Research which we carried out several years ago collating Press cuttings concerning suicides among people awaiting prosecution for minor offences indicates that there are more than fifty such deaths per year.
Data which I have gathered from people contacting Portia leads to the belief that it is not the penalty itself which causes deep distress as the fear of publicity in the local media. This is especially alarming for mothers, who realise that a newspaper item such as “Mrs X fined £25 for shoplifting” will be passed around by her children’s classmates and will produce taunting. There is also the fear that her children will be cut off from friends, because their parents will not want contact with criminal families.
Suicide results from a wish to protect their families from shame and if the courts only realised it, a sense of shame does more than anything else to keep people honest. Once shame has been lost, there is little or no reluctance to commit criminal acts if is seems they will not be detected.
It would help cut crime figures if first offenders facing prosecution for “trivial” sums could claim the right to have their case heard “in camera”, with magistrates sitting informally around a table with defendant, lawyer and prosecutor, and with Press and public excluded. For others, just outside the “trivial” limit (or second offenders) this concession could be optional. If the defendant felt the decision was unjust, there could be an appeal, in a public court. In this way there could be penalty without shame, in the knowledge that a further offence would probably be heard in public.
This would also give magistrates far greater insight into the motivation for offences, since defendants unaccustomed to speaking in public could reveal themselves more freely. For example, I appeared as “Mackenzie” for a woman who could not afford a lawyer. She was found guilty of shoplifting, but I was able to explain in a note to the magistrates that in the stores, her periods began; she tried to rush out, to find a toilet, but in her haste forgot to offer a packet of tea for payment. She would not allow this to be said in open court, in shame, but the note brought a conditional discharge.
My reasons for believing this is a subject which has been grossly under-investigated and "swept under the carpet" are as follows:
1. A senior prison officer, Ms Pauline Martindale (a member of Holloway's suicide awareness training team) states that a high percentage of prisoners — about three out of 10 — arrive at Holloway with forms warning that they are at high risk of suicide. A subsequent report in the Guardian (April 23, 1998?) quotes her as saying that half the new inmates arrive with similar Pol 1 forms — three-quarters of them suicide warnings.
Not all prisoners have prior assessment (fine defaulters, for instance, and those on remand). What is the precise definition of "high risk"? How many are at "medium risk" or "low risk"; how many are unidentified?
2. It seems that at times the reception area is understaffed, and this provides reason for failure to respond to risk.
3. One question asked during the assessment is: "Have you ever wanted to kill yourself?" This has the defect of putting suicide in mind. It can also be regarded as a "trap question." Does the woman fear that an affirmative answer will mean a strait-jacket and solitary confinement in a padded cell? Furthermore, the answer which is given will be taken into account when eventual early release is considered. An affirmative answer could preclude release. Also, on her first moments in prison, providing answers to a uniformed officer, a woman is likely to be fearful, mutinous, resentful, suspicious, and very likely to provide false answers. (As indeed she is during a prior medical assessment and during pre-release interviews).
4. One method of suicide — choking to death by swallowing toilet paper — is one which could be almost impossibly difficult to prevent. Women can have shoe-laces, blades, glass and string taken away; can they be deprived of toilet paper? Must they be kept under close scrutiny in toilets? And if they are not allowed toilet paper, must books, newspapers, magazines, letters also be banned, for these could serve the same purpose? There might well be "copycat" suicides. Throughout women's (and men's) prisons, the risk is an alarming one.
5. The daily population of women's prisons has risen 57 percent in three years to a total of 2,125. There tends to be a rapid turnover since women's sentences are usually short (perhaps seven days for fine default or non-payment of TV licences). This adds up to many thousands per year, of whom it seems that 30 percent show severe symptoms of suicide risk. Some 13.75% of them have children under five; 17.2%, aged five to nine; 24.6%, aged 10 to 16. Very few can bring babies into prison, and some have had no time to make arrangements for the care of their children. Almost all the mothers must be highly distressed about what is happening and may happen to their families. What proportion of these are made suicidal by imprisonment or by the deprivation which led to it?
6. Prison staff are highly experienced in handling potential suicides (although this inquest report shows that they can be short-staffed and overloaded). But for the most part, all that happens is that suicide is not permitted to take place: the desire for death remains. Is it right that a civilised country should impose the death wish on a large, and increasing, number of women, many of them mothers, and then deprive them of outlet?
7. My own belief is that very often this risk survives the sentence. In 1972 a released prisoner told me that she had been able to make only three real friends in prison (where she was a "fish out of water.") Two, she said, committed suicide within six weeks of release. This seemed incredible so I checked up, and it was absolutely true, although the inquests made no mention of past imprisonment. The third woman came to my home for a fortnight and was in a state of mental breakdown which horrified the doctor I took her to; he had her admitted immediately to a mental hospital. My informant had severe thrombosis, a stress-related illness very rare at her age.
8. It seems to me there is logic about this. Some women enter prison at high risk of suicide; they have almost unbearable ordeals in prison, partly at the hands of other prisoners, and then come out expecting that this is over and they can make fresh starts. Instead, they may find themselves homeless, friendless, jobless, the subject of maliciousness and ill-will, hopelessly in debt, and perhaps have difficulty in getting their children back. So they kill themselves or have breakdowns.
9. How often does this happen? Coroners might feel that it would be cruel to make mention of a sentence which has been served; those relatives and friends giving evidence might consider it best forgotten. I have repeatedly asked the Home Office Research Division to investigate, but there is a total barrier. Are they afraid of the results?
Posted in 1998.
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