Human rights don’t end when the cell door closes
Ms A’s trauma and her baby’s death at birth amount to a case of criminal abandonment
HER cries for help went unanswered. Screaming with pain, she passed out.
When she came to, her baby daughter had been delivered. She bit through the umbilical cord.
She cleaned up some blood, put the placenta in the bin and crawled into bed with her dying baby.
But still nobody came. Until it was too late. Her baby was already dead. Baby A was born and died on September 27, 2019, in Europe’s biggest women’s prison.
The pathologist can’t determine whether the baby girl was born alive or stillborn but the fact remains – her vulnerable 18-year-old mum was forced to give birth alone and scared while in the care of the state.
Despite calling for a nurse twice, Ms A was ignored and forced to endure hours of agony and pain while officers at the private Bronzefield prison in Middlesex went about their business.
The report from the Prison and Probation Ombudsman makes for grim reading.
Ms A made two internal phone calls and pressed her bell twice to ask for a nurse before giving birth. Her first call lasted a minute while her second, 25 minutes later, was immediately disconnected.
A prison officer shone a torch into her cell and “didn’t see anything out of the ordinary” but Ms A said she was on all fours on the floor.
The report said: “Ms A was failed.”
It’s all to easy to dismiss what happened to Ms A with a shrug of our shoulders and think whatever happens in prison doesn’t matter to people outside and why should we care?
We should care. Very much so. Not all crimes are equal and not all prisoners deserve to be banged up.
Quite often, too, prisoners will come out worse than when they went in – which means, for you and I, more likelihood of more victims due to reoffending.
At the same time, prisoners retain key human rights we are all entitled to – the right to live, the right to a fair trial and the basic right to be free of inhuman treatment and access to rehabilitation.
Of course there are always going to be those who will try to use those policies to their own advantage. Limbs in the
Loch killer William Beggs has gamed the system for years with numerous human rights fights with the authorities, including wanting to be able to buy a laptop to use in his cell.
Ms A was on remand accused of robbery – she hadn’t stood trial and was, to use the old axiom, innocent until proven guilty.
She wasn’t manipulating the system. Ms A and her baby daughter are victims of the state. They weren’t just failed by the system – they were criminally abandoned.