BURSTING POINT: THE DRUGS MULES FILLING UP UK PRISONS

The huge number of Jamaican women coming into Britain with their stomachs
full of cocaine is pushing the already overcrowded female prison system to
breaking point. More than 10% of the women currently in jail are Jamaican
drug mules who swallowed rubber wraps of cocaine and boarded flights to
this country.

A Guardian investigation has established that the long sentences being
served by the 450 Jamaican couriers are stretching resources to the limit
while failing to act as a deterrent to the desperate women prepared to
smuggle drugs.

The crisis has deepened since July, when a glut of women prisoners were
sentenced before the courts went into summer recess. Women are regularly
being bused around as prisons try to find them cells and overcrowding is
blamed for the unprecedented number of suicides within female jails: 17
women have taken their own lives since August last year.

Jamaican drug couriers have been identified as a key factor in the
overcrowding problem. At a time when cells are in short supply, the prison
service has been forced to dedicate four of the 17 women's jails to housing
foreign women.

One, Morton Hall prison in Lincolnshire, is the first jail in the country
to have more Jamaicans than any other nationals behind bars - a total of
155, compared with 115 women of all other nationalities.

The Guardian has obtained access to prisoners and prison governors, as well
as speaking to lawyers, reform campaigners and the women's families in
Britain and Jamaica, to produce the most detailed examination yet of a
trade that has deluged this country's prisons while devastating families
and communities in the Caribbean.

The pressure is now so great that British private companies have been
invited to tender to build a jail in Jamaica so that the mules currently
imprisoned in this country could be transferred back to the Caribbean.

According to senior officials, the project is being pursued by the Jamaican
authorities but there is speculation that the British government would
consider underwriting it.

Peter Mathers, British high commissioner in Jamaica, said: "A number of
British companies are interested and there are companies that are bidding
and we hope that it will happen soon."

Another option ministers are being urged to contemplate is to stop
prosecuting the mules and to simply confiscate their drugs and deport them,
or to develop community sentences in Jamaica. Others, including the new
director of public prosecutions, believe their sentences should be shorter.

At Morton Hall, two to three Jamaicans a week are being transferred there
from local prisons, even though customs and Foreign Office measures have
managed to cut the overall number of mules making it to the UK.

The official prison service line is that its duty is to accommodate whoever
the courts decide to jail, regardless of population pressures. But Lynn
Saunders, Morton Hall's governor, said the principal cause of the problem
was the length of sentence being handed down to couriers who, customs
officials admit, play a minuscule role in drug trafficking into this country.

She said: "There are issues about the sentencing these women get. They are
very long and disproportionate to sentences for violence against the
person. We have got people doing 10 years here.

"We haven't seen a drop in the number of Jamaican women being admitted but
I am told there has been a leavening off. We haven't seen that."

Barbara Thompson, 39, a mother of six, is typical of the mules doing time
in Morton Hall. She is serving three years and nine months for carrying
341g of cocaine in her stomach. Hers is a story of deprivation, desperation
and, she now admits, naivety. A street seller in the Jamaican capital
Kingston, she was approached by a young woman who told her she could make
"much more money another way".

Thompson was given an address in Spanish Town, outside Kingston, where she
was shown piles of little parcels containing 100% pure cocaine. Made from
the fingers of latex gloves and secured with tape, each was the size of the
top of her thumb. She was supposed to swallow 100 and was given six bottles
of juice to wash them down. She managed to swallow 52.

Thompson was paid ?400 in Jamaican dollars in advance and told that she
would get another ?1,600 when she got to England.

Although she had been warned not to have any food or drink, she started
eating as soon as she got on the plane in the hope that she would pass the
drugs in the toilet and leave them there. While on the plane she was told
of a woman who had died with drugs in her stomach because one of the
packages she had swallowed had burst. It can cause a slow and painful
death, with the victim fully aware that their respiratory system is going
into overdrive.

But by the time she landed at Heathrow, the drugs were still in Thompson's
body and when she was stopped by customs officers, she told them
immediately what she had done. "I wanted to tell them that I had some drugs
inside me and that I didn't know how to get them out but I was afraid they
would take me in for a strip search. But then I told them I was loaded."

