Farah Damji talks about the lack of mental healthcare in women's prisons and how she hopes her test case against CNWL NHS Foundation Trust will change the system for 1000's of Women

Yesterday, I was contacted by Clare Simms, the managing editor of View Magazine, a quarterly publication that tells us it’s “for women with conviction, dedicated to our children, families, supporters, legal teams and the charities and NGOs that strive to keep us together when we are falling apart.”

It’s a magazine written for and often by women with experience of imprisonment which they provide free to prisons, prisoners and ex-prisoners. They sent me 3 editions for me to have a look – and I can say, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s a quality production.

Clare has put her weight behind a woman she’s got to know through her work, Farah Damji, who’s raising awareness of the absence of mental health provision for women in prisons through her own case against Central and Northwest London NHS Foundation Trust, who, she explains, failed her while she was in prison. Farah hopes that her test case will support and change the circumstances for the thousands of women who are denied mental health care in prisons today.

Since there are only a few days left in their campaign, I’m posting my conversation with Farah today in the hope we can help them reach their £5000 target.

£5000 isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, especially when you consider that imprisoning a person for a year costs anything between £44 and £75 thousand a year – as more private prisons are being constructed – the prison population in the UK has nearly doubled since I became a social worker in the early 1990’s – crime is falling – we need to ask, ‘Who are we sending to jail?’. While billions are being pumped into these huge penal systems, community mental health provision is at crisis point. Depending on what statistics you choose to look at, anything between 25% and 80% of women in prison report having mental health problems – nearly 60% of women interviewed recently by the prison reform trust report having experienced domestic violence, while 53% said they experienced childhood emotional, physical or sexual abuse.

As suicide rates increase in women’s prisons, Is it time to defund these institutions, and put the limited money we have into timely, preventative, community mental health services?

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