drugs and despair

Today's Observer highlights the UK's penchant for imprisoning mentally ill women who would benefit more from treatment to tackle their drug and emotional problems.
A government review - triggered by six deaths at the Cheshire women's prison HMP Styal in just 12 months - is due to be published any day and is expected to recommend improved rehabilitation for female offenders.
Women tend to get locked up for pettier crimes than men, and are often put on remand rather than bailed. On release, they may find themselves homeless and their children taken into care. And so the cycle continues.
Last year, I spent a day at Styal - through sheer coincidence arriving less than 24 hours after the death of Valerie Hayes, the most recent woman to die at the facility.
Hayes' family was due to meet the governor, Steve Hall, immediately after me, and the staff and inmates were twitchy.
Hall was frank about his role: “We deal with phenomenally chaotic, damaged women. Our job is about trying to keep these women alive. But inevitably, given the kind of challenges we are facing, there will be more deaths."
Eighty-five per cent of the women who pass through Styal have serious drug habits - often addicted to more than one substance. The majority have been sexually abused and at least a third have already attempted suicide.
More are self-harmers: in 2005 there were 1,532 incidents in the jail.
Hall added: "We are talking deep lacerations, swallowing batteries and razor blades, inserting blades into old wounds.
“They will tie things round their neck, be it television leads, which are cut as short as possible, sweatshirts or whatever they can lay their hands on."
A former inmate I met with told how the main topic of conversation between prisoners was self-harm.
“Styal was the opposite of what I needed," she said. "Most of the people there are self-harming all the time, and that was one of the main topics of conversation. We would compare notes on ways to hurt ourselves and I would pick up new ideas from other inmates.
“For me, self-harm was a way of numbing the pain in my mind. There were periods when I was cutting myself to ribbons. I would start up again the minute the nurse closed my cell door."
It's an issue which the chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, has been highlighting.
When I interviewed her, she called for a policy shift towards rehabilitation.
She said: "It was very clear to me that a lot of women at that prison [Styal] should not have been there. An awful lot of them were extremely vulnerable and prison simply made then even more so."
This issue needs urgent attention. I wonder though, if the political will is there. Prison deaths are not a new phenomenon and little has been done so far.
If fewer of these women were society's undesirables (drug addicts, sex workers etc) and more were from what the right-wing press loves to call "hard-working" (ie educated, middle-class) families, perhaps there would be a greater sense of urgency.
Sadly, successive governments seem to believe few votes are won by being socially progressive.
Keeping these women - who to me are actually society's victims and desperately need our help - locked up in prison adds to the "tough on crime" credentials policymakers are so desperate to promote.
What it fails to do, however, is deal with the root causes: abuse, mental illness, drug problems and poor education and life chances.