It's so hard for them when they're released to get their kids back So let's avoid it. Let's make it a place of last resort.What many need is counselling and rehabilitation What they are getting in increasing numbers is prison. A woman is now twice as likely to go to jail for theft as she was in 1991.There are places where such therapeutic work is going on with female offenders but we just don't hear about them. If a woman is a threat to society or herself or her kids, then there is clearly something wrong and maybe some form of prison may be appropriate. But if she's not, we need to look again at the wider consequences of sending women - and in particular mothers - to prison.More women, for instance, go to prison now for shoplifting than any other crime. Again, if a woman is shoplifting and she's making a good living out of it, then, yes, prison may be called for.
But most women who shoplift are doing it because they're in debt, or they've got a drug problem, or they can't afford clothes for the children and so they steal them.This isn't about feeling sorry for women over men, or saying that women should never be locked up just because they're women, but realising that for them prison doesn't work by any measure. But however much we have changed, it is still the woman who usually keeps the family together I know. My mother was a single parent when my sister and I were growing up.I am not arguing that women should never go to prison. We need to understand that cycle of damage better and finds ways to break it.I know we talk a lot about men's roles in the home today and that's very important. Only 5 per cent of them stay in the family home when their mothers go to jail. And official statistics show that a child whose parent has been in prison has a 65 per cent chance of following in their footsteps.
She said she'd never felt so violated in all her life.Children are at the heart of the Smart Justice for Women campaign. Currently 18,000 children are being separated from their mothers because they are in prison. One family friend who accompanied me to Belmarsh refused to come again because of how they treat visitors. It's high security and the officers make visitors feel like criminals.
