About the Exhibition
WOMEN IN PRISON
Holloway Prison was the largest women’s prison in the Western Europe until its closure in 2016. Women have a very different prison experience to men as they lose contact with their children and community. They often serve short sentences, mainly for non-violent crimes.
England and Wales have one of the highest rates of women’s imprisonment in Western Europe, around 9000 per year. While thousands of women are sent to prison each year, they represent just 5% of the national prison population. At the time of its closure the prison had space for 591 women and saw at least 800 women come through its doors each year. The annual cost of keeping a woman at Holloway Prison was £39,000 in 2014.
When Holloway Prison became a women’s prison in 1902 the main crimes were drunkenness, vagrancy or prostitution. By the closure of Holloway in 2016, more than 80% of its prisoners had been sentenced for non-violent crime and about half had been convicted of theft – mostly shoplifting.
Today, women in the Criminal Justice System are often the most vulnerable or marginalised in our society. BAME women are more than twice as likely as white women to be arrested, 53% have experienced abuse during childhood and 49% of women in prison are identified as suffering from both anxiety and depression. Drugs and alcohol addiction can also be a major factor in women’s imprisonment. At the time of the closure, 70% of women entering prison need clinical detoxification and more than 30% said it was easy to get drugs in prison.
Women’s sentences tend to be very short – nearly two thirds serve a sentence of less than 6 months. Short custodial sentences have the worst reoffending rates, as women lose their homes, jobs and contact with families while in prison and many end up homeless on release.
In the very early days of Holloway Prison, men carried out hard labour while women prisoners were given domestic work such as laundry and needlework. Prison was meant to return women to their perceived ‘true nature’ of gentle calm as opposed to the rebellious and violent nature of the male prisoner.
Even in the present day the idea of a violent woman is often presented as shocking. Male and female violence or criminal behaviour is often thought of very differently. The five women hanged at the prison from 1903 were often cruelly stereotyped in the media. In 1955 Ruth Ellis was executed at Holloway. The last woman ever to be executed in the UK. All of the women were buried in unmarked graves within the grounds but were exhumed and reburied during the 1970s redevelopment.