international law that have not been recognized nor dealt with by existing international jurisdictions.

After five years of fundraising, outreach and assembling a team of prominent lawyers, the People’s Tribunal is now ready to proceed. It is organized in two parts: a Truth Commission and a Tribunal.  The Truth Commission, during which the court will hear and examine oral and written evidence from dozens of witnesses, is held at AI’s headquarters in London on June 18-22.  The Tribunal will then meet on October 25-27 in The Hague to issue a verdict.

Attendance is free, but you need to register. For more information, click here. To follow the proceedings live, click here.