She was taken to a special, see-through toilet at the airport where customs
officers watched and retrieved the drugs from a bowl as they passed through
her system. An x-ray at a local hospital revealed that one wrap was still
in her stomach so she was taken back to Heathrow to wait for it to pass
through.

"I was so scared that that one would never come out and that I would die,"
she said.

After 12 weeks in Holloway prison, Thompson was taken to court. Her
circumstances in Jamaica were not taken into consideration when she was
sentenced. However, she said she was so relieved that she had not died on
the plane that part of her was glad she had ended up in prison.

But she did not realise the high price she and her family would have to pay
for her getting caught. Since she failed to meet the person she was
supposed to deliver the drugs to in a cafe at Heathrow's terminal three,
the gang who supplied them in Kingston assumed that she had stolen them. As
punishment, they kidnapped her brother, stabbed him and then burnt him alive.

That has not satisfied their desire for revenge. "They have been making
threats to my family and they don't believe that I am in prison. I don't
want to go back on the streets in Kingston and sell because I am very
scared that they will find me. I am going to have to go and live somewhere
else."

She added: "I will never do the drugs thing again. I don't feel pleased
with what I have done and I am not proud."

Earlier this month, a letter written by a group of Jamaican inmates was
smuggled out of prison and sent to the home secretary, David Blunkett, on
behalf of women like Barbara. The letter points out that each woman costs
the taxpayer ?24,000-?35,000 a year to keep locked up and pleads for
remission and reform of the sentencing system.

Since 1997 when Labour came to power, the number of foreign women in
British prisons has increased by 140%, to an average of 4,500, compared
with 1,577 10 years ago.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Foreign national
women in British jails don't cause any trouble, but they do contribute to
the in tolerable pressure on the system simply by being in prison so long."

Olga Heaven of Hibiscus, the British organisation that helps foreign women
in prison here and attempts to ease their resettlement when they are
released and deported home, says the number of Jamaican women imprisoned
has increased exponentially and that the figure is more like 20% of the
female population. When she set up a Jamaican arm of Hibiscus in 1995,
there were only 27 women from the island in prison in the UK.

The official figures may also seriously underestimate the trafficking
problem. Ms Heaven believes that the women are often used as decoys to
allow more serious couriers to make it through.

She said: "I can't see what sense it makes to hold a woman in her mid to
late 30s to a long prison sentence when she's just a courier who has never
done anything like this in her life before."

Two weeks ago, an inquest pronounced an open verdict on a Jamaican
prisoner, Beverley Fowler, 32, who was found hanging in her cell in Durham
prison last October two days before she had been due to be deported. The
inquest heard that little was done to help Fowler to prepare for her
deportation to Jamaica where she had been gang raped and had faced threats
and violence.

She had three children, aged 16, 14, and 12 and was a single mother after
the children's father was shot dead in 1998; her mother, who had been
looking after the children while she was in prison, died in April 2002.
Fowler's request for compassionate release was turned down, in spite of
having just six months to serve of her six year sentence.

The majority of the Jamaican women in prison here are over 30 and many are
single mothers. Catherine Phillips, 49, is a grandmother who swallowed 601g
of cocaine, with an estimated street value of ?57,000. She is now serving a
six-year sentence. "I was supposed to be here for nine days, I have been
here now for three years," she said.

Like Thompson, Phillips washed the drugs down with juice, becoming what
customs officers term a "stuffer and swallower". But unlike Thompson,
Phillips came close to dying because the drug wraps would not leave her
system. Three days after being caught she was taken to hospital, where an
x-ray showed that the wrapping of the packages had melded together. Doctors
told her that they would soon have to operate or the drugs would enter her
system and she would die.

She said: "The customs officer explained that if I had not been caught and
got through to the dealer I would have died because they would not have had
an x-ray and would not have known they were melting."

Phillips, who pleaded guilty in court and wrote a letter to the judge
apologising for her actions, believes that long sentences are not a
deterrent because the women who become mules do not know about them until
they are caught.

"It's not in any conversation that prison is a possibility. It's just going
to England and getting this package delivered. Those drug dealers won't go
to jail and they don't know anything about prison life or what's going on.
They would just leave you to die. They will find somebody else to fill your
space.

"I can't tell people don't do it when they are starving. But they should
know it's six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years... you ain't coming back and
you can't bargain with the judge."

(All the names of the women prisoners and their families have been changed)