JENNI MURRAY: I'm not soft, but here's why we should let almost all women prisoners go
In 1983, I visited a women’s prison for the very first time. I was working for Newsnight when the then governor of Holloway persuaded the Home Office to let me visit what was known as the Muppet House. A basement with no natural light where women suffering severe mental health problems were kept alone in their cells.
I was most shocked by an elderly woman who sat silently, rocking back and forth on her bed. I was told she was Eastern European and had no English. Her husband had died and none of her bills had been paid. It was for this crime of debt that she was incarcerated, but no account had been taken of the fact she had never paid a bill in her life.
Her husband had done everything and she couldn’t read the letters that came after his death. Why was she in prison with no one to care for her?
I recalled this when I heard James Timpson had been appointed to the Cabinet as the new unelected prisons minister.
Demonstrators outside the High Court after Kiranjit Ahluwalia was given a life sentence for fatally burning her husband in 1989. She was released in 1992
I’m not a fan of Prime Ministers appointing men or women if they have not been elected to serve. But Timpson’s expertise in this area cannot be denied.
He is the chief executive of the Manchester-based company famous for its shoe repair and key-cutting shops (there are over 2,000 nationwide) and latterly became known for employing inmates after their release.
Currently Timpson employs more than 600 prison leavers, making up more than 10 per cent of the company. Interestingly, he doesn’t take on men under the age of 25, but employs women from 19 upwards. It appears women are more trustworthy at a younger age than men.
Timpson is the former chair of the Prison Reform Trust and takes on his ministerial post at probably the hardest time in the history of the service.
The prison population has risen to almost 100,000, of whom four per cent are women. The jails are bursting at the seams. He’s clear that significant numbers should not be in prison and, in the case of women, he says for a ‘large proportion... prison is a disaster’.
It would be ridiculous if his view were seen somehow to indicate that he believes women are inherently good and don’t commit terrible crimes. They do. Myra Hindley, Rosemary West and Lucy Letby spring to mind.
For women like them, a life sentence is the only option, but the majority of women in prison have not committed such dreadful, murderous crimes.
Over the years, as I’ve been into jails and met former inmates, I’ve learned how minor the crimes most often committed by women are. They’ve led to short sentences but have had a devastating effect on the woman’s life — and, if she’s a mother, those of her children.
Several years after visiting Muppet House, I was sent to Styal Prison in Cheshire for Woman’s Hour because of the high number of suicides that had taken place there. At least 11 women have killed themselves there since 2007 and former inmates have condemned the prison as ‘hell on earth, no place for a vulnerable young woman’.
There, I spoke with inmates imprisoned for various offences such as shoplifting, cheque fraud, forgeries, drugs and sex work such as prostitution or soliciting.
In every case the woman told me she’d committed the crime for her kids. She’d stolen food for them or done whatever work she could to give them a decent life. I remember interviewing prostitutes in Southampton, all of whom were single mothers working to support their children.
Most of the women in Styal had become lone parents because they’d escaped terrible domestic violence. Many of them had been abused physically and sexually as children. They had all suffered far more serious crime than they had committed, yet here they were suffering the loss of the children they’d tried so hard to protect.
I have, of course, met women who have committed very serious crimes. In 1989 Kiranjit Ahluwalia set her husband’s bed alight and killed him. She was given a life sentence but was released in 1992 when her lawyers managed to prove she had been driven to her action by ten years of coercive control and brutal beatings.
Similarly, Sally Challen, who was jailed for life in 2011 for killing her husband in a hammer attack, was released after nine and a half years when a judge ruled her guilty of manslaughter not murder. Her two grown-up sons supported her throughout and had witnessed their father’s violence towards her.
I hope I’ve made it clear that I haven’t gone soft on this question. I don’t believe all women are what Margaret Atwood once described as ‘gooder’. But I do think serious crimes committed by women are rare.
In the year to March 2023, 5,164 women were sent to prison. But an estimated 17,000 children are affected by maternal imprisonment each year. They and their children need support.
I recall a former burglar (male) telling me prison was effectively a ‘school for crime’. According to Timpson, prison puts women ‘back in the offending cycle’ too. We don’t want our mothers and their children learning how to burgle better. We need them to know they could go to Mr Timpson and say, as politely as possible, ‘gizza job?’
Why Ruth should stay schtum
Best not spill the beans about what went wrong with your marriage to Eamonn, Ruth
Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes seemed such a happy, smiley couple when they appeared together as presenters on This Morning.
No longer. He’s doing breakfast on GB News and she’s about to return to Loose Women and, it’s rumoured, tell viewers why their marriage hit the rocks.
Best not spill the beans about what went wrong, Ruth. There are public lives and private lives and this should remain private. Eamonn’s got enough pain in his back without adding to it!
Let 'Lady Vic' have her own life
Lady Starmer is a fan of Me+Em, and is seen wearing one of the brand's £275 red dresses here
Poor Victoria Starmer, thrust into a limelight I doubt she wanted to be in. When will we learn that a wife has a job of her own, leave her to hers and him to his?
Good excuse, though, to stock up on some of the frocks of the moment. Just as well Vic has the figure to fit the Me+Em brand. It’s not at all kind to those who don’t.
Diagnoses of cancer said to be caused by smoking have risen to an all-time high. I packed it in nearly ten months ago after nigh-on 50 years’ devotion to the evil weed. And I have to report I don’t feel better: I feel infinitely worse.
I admit I've turned my heating on!
A spectator takes shelter under an umbrella while courtside at Wimbledon last week
Didn’t expect to have the heating on in July, but I do! Didn’t expect the garden to need no watering from me, but it doesn’t. The world is confusingly upside down.
It was on Woman’s Hour in 2022 that Anneliese Dodds said there are ‘different definitions legally around what a woman actually is’. And Keir Starmer’s given her the equalities brief! He doesn’t listen; she doesn’t get it. There are women (biology) and trans women aka males (also biology).
