What really goes on in a women’s prison

Jessamy Calkin admires this GP’s riveting, humane sequel to her explosive 2019 memoir ‘The Prison Doctor’

FTHE PRISON DOCTOR: WOMEN INSIDE by Amanda Brown 288pp, HQ , £8.99, ebook £4.99

or 20 years, Dr Amanda Brown had a job she loved as a GP in a village surgery in Buckinghamshire. But in 2004, disheartened by the bureaucracy and the targets imposed by the practice she had built up, she resigned. After venting her fury in the medical magazine Pulse, she got a call from a man who was recruiting doctors to work in prisons.

Her early experience in a young offenders institution was a piece of cake compared to the seven years she spent in Wormwood Scrubs. Although exhilarated by the challenge, she was finally defeated by the pernicious influence of the psychoactive drug spice, which made the men who used it unpredictable and dangerous. “I didn’t know how to help them. There was no treatment I could offer to reverse the dreadful effects it sometimes had.” Those years were the focus of her explosive memoir, The Prison Doctor, which became a bestseller last year. Taken aback by its success, Brown was wary of writing a second book, thinking she had used up all her best stories. Turns out, she hadn’t. The Prison Doctor: Women Inside is a riveting successor.

It picks up in 2015, when Brown moved from Wormwood Scrubs to Bronzefield in Middlesex, the largest women’s prison in Europe, and the only UK prison purposebuilt solely for females. It houses Category A prisoners, those deemed to pose the most threat to the public, with capacity for 572 women. It has a mother and baby unit, a garden, detox unit, gym, sexual health clinic, dentist, podiatrist, mental health team, and Phoenix house, a 10-bed unit with semi-open conditions.

Women make up only five per cent of the prison population in England and Wales, yet female offenders are the most vulnerable people in our society. “By far the majority of women I see have experienced some kind of trauma,” reports Brown. “Many have a history of domestic violence and sexual abuse. They live in terror, and this leads to substance abuse, self-harm, suicide attempts and serious mental health issues.”

Two thirds of the women in prison have dependent children at home – which translates as 18,000 children a year separated from their mothers. The chilling reality is that only nine per cent of those are cared for by their fathers during their mothers’ absence.

The vast majority of women are in for non-violent offences and for only a matter of weeks, but ironically that brevity can be a curse. “Their sentences are often far too short to achieve any sort of rehabilitation – some have said that a short sentence may as well be a life sentence,” says Brown. “The success stories mostly come from those in prison long enough to get off drugs and engage with learning and training.”

In prison, many of the women have access to all the things they lack on the outside: hot meals, a bed where they feel safe, detox, counselling, education – and

The homeless women try to get arrested in time for Christmas, so they don’t freeze

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris 432pp, Arrow, £8.99

Harris’s novel imagines a post-apocalyptic England that has reverted to a 15th-century way of life, peopled by characters drawn with a Dickensian confidence. Thrilling, wonderfully conceived and entirely without preaching, it probes the nature of history and exposes the fragility of modern civilisation.