The End of the Sentence

Psychotherapy with Female Offenders

Pamela Windham Stewart, Jessica Collier, Pamela Windham Stewart, Jessica Collier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429665271
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

HMP Holloway was the largest women's prison in Europe, historically holding numerous infamous female criminals and eliciting intrigue and fascination from the public. The End of the Sentence: Psychotherapy with Female Offenders documents the rich and varied psychotherapeutic work undertaken by dedicated specialists in this intense and often difficult environment, where attempts to provide psychological security were often undermined by conflicting ideas of physical security.

Women commit crime most often in the context of poverty, addiction and transgenerational violence or trauma, familial cycles of offending and imprisonment which are often overlooked. Using personal testimony and case studies, and screened through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, the book examines the enduring therapeutic and relational endeavour to find connection, closure and to experience a "good enough" ending with prisoners when the possibility of a positive new beginning often seemed remote. It also considers how the cultural and political discourse remains hostile towards women who are incarcerated, and how this may have culminated in the closure of the only female prison in London.

Through insightful real-life accounts, this insightful book also emphasizes the importance of professionals finding ways of supporting one another to offer women who have entered the criminal justice system a way to leave it. It will prove fascinating reading for forensic psychotherapists, forensic psychologists and criminologists, as well as anything interested in the criminal justice system.

PART I

Prison and the Symbolic Mother

Chapter One

The violence of austerity

Maureen Mansfield

Introduction

HMP Holloway has been entwined with women and gender specific advocacy and reform since its earliest days. Opened in 1852, it became a women-only prison in 1903, following the closure of Newgate Prison a year earlier. Previously the prison had held both men and women together. Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, philanthropist and penal reformer, was said to be the person who knew the most about conditions for women in prisons at the time. She was invited to chair the 1919 Committee of Enquiry into Medical Care in Holloway and founded the National Lady Visitor Association – visiting both Holloway and Aylesbury – which “sought to educate them and help them prepare for life after their imprisonment” (Bennett, 2017). Over a century has passed of campaigning for better conditions for women in prison; in HMP Holloway specifically. I worked for the campaigning organisation Women in Prison, in the prison’s final years until its closure in 2016. In this chapter I aim to weave my personal experience of HMP Holloway, with the history of the challenge to the prison itself.

A cruel irony of sorts is that despite the long history of reformist and abolitionist efforts centred around the sometimes distressingly harmful Holloway, its closure was not a moment to celebrate. On an otherwise ordinary Wednesday, I was discussing with colleagues the planned proposals to close London’s Victorian prisons and build nine new men’s prisons, when the closure was announced during the Government’s Autumn Spending Review. I wrongly assumed Holloway, being neither a Victorian prison nor a men’s prison, would be unaffected. The news that the prison was to close was monumental; yet the world continued. Of course, aspects of it bubbled up to the public consciousness, but similar to a personal bereavement, many, including myself, wondered how this was not bigger news. The world kept turning as if nothing had changed.

As it happened, the year the decision to close Holloway was made was also personally seismic for me. I lost my sister to breast cancer that January, and my mother, tragically, that September; no longer able to bare her pain enough to stay. Due in part to austerity, there was nothing resembling support for any of us to hold on to. My grand aunt, two uncles and my cat also passed on that year. I experienced the loss of three generations of a family tree; three siblings from a family branch.

The history of organisations in HMP Holloway

Women in Prison (WiP) was established in 1983 by Chris Tchaikovsky, a former prisoner of Holloway, and the academic Pat Carlen. Chris had been in Holloway on minor offences, but during her last stay in the prison in 1974, a woman burned herself to death in a cell. This is surprisingly common and during my time working in the prison women also set fire to themselves amid other desperate actions. Women in Prison was originally a campaigning organisation, born out of a rage against the injustices Tchaikovsky saw there. Alongside Inquest, it emerged with support from a campaigning group called “Radical Alternatives to Prisons” (RAP). Funded by a Christian organisation who were critical of punitive responses and issues of inequalities, they felt strongly that punishment and prison was an inadequate method of achieving behaviour change. As part of their abolitionist organising, RAP produced “Alternatives to Holloway” in 1972. This suggested, as the title implies, alternatives to re-building the prison. Opposing the re-building of the prison, their argument centred around investment in community support, social justice and tackling inequalities. Investment in these areas, they argued, would mean fewer individuals would enter the criminal justice system. Today, Reclaim Holloway is a coalition campaign that has strikingly similar proposals for the public land at Holloway, arguing that it should be used for community support, not sold off to fund more prisons, built further away.

