Bella Ramsey in Time shows what I have seen up close in women’s prisons – and they’re worse than men’s

As a white, middle-class woman from the Home Counties, Jane Corry didn’t expect to spend so much time in women’s prisons. However, after 10 years of working with prisoners and hearing their painful stories, she has a new understanding of the difficulties many of them have had to face

Bella Ramsey in ‘Time’ (BBC/Sally Mais)

It was her nails I noticed first. They were beautifully manicured, ruby red. Oval. She was sweeping the floor in the entrance hall of a high-security prison not far from London. “What are you here for?” she asked. I explained that I was there to do research for a novel I was writing. “I’m desperate to get out of this place,” she confided. “My lawyer’s launching an appeal.”

I wanted to ask what she’d done, but I knew this might not be considered respectful. “Respect” is a big word in prison. Trust me; you don’t want to be seen as “disrespecting” anyone. It’s a lesson vividly described in the TV drama Time, which stars the brilliant Bella Ramsey, who plays an addict giving birth inside. I had already worked at a high-security male HMP for three years, but this was my first visit to a women’s prison. And I can tell you, I’d rather be with men any day. It’s no surprise to me that viewers have described Time as even more traumatic than Ramsey’s other recent drama, The Last of Us.

As I walked around with a prison “minder,” I could almost touch the fragile frieze of fear, anger, frustration, depression, and panic that enveloped us. The “girl gang” pack mentality was present too, reminiscent of bullying at certain schools, only much darker. As a woman with a writer’s imagination, I could also too easily see myself behind bars without my children, queuing up for the corridor phone, desperately trying to talk to loved ones in a noisy visiting hall, with adrenaline pulsing through a body in a constant state of fight or flight.