Women Are Victims Of Prisons.. It's Time To Stop Locking Them Up

It's almost a decade since former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini published a radical report calling for an overhaul of how Scotland treats women in the justice system.

- Annie Brown

It was a progressive and humane approach which recognised most women who are discarded to our jails are far more victims than perpetrators.

Seven in 10 of them will have suffered a mental illness, many will have been sexually or physically abused and been victims of coercive control.

More than half will have substance addictions.

Angiolini’s report came too late for the 10 inmates who killed themselves in their Cornton Vale cells between 1995 and 2001 but it brought hope for others still locked in the system.

Tragically it was a false hope for too many, including Katie Allan, a Glasgow University student who took her own life in Polmont while serving a 16-month sentence for hitting a teenager in her car while over the legal drink-drive limit.

Katie at no point abdicated responsibility for her actions but jailing her was purely a punitive action and had nothing to do with rehabilitation.

Despite clear evidence of her vulnerability, she was harangued and strip-searched, she had lost 80 percent of her hair through stress-induced alopecia and had self-harmed, yet had not been assessed as a suicide risk when she was found dead in her cell in June 2018.