Why do we bother to imprison women?

It costs a lot of time and money to lock women up, and inflict a lot of petty rules on them

Depressing news - prisons chief Martin Narey has bowed to public opinion and refuses to release Maxine Carr back into the community. You may consider what follows sexist, crazy or just plain stupid. On the other hand, I hope you may agree with me, in which case start writing letters to Mr Blunkett immediately.

Given that our prisons are full to bursting, given that the number of people in them has risen by over 50 per cent in the last five years, given that the number of people reoffending shows no sign of dropping, can anyone tell me why we bother to imprison women? Does stripping a woman of her dignity by putting her in a uniform, incarcerating her for hours on end, serving her substandard food and depriving her of her children serve any purpose, apart from achieving a dubious target set by a bean counter in the Home Office?

Prison certainly hasn't worked for Patricia Amos, the first mother to be jailed for her children's truancy. In May 2002, Mrs Amos was sentenced to 60 days' imprisonment, and released on appeal after serving 28 days. Now her daughter is refusing to go to school again, and Mrs Amos is back in court. This time she faces another prison sentence. Earlier this week newspapers carried the distressing photograph of another distraught mother facing two years' imprisonment. Heather Thompson was found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving after she crashed the car she was driving at high speed and killed her daughter and her 12-year-old friend. There is no doubt that Mrs Thompson's dreadful driving has caused immense pain and suffering to two families, but is a custodial sentence really the way either to make amends to those who have been bereaved or to give the person responsible the equipment to restart her life again?

Just as I can see no reason for imprisoning anyone under 18, and find it a scandal that the Home Office still justifies the incarceration of minors, so I can't see why a socially aware Labour government cannot lead the world and treat most female offenders differently. It costs a lot of time and money to lock women up, and inflict a lot of petty rules and regulations on some of the most deprived people in our society, and to what end? Currently there are more than 70,000 people in prison, and the number of women has risen steadily (at a rate of 15 per cent, between 2001 and 2002, compared to the 6 per cent increase in the number of men) to almost 4,500. Over a 10-year period we have seen an astonishing 140 per cent rise in the number of women locked up.

Women are not generally running major crime syndicates, drugs factories, or huge financial frauds. Women are not generally burglars or robbers using guns. The vast majority of women in prison, almost 40 per cent, are there for drug offences, often carrying drugs or selling drugs for other people. A large number are drug users, who committed crimes to fund their habit, in which case they need treatment, which could be provided in secure accommodation in the community, not in a prison.

The next largest category (16.6 per cent) is for "violence against another person", and presumably Mrs Thompson will be considered part of that statistic. But women are not inherently violent. They might be thoughtless, uneducated and selfish. They might be driven by passion and feelings of rejection, but few women kill or harm because it gives them a thrill. These women should be having psychiatric care, not spending hours alone in a prison cell surrounded by a culture where drugs are freely available and tender loving care is at a premium.

New figures reveal that the number of incidents of self-harm among prisoners has increased five-fold since 1998, and that the number of women harming themselves in prison has soared. One spokesman admitted that as 80 per cent of all prisoners suffer from some kind of mental illness. Most women in jail are illiterate, from abused families and at the bottom end of the social scale. You can't tell me that the social demographic of Holloway mirrors that of Epsom or Cheltenham.

David Blunkett's belief that good parenting can be absorbed via a custodial sentence is plainly ludicrous, depriving needy children of their parents and causing many more of them to be taken into care. I don't doubt that many mothers need help in how to stand up to their children and how to get them through the school gates. They need support and advice on how to impose order on young lives full of chaos and bullying, with the ever-present threat of gang culture and peer pressure. But I don't think that these parenting skills are best learnt behind bars.

It would be far more effective to impose some form of community service on mothers whose children are out of control, and in the process show them how they can contribute positively to the area in which they live. Once we help women to be better mothers, educate and support them and give them self-esteem, they will start raising daughters who don't indulge in benefit fraud, credit-card theft, and think it's acceptable to shoplift and handle stolen goods.

The new Director of Public Prosecutions is considering whether mothers who accused of killing their babies should be spared prosecution and dealt with outside the courts, as in some European countries. Now is surely the time to extend this thinking to many other offences for which we currently imprison women. Unless, of course, we want to lock up even more women next year and wait for them to harm themselves. Are we that callous?