Something about Holloway, its North London location notwithstanding, has always inspired women to organise and campaign for change; to get stuck in practically and provide support. Part of the history of the women’s movement is forever connected to the prison. Holloway held political prisoners, most notably, of course, the suffragettes. It also held councillors from Poplar in the 1920s, objectors during both world wars, the Committee of 100, Greenham Common protesters, environmental and animal rights activists, and more recently, women who attempted to fight ISIS with the Kurdish Freedom Party, held under terrorism charges. A less acknowledged contribution to the women’s movement, however, is how the prison inspired, or perhaps more accurately, compelled groups of women to organise in response to the conditions within the prison. Women in Prison counts Holloway as its birthplace, alongside others for whom it has made an important contribution including Hibiscus, Women in Secure Hospitals (now Women at WISH), Clean Break, Birth Companions, The Griffins, and more recently, Treasures Foundation and Holloway United Therapies.

Women in Prison’s original manifesto illustrates the organisation’s understanding of women as a minority in the criminal justice system. It sought to campaign and raise awareness of women as a minority with differing needs in the prison system, as a means to seek to

unite women of all classes, ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientation in a campaign which, whilst highlighting and attempting to redress the injustices presently suffered by Britain’s hitherto neglected women, will also contribute to the wider campaign for democratic control for the criminal justice and penal systems.

(Carlen, 1985: 187)

Written in 1983, WiP’s original manifesto contained ten demands for women prisoners, and ten demands for all prisoners. It encapsulated a strong desire for prisoners to self-organise and be a collective democratic instrument to subvert and redistribute power universally and democratically. The first point on the manifesto for all prisoners was the democratisation of the criminal and penal justice system in Britain. As such, the origin story of WiP should be understood in ideological terms associated with prison abolition, collective emancipation and solidarity. I believe this is important to frame, in order to contextualise my role within the psychological therapies team at Holloway. Alongside colleagues working with and for the prison and the NHS, I was working within an independent organisation who, from its foundations, challenged the legitimacy of the prison project and had its sights firmly locked on the harms of the state and the systemic institutional harms of imprisonment.

Working in the prison

I worked at Holloway as a mental health manager for WiP, managing the more psychologically informed or complex needs projects of the organisation. At Holloway, the projects were integrated into the psychological therapies team and I attended the weekly referral meeting on behalf of the organisation. During my time with Women in Prison, the complexity and tensions inherent in working for an independent charity in a prison setting gave me an appreciation of what psychoanalytical thinking offers to help understand the unspoken processes at play; both within the work with the women and within teams and organisations. Prison and politics are never far apart, despite the absence of any meaningful public dialogue about what their function is. It would be very difficult to reflect on the work of either WiP or Holloway without mentioning the current socio-political climate and neo-liberalism’s impact on the organisation, which was ultimately a predominant factor in Holloway’s closure.

During the intervening years between its foundation and the closure of Holloway, WiP expanded and contracted, depending on whatever political and funding narratives were in fashion at the time. Like many other small to medium sized organisations, it changed somewhat in response to the needs of the women and somewhat in response to the organisation’s own survival. Having focused on campaigning, Chris and colleagues were continuously approached by women in prison and their families for support. Thus began what is now their core business: supporting women affected by the criminal justice system. While campaigning is still a very important element, the organisations slide towards service delivery mirrors that of many women’s organisations established at the time. Having challenged the system from the edges, they have now been co-opted into it, to provide services on behalf of the state. Survival now depends on contracts with government, or privatised companies contracted by the government. Organisations supporting women in the criminal justice system struggle to voice concerns as strongly as they once did.

Consider briefly the scale of intervention that the prison received from community based or women’s organisations. In my short time of nearly seven years, WiP alone had fifteen different projects supporting the women in Holloway. Some employed one member of staff, others eight. Funding came from charitable trust funds and some statutory funding streams, which effected a huge change in working culture that I will touch upon later. My contribution was in designing smaller scale, specialist projects focusing on complex needs and therapeutic services responding to trauma and supporting women’s engagement; understanding her resistance to cooperating with the system.

Co-option into the system mirrored my own personal experience with the prison. At Holloway, I wavered from initially feeling outside to feeling gradually drawn further inside. How I understood what was happening around me shifted from my interpretation as humanistic counsellor, influenced by phenomenological existentialism, towards a greater appreciation of psychoanalytical thinking. Subtle co-option, was part of Holloway’s special way of eliciting more from you, of drawing you in. When the decision to close the prison was made, I doubt anyone accounted for the generosity of spirit Holloway ignited in people, the collective effort involved in making it a better place. My political objections to prisons as a means to solve social problems and my, probably predictable, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian position matched the women’s. Despite that, perhaps even because of it, my attachment and commitment to contributing towards making Holloway “better” was unwavering and it still is as I campaign with Reclaim Holloway.

