Suicide rate at women's jail stirs grief and anger

In the late afternoon of January 18 this year, having spent the first night of a three-year sentence for manslaughter at Styal women's prison in Cheshire, Sarah Campbell asked to see a prison officer. When one arrived an hour later, she said she had taken an overdose of antidepressants.

At 4.52pm, the prison made a 999 call to Wythenshawe hospital in Manchester. Fifty minutes later Sarah arrived at the hospital, unconscious and in a fit.

At her home near Whitchurch in Cheshire, her mother, Pauline Campbell, was preparing to go out, having heard nothing from the prison and unaware that her only daughter was fighting for her life. Sarah was pronounced dead at 7.56pm, three days before her 19th birthday. It was past midnight by the time her mother was informed by telephone.

Recounting the story four months later, Mrs Campbell's hands shook with anger.

She said: "I am very angry that no one from the prison phoned me. I could have held Sarah's hand for a few minutes before she died, but I was denied that opportunity." She is now calling for a public inquiry into recent deaths at Styal prison.

Sarah Campbell was neither the first nor the last young woman to die, apparently by her own hand, at the prison in the past few months.

On Easter Monday, Jolene Willis, 24, was found hanged in her cell, one month into a four-month sentence for theft. Hers was the fourth such death at the prison since August, compared with a total of nine deaths at all-female prisons in the country last year.

The Howard League for Penal Reform, an independent charity working on criminal justice issues, has long been concerned at the dramatic increase in female deaths in custody and has echoed Mrs Campbell's calls for an inquiry.

Claire McCarthy, the policy and campaigns officer at the Howard League, said: "This year's spate of female suicides is astonishing and unprecedented.

"Women who took their lives last year were more of a spread, in terms of ages and backgrounds. So far this year they have been young. We are very concerned."

The prison service, speaking on behalf of Styal prison, refused to discuss individual cases but has launched an internal investigation following Jolene Willis's death.

Alan Ross, a spokesman for the service, said: "We deeply regret the high number of suicides and are doing everything we can to reduce the number of self-inflicted deaths."

He said the service was confident of the prison's practices, but conceded that no major changes had been made at Styal since the first death in custody in August.

But serious questions remain. Anna Claire Baker, who was found hanged in her cell in December 2002, and Sarah Campbell were recognised as being at risk of suicide, but it is unclear if they were on 15-minute watches.

Styal has not explained how Sarah, on her second day in prison, managed to obtain more than 100 tablets and, if she smuggled them in, why this was not picked up.

Ms McCarthy said: "From the outside it is difficult to know what has gone wrong. Investigations after suicides are done by the prison and the findings are never released to the public.

"There should be an independent investigation and that should reveal what should be done after these four cases. If that had happened after the first one, there may not have been a fourth." None of the inquests into the four deaths has yet reported and no details of the prison's internal inquiries have been released.

Styal's history is complex. According to the Howard League, the prison reported one suicide in custody in 1992 and then none for eight years. In 2000, self-inflicted deaths started again with one suicide reported. In April 2001 there was another and then there was the spate of four in nine months beginning last August.

One explanation for the sudden increase was the conversion, between 1999 and 2000, of what was a training prison into a local prison.

In April 1999, Styal's population grew by 60% when women from Risley prison were transferred to Styal. The prison service accepts that this sudden increase might have had an effect on death rates.

"The local prison is very unsettled," Mr Ross said. "There is a high prisoner turnover, a lot more first-timers and that means a lot of instability."

But the Howard League disputes the idea that overcrowding alone leads to an increase in deaths.

Ms McCarthy said: "It sounds like an excuse. The prison service can never do enough to reduce suicides. The point is to stop people going into prison. We would question the need for these women to be in prison in the first place. They are not a threat to society. We would question whether it is appropriate to imprison them when, as we've seen, it ends in tragedy."

It is a situation that Mrs Campbell believes contributed to her daughter's death. She said: "Styal prison is not a suitable place at all to send someone who has complex needs. Sarah should not have been sent there in the first place."

Before her trial in January Sarah spent six months on remand at Styal. She was told by the prison psychiatrist that if convicted, she would be sent to a secure hospital. Her mother is convinced it was her return to Styal that caused Sarah to take an overdose.

Mrs Campbell said: "Sarah was expecting to go to a secure hospital in January. She was horrified that she was returning to Styal.

"There are serious failings that are not being addressed at Styal. Overcrowding, understaffing, inadequate resources and dealing with a prison population where half of them shouldn't even be there.

"If these problems were addressed after the first death, Sarah might still be here today."