‘Confined to cells for 23 hours’: Self-harm among female prisoners surges by 47% to record levels

‘The increases are part of a wider trend of declining mental health for women in prison and serve as a sobering reminder of the damaging impact prison has,’ says campaigner

Maya Oppenheim,May Bulman
Friday 29 October 2021 08:34 BST
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<p>Ms Vieru warns newly released data is even more troubling given the government pledged funding for 20,000 more prison places</p>

Ms Vieru warns newly released data is even more troubling given the government pledged funding for 20,000 more prison places

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Self-harm among female prisoners surged drastically to record levels in recent months, new data shows.

Ministry of Justice statistics show self-harm among female inmates rose by 47 per cent in the three months stretching until June 2021. This is far higher than the 8 per cent increase during the same period of time in male prisons.

Overall, there was a 16 per cent annual increase in the rate of self-harm incidents among female prisoners between June 2020 to June 2021, which is the highest level for the last 10 years.

While self-harm in the women’s prison estate has been rising since 2017, incidents have soared since highly strict regimes and rules were rolled out in jails in the wake of the Covid crisis.

Sorana Vieru, of Women in Prison, a leading charity helping women locked in the criminal justice system, said: “This huge jump in self-harm incidents on the last quarter highlights the devastating mental health crisis for women in prison.

“Self-harm incidents have hit record levels in women’s prisons, and since the pandemic began while restrictions in the community have gradually eased, this hasn’t been the case for all women in prison, who have remained confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day.

“However, the increases are part of a wider trend of declining mental health for women in prison and serve as a sobering reminder of the damaging impact prison has. We must not continue to ignore the fact that prisons are not safe and do not enable recovery but thwart it.”

Ms Vieru warned the newly released data is even more troubling given the government pledged funding for 20,000 more prison places, including 500 for women’s prisons, during the Spending Review this week.

“Instead the government can and must use this to invest in community-based services that support women to tackle the issues that sweep them into crime in the first place, like domestic abuse and mental ill-health,” she added.

While Zahra Wynne, of Revolving Doors, a charity which helps people trapped in the cycle of homelessness, crime and mental health issues, told The Independent: “The Ministry of Justice state that the sharp increase in self-harm in women’s prisons is ‘primarily driven by a reduction in self-harm in the previous quarter compared to the recent trend’.

“However, if you look at the year-on-year data, self-harm in women’s prisons has been steadily rising for a decade.

“Women with lived experience of imprisonment tell us that prison is a traumatising experience – which only exacerbates the trauma from domestic violence, poverty, substance misuse and homelessness that many women in prison have faced.”

A previous report by the Prison Reform Trust found 80 per cent of women in jail were serving sentences for non-violent offences.

A former female prisoner, who chose to remain anonymous, previously told The Independent she encountered many women self-harming in jail - adding that she herself suffered from a great deal of “unaddressed trauma” while inside.

“I saw lots of women self-harming,” she said. “You could see their distress – it was an absence of attention for many of them and feeling like not having someone to recognise they were alive. They were isolated and isolated again. It was a sign of distress and not having anywhere else to take it.”

The new data also reveals that the rate of self-harm among children in custody has increased by 27 per cent over the past year – the highest level since at least 2014, when the current records began.

The rate of self-harm incidents fell substantially during the first nine months of the pandemic but has increased in each of the latest two quarters, surging by 65 per cent in the three months to the end of June 2021.

It comes amid mounting concern about the youth custody estate. Two secure training centres – which are designed to house child prisoners aged 12 to 17 – have been forced to close in recent years due to poor conditions, and the third and only remaining facility was recently found by inspectors to have “widespread failings”.

In light of the figures, shadow youth justice minister Anna McMorrin called on ministers to “urgently set out how they plan to improve conditions for children and staff in the youth estate”.

“Under the Tories, violence and self-harm have spiralled out of control in youth custody. The government must commission an independent review into youth custody to develop a long-term strategy for young offenders and to get a grip on this crisis they’ve created,” she said.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Mental health support is increasing across the estate, including a taskforce dedicated to reducing worryingly high levels of self-harm in women’s prisons.

“While the number of children in custody has fallen drastically in the last decade, all youth custody officers are receiving degree-level training to best support the often complex needs of the small number of vulnerable children who remain.”

They said more than 25,000 new and existing staff had received self-harm and suicide prevention training to help them better support offenders with complex needs across the whole estate.

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