The prison as mother

The prison captured a part of me, connected to my desire for systemic change; but it also dragged up my unconscious drive in working with women in prison. Both the closure of the prison and the death of my mother brought to the surface the impossible task I had set myself as a child, to “save” my mother, and by extension to strive to “save” the women in prison. This compulsion was as strong as those that brought women into the prison; both the “helper” and the “helped” finding themselves in the same place, for all too similar reasons.

Mothers and mothering was a recurring theme in the prison. Women distraught at being separated from their children might readily be accessible in our minds. However, the sometimes repetitive failure of the mothers of the women in prison to protect or believe their daughters was emotionally annihilating. Inconsistent care, abuse and neglect create early attachments and patterns that can result in mistrust and a lack of “reflective functioning”, defined as the capacity to understand your own thoughts and feelings and the intentions of others (Bateman and Fonagy, 2004). I heard shocking stories of women being prostituted by their mothers, which I experienced alongside their desire for a better relationship; to get what their mothers could never give them. This desire was so strong that repeated attempts to support some on release, meeting the same woman at the prison gates five, ten or fifteen times, would result in her inevitable return to her mother. This in turn brought along the crack addictions and sex working and the return to prison. In a way, we were somehow together in prison because of our mothers. This observation is not to attribute blame to mothers, but to understand the strong dynamics at play. Returning to prison was perpetuated as a result of the failure of this wish for containment, a longing to be held and contained. Prison can be seen as a stand in for mother, with the women “forcing their way in so violently, they usually find there is no longer an ‘inside’ that can hold them; the urge to get inside becomes even more urgent” (Adlam and Scanlon in Aiyegbusi, 2009: 129). Those women usually found themselves even deeper in the prison system, spending some time in the care and separation unit, or health care unit. Women with disrupted attachments have an increased risk of externalising behavioural problems, especially when other social risk factors are present (Belsky and Fearon, 2002). These contribute to repeated transgenerational patterns of difficult adult relationships, disrupted attachments (Yakeley, 2010) and maternal abuse and neglect (Motz, 2008). A difficult maternal relationship is a greater predictor of offending in women than men. While the truth is that prison can never be a home, it helps us understand why the closure of HMP Holloway felt so monumental. It also helps in understanding the managerial problems in forensic institutions and the dependency inherent in these systems (Adshead, 2002; Barrett, 2011).

I felt the loss of Holloway, as a container, and as the “Concrete Mother” (Motz, 2008), acutely, and perhaps on behalf of the generations of women and campaigners gone before. There is profound internal anxiety concerning psychic survival (Adlam and Scanlon in Aiyegbusi, 2009) located in dedicated forensic services. Those working within the complex system feel entwined with the organisation. The organisational is also the personal. Structures and policies are bound up with the inner emotional lives of those working within them, while simultaneously trying to change them (Armstrong, 1991). In order to be able to offer “healthy” psychological interventions, the perpetual loss, absences and abandonment in the “mind” of any team has to be acknowledged. The organisations associated with Holloway underwent a similar negation of their traumatic experiences as that of the women. In writing I have come to recognise that the closure, as it interweaved around my own losses, has meant I have given myself another impossible task to replace saving my own mother: to keep Holloway alive. Or at least try to make it better understood. This mirrors the litanies of unrecognised and unspoken losses that bring women to prison, as they used their own lives and bodies as memorials in the absence of acknowledgement of their loss and abandonment. Those affected carry “the fear that we will forget as well as be forgotten and lose what has been of value” (Salzberger-Wittenberg, 1999).

The particular character of any organisation is a reflection of the client group and workers and may get in the way of healthy functioning (Stokoe, 2011). An organisation founded by a former prisoner, which at one point only employed women with personal experience of imprisonment, WiP are particularly vulnerable to operating in a fragmented mode. Set up to work with women traumatised and “dismembered” from society, it becomes itself traumatised and dismembered as staff try to deal with the anxiety arising from the failed dependence within the system, alongside their own drive towards the work. Exposed to raw, unprocessed projections and organised around the victim/perpetrator split in the first instance, one is vulnerable to acting out these dynamics and engaging in sado-masochistic behaviour if not provided with opportunities to understand the unconscious processes that support this sort of painful interpersonal relating (Aiyegbusi, 2009).

Autonomy and independence

Just as the women found themselves in deep custody, in the bowels of the prison, I too found myself working with longer sentenced women, entrenched and embattled. The task for WiP when working with these women who did not “engage” was to use our independence to help translate the system. To help women see the matrix ahead of them; to help them to understand as early as possible, the challenges they faced from “the system”. We wanted to support them in understanding what was and is in their control and what wasn’t and where to place their attention and energy. While understandable, the systemic injustices they might feel would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Editors and Contributors
• Foreword by Estela Welldon
• Introduction
• PART I: Prison and the symbolic mother
• PART II: Working with institutional dynamics
• PART III: Living in prison
• PART IV: Prison and society
• Afterword
• Index