HARD LABOUR

When Layla told prison staff she was about to give birth, they gave her a cup of tea and a paracetamol... Andy Martin speaks to Angela Clarke, a prison visitor who has just written a novel based on her experiences of pregnant women in jail

Gemma was 14 weeks pregnant when she was sentenced. She hadn’t intended to set fire to her building, she had only been trying to gas herself. No one else was harmed. She suffered from EUPD (Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder), and had a full-blown breakdown aged 30. She was on bail for two-and-a-half years, in which time she had rebuilt her relationship with her two children, found a partner, a job, and a home. And she was pregnant. In the teeth of the pre-sentencing report arguing for her to remain at liberty,

the judge locked her up for several years, together with her unborn child.

She was shoved in a small holding room with 14 other women. Her medication was taken away. Instantly nauseous, she asked to be let out of the room because she was feeling sick. “You need to get used to it!” came the reply. She duly threw up.

The law takes no notice of pregnancy. The law is blind towards mothers-to-be. And prisons try to be for as long as possible. In theory, you get taken to the local hospital to give birth, with appropriate care, usually while handcuffed or chained to the bed and accompanied at all times by two guards (of either gender). But it doesn’t always work out that way.

Layla gave birth in her cell, three-and-a-half weeks prematurely. Her daughter was born feet first. Like Gemma, she was already pregnant when incarcerated for her first offence. She was given no help or advice in prison. When she told prison staff she was going into labour she was offered paracetamol and a cup of tea. She gave birth with no trained staff present and everyone panicking. After she had given birth the baby was taken away and she was left there with no idea what would happen to her baby.

There are still more atrocious cases. Jasmine gave birth in her cell at 20 weeks and the baby died. But ironically that death will not appear in prison records because the baby was not, in principle, a prisoner. Pregnant women are so thoroughly ignored or scorned by the system that we do not even have any official government statistics on how many there are in prison. But they are disproportionately punished because they undergo a double confinement. Two people, not one, are being sent down.

A compelling crime novel published last week by Angela Clarke, On My Life, dramatises the whole issue. Its protagonist, Jenna Burns, is framed for murder, and locked up while pregnant, and gives birth in her cell with no access to medical care, all the while struggling to prove her innocence and facing violence from fellow inmates. And her cellmate has it even worse. It is, as they say in the movies, based on a true story.

Clarke has volunteered and taught in prisons and has met many pregnant prisoners (or “pregnants” as they are referred to by staff). She was chairing a prison book club when she was shocked to see a prisoner walk in late with her 13-month old daughter holding her hand. In open prisons, prisoners and new-borns can be kept together. But in 50 per cent of cases (and always in higher security institutions) the child is separated from the mother and taken into care (or possibly handed over to a family member).

Clarke notes that in the prison in which mothers could be accompanied by their children there were also prisoners that had been convicted of sexual offences against children. One pregnant woman was so afraid of physical assault that she would only come out of her cell to go to the prison library. At the launch of On My Life in London, Clarke said: “I’m a firm believer in rehabilitation and I feel like I’m making a difference.”

She also acknowledged that “it’s good for me as a writer to learn about other people’s lives.” But she remains scandalised by the conditions female convicts have to endure. She says that at the last Home Office prison she went into she couldn’t put her bag down because the rats would eat it. There were cockroaches scuttling across her desk and she couldn’t use the bathroom because the ceiling had collapsed. “Home Office prisons are in terrible disrepair and not fit for purpose.”

But Clarke says she will keep volunteering as a prison visitor because “they [the prisoners] are already abandoned and I would be abandoning them again if I stopped now”. She recalls that in one prison she went into there is a dedicated room where the prisoner is allowed to see the baby – brought in by a family member – and then change and bathe it. “And then the baby is taken away again and everyone is in floods of tears.”

At the last Home Office prison she went into she couldn’t put her bag down because rats would eat it.