From - 28dayslater - Holloway Prison 2017
On June 7th, the studio’s Sarah has been invited to join a discussion about the proposed women's building on the site of Holloway prison.
Some thoughts ahead of that…
Holloway, at the time of it’s closing, the largest women’s prison in Europe, was founded built in 1852 with the intention of being “a terror to evil-doers”, known locally as ‘The Camden Castle’. It became female only in 1903, coincidentally the year that Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Suffragette movement. By the time it closed in 2016, it housed up to 500 women at any one time.
My interest in prisons, is related to a wider interest in systems of confinement for mental illness, as the history of the asylum is at times closely linked to that of the prison. The idea of removing liberty from people, confining them, as a form of punishment dates back to the ancient world. Mass confinement became increasingly used as a form of control in western societies from the 18thcentury onwards. Together with the asylum, the prison was a way of separating people, deemed harmful, from society. Prison with it’s additional element as a system of punishment replaced even more barbaric penal practices such as public executions and floggings for even petty crime. The modern prison was in fact intended as more humane, a form of punishment that allowed for reform and redemption.
Prison along with the asylum, formed part of what Foucault called systems of control and was way of managing, on a grand scale, both criminals and the mentally ill, though often this would encompass outcasts, perceived social misfits and those who refused to conform. Both were used to confine those who did not fit societal norms, what Lisa Appignanesi calls the Mad, Bad and Sad. These often the poor and the powerless, (certainly the poor would spend longer in prison because they couldn’t afford bail). Very frequently women, who had fallen into poverty and today women of colour are also overrepresented in the penal system.
The relationship between prisons and mental illness is an interesting one, which has shifted over time, but today in the UK some 25% of female inmates have a mental health problem, including those indicative of severe mental illness such as psychosis, which compares with 15% in the general population. Many should arguably be in a place of safety, rather than a prison.
Women find themselves in prison for many reasons, systemic inequality and the accompanying precarity sees many spiral into criminal behaviors , or behaviors which are increasingly criminalized, often due to financial insecurity, something such as not paying a council tax can land people in prison. Women also find themselves in prison for refusing to conform to society, pushing boundaries has also been something that has led to women being imprisoned. The suffragettes, some of Holloway’s most famous inmates, are of course a examples of this.
Prisons hide societies failings to care and protect people, it swallows up those who fall through the cracks, and are often black holes to which people are lost rather than places in which they are redeemed.
The prison closed in 2016, as part of the government’s plan to replace ‘victorian’ prisons in London.
In that same year Sarah Reed a mixed race woman who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, would die there, found hanging in her cell. In many ways her life typifies the stories of those who find themselves in the criminal justice system. She had fallen into the system after the loss of a baby saw her mental health deteriorate and the onset of this illness.
Following the enquiry into her death. Deborah Coles of Inquest said: "Sarah Reed was a woman in torment, imprisoned for the sake of two medical assessments to confirm what was resoundingly clear, that she needed specialist care not prison. Her death was a result of multi-agency failures to protect a woman in crisis. Instead of providing her with adequate support, the prison treated her ill mental health as a discipline, control and containment issue." Women often find themselves in prison because of such precarity.
The Women’s Building
So, the women’s building presents an opportunity.
Firstly to remember the history it represents, which is valuable social history, from which we can learn. This building should provide a lasting legacy. It could tell the stories of the women who once lived here, be a repository of Womens’ Histories. It’s a chance to symbolise a new social commitment towards women.
The women’s building could be an inversion of everything that prison represents.
It is an opportunity to address the unique needs in women’s lives.. It could offer support rather than punishment. Supporting social change, fostering community. It could give time rather than take it, in the form of education programsand extension of family networks for those that do not have them. I could be a way of keeping people out of our of prisons. Existing fragments could be preserved and repurposed as a way of remembering. The project could be an exemplar of co design, if allowed, and should feature a strong representation from female voices.
Perhaps this building could represent a City or society of Women become a modern women friendly society and a place of safety.
Challenging the systems that frustrate women’s progression and indeed at times their very survival in our society.
