Convincing people that the majority of women in prison should be seen as victims can be a tricky sell. It helps if you have some facts to capture your audience’s attention. Almost half of all incidents of self-injury in prison are committed by women, although only 5% of the prison population are female. New Hall Prison in West Yorkshire holds 3-400 women and in 2006 saw 1,266 incidents of women attempting to strangle themselves with bed sheets and clothing, or cutting themselves with blades.

Stories can also help. One of the girls the Howard League’s legal team represents came from an abusive home; over half of women in prison say they have suffered domestic violence and one in three has experienced sexual abuse. Permanently excluded from school at the age of 13, this girl spent much of the rest of her childhood in custody. A prolific self-harmer, she gouged herself with stones and cut across her throat with a pair of scissors. At one point she attempted suicide by swallowing broken glass. The response of prison staff to this behaviour was to punish her with segregation and restraint, all of which only exacerbated her self-injury. Prison was institutionally incapable of assistance for this young woman.

The Howard League for Penal Reform has recently launched its Lost Daughters campaign to fight for a drastic cut in the number of women being held in prison.

There are over 4,000 women imprisoned in England and Wales, and these women are five times more likely to have mental health needs than women in the community. So far three women have committed suicide in custody this year, including one 36 year old woman who was only serving a 28 day prison sentence for theft. One coroner who reviewed a series of six suicides at Styal prison, said women in prison are ‘damaged individuals, committing… petty crime for whom imprisonment represented a disproportionate response’. Indeed, 68% of women are in prison for non-violent offences, with shop-lifting and drug-related crimes the most prolific.

The moment when the state takes proper note of what is happening in these women’s lives is, to an extent, arbitrary. There were countless instances in the childhood of the girl described above when government agencies might have intervened and society would have recognised her as a victim. Instead, it was only once crimes had been committed that the system was brought to bear on her life and by then it was the criminal justice system, it was prison. By then she was no longer a ‘victim’ but labeled an ‘offender’.

Women’s prisons aren’t even effective at preventing reoffending. The government puts the recidivism rate for women leaving prison at 37%, yet this figure has been produced using a new method to calculate reoffending that is widely considered an underestimation.

A high rate of reoffending is scarcely surprising given that women enter the system as victims, spend their sentence being treated as hardened criminals and upon release face the same deluge of social problems that victimised them in the first place.

Solutions based in the community have a far greater chance of helping women avoid crime. This position was echoed strongly by Baroness Corston, whose review for the government called for the complete closure of women’s prisons. The Corston review recommended that the vast majority of women currently in prison would be better placed in the community, while small local secure units should be introduced for those few women that do require custody for public protection.

While some funding has been found to expand the provision of community-based schemes for women, recession clearly brings challenges for a transformative approach. However, there is ample evidence that the closure of women’s prisons and the implementation of such schemes would save the government money. The New Economics Foundation has found that for every pound invested in support of focused alternatives to prison, £14 worth of social value is created for women and their children, victims and society generally over ten years. If community interventions were to attain a reduction of just 6% in recidivism, the state would recoup the investment required to achieve this in just one year.

While the fulfillment of the Corston goals are the ultimate objective of our campaign, a more immediate change to welcome would be a shift in the rhetoric around women and prison. At the moment women who commit crime are dubbed ‘offenders’ not victims, yet this hardly matches up to the reality of the situation.

Lost Daughters sets a challenge for politicians. There is political will to do things differently– the Corston review received cross-party support – and there is political space to garner real public support given the manifest vulnerabilities of jailed women. The possibilities for reform are, at worst, cost neutral and at best will lead to savings in the future. Social justice, common sense and economics all point us in the same direction and if anyone is still in any doubt, we have the facts and we have the stories. Now what is needed is the change.