Boris Johnson could have confronted crime at its core. Instead he falls back on Tory scaremongering

My time in prison showed me crime strongly correlates with poverty, addiction and mental ill health. More prison places and greater stop and search powers are simply the wrong solutions to these problems

“On entering … I was struck by the sight of rows of women’s faces pressed against the open observation hatches of their locked doors, peering into the narrow, dark cell block corridor.”

Do not be mistaken. These are not pre-Victorian observations of “angel of the prisons” Elizabeth Fry, social reformer and Quaker philanthropist upon a visit to Newgate Prison in the early nineteenth century. These are the 2019 comments of HMIP chief inspector Peter Clarke in his report published earlier this week, following a recent inspection of HMP Eastwood Park in Falfield, South Gloucestershire.

Anachronisms are topical. During the week’s “constitutional outrage”, the leader of the Privy Council, Jacob Rees-Mogg paid supplicant-like homage to his feudal lord, all the while enabling an unelected government to bypass sovereign parliament and democratic process before the 31 October Brexit deadline. The ensuing legislative proposals from the government – especially on "violent crime" – equally echo the hackneyed Tory pre-election war cries of yesteryear.

From personal experience, I am unconvinced that either violent crime will go down or the conditions of HMP Eastwood Park will benefit from Boris Johnson’s “very exciting agenda”. After being found guilty of obtaining an electronic transfer by deception in 2009, I served half of my five-year sentence in closed conditions in the female estate, living among those in whom the government now seeks to evoke “terror” through its 10,000 increased prison places, £85m empowerment of the CPS and enhanced police presence and search powers.

My reasons for why I think his plans will fail are many. I spent six months on a cell block with Vanessa during this period, at HMP Holloway. Vanessa had been “ghosted” from Eastwood Park during her second consecutive three-year sentence for arson for which she had been convicted after setting fire to herself in her prison cell. Resident in Holloway’s 17 bed secure mental health unit, then the only designated secure facility of its kind within the female UK prison estate, Vanessa was already a seasoned “lag” having commenced an offending cycle in her late teens for theft offences which escalated to knife crime. Eastwood Park proved her breaking point.

Her mental health needs marginalised, children placed into care before her twenty first birthday and separated from her family who resided in rural north Wales, Vanessa was severely scarred and disfigured from self-harm and had limited prospects of release let alone rehabilitation in the face of a system that, even a decade ago, was swelling in inmate numbers, diminishing in personnel and forced, de facto, to focus on the penal elements of sentencing at the expense of the government’s parallel and often frustrated statutory obligation to rehabilitate.

I have no doubt that Holloway’s care facility could have gone far to assist Vanessa and others like her. It closed, along with the prison, in 2016, its state-owned central London land sold to foreign investors for commercial development. Vanessa is now a long-term resident in Rampton, one of only three high security psychiatric hospitals in the UK. London is now without either a holding or remand facility for women, with Holloway’s former inmates “shipped” to HMPs Downview and Bronzefield - which are now filled to near breaking point, in conditions identical to those described in this week’s HMIP report.

Ten years on, I still encounter some of my former prison “sisters” on the London streets: often they are homeless, frequently they are addicted to crack and heroin, rarely are they permitted access to their children. Many developed their drug dependency while in custody. Without exception, they regret their actions and lifestyle. Like most of us who have been subject to the criminal justice system and convicted, regardless of their pleas in court, they recognise that their actions, intentional or otherwise, have created victims over and beyond those who gave evidence against them in court, citing their children, friends, families, and even the British taxpayer.

Prison taught me that crime is more complex than any election manifesto pledge. Coupled with the conditions of punishment and incarceration – which can serve to reinforce as much as deter offending – intricate themes of mental health, addiction, education and poverty have a strong bearing on an individual’s choices and decisions.

Any government that attempts to tackle crime, violent or otherwise, without empowering probation and drugs outreach services and fails to provide adequate secure health units and fund ex-offender employment programmes is doomed to reinforce the offending cycle.

Better by far to confront crime at its social core. Rather than earmarking its newfound millions for new prison spaces and sentences and increased police, the government should listen to its state partners and its prisoners. These funds are urgently needed by the National Probation Trust, community drug and alcohol treatment, recovery services and voluntary sector initiatives that must be empowered and enabled to provide real rehabilitation.

Women caged in Victorian workhouse inspired prisons are as outdated as an Old Etonian, Oxonian’s late summer Balmoral audience with the Queen. Neither are likely to solve the UK’s current crises or deliver true democracy.

Victoria is a former prisoner, ex-solicitor and founder of Leather Inside Out, a North London based prison rehabilitation charity