DRUGS AT ROOT OF BIG INCREASE IN WOMEN JAILED

BRITAIN is now locking up women in numbers not seen since Victorian times.
Whereas gin was once blamed for their path to jail, experts today blame
cocaine and heroin for the past decade's rise in female crime -- the
biggest this century. Since 1990 the number of women in British prisons has
tripled to 4,045.

The number jailed for drug offences has also tripled, to about two in five
of all female prisoners, with drugs being the most common cause of
imprisonment. The next most common crime is theft, often linked to drug
addiction.

By contrast, only one in 14 male prisoners is there for drugs offences. The
most common offence among men is violent crime, such as murder and grievous
bodily harm.

"Drugs are the reason why women's prisons are filling up", said Chris
Tchaikovsky, the head of the lobby group Women in Prison, and a former
prisoner. "If the Government thinks you can punish people out of using
drugs, I can tell you from experience you can't. Prison makes you feel bad,
drugs make you feel good, ergo the drugs problem gets worse. "Prisons are
barbaric relics of the Victorian age which don't work apart from containing
the violent -- they are certainly no substitute for drug rehabilitation."

Dorothy Wedderburn, who wrote an extensive report on the subject for the
Prison Reform Trust, found that violent crime among women had doubled, but
the numbers of women jailed for such crimes were still in the low hundreds.

"It is the drugs offences which have increased enormously among women, and
so any debate on the subject has to discuss lightening the penalty for
that," Professor Wedderburn said. "We are undoubtedly more penal in our
approach to the use of drugs than the rest of Europe."

Women in prison have much greater mental health problems than men. Half
have been sexually abused, half of them say that they harm themselves, and
a third are in debt.

Most urgently, at least half of the women in prison are mothers, and two
thirds of those have children under ten years old. "Judges don't take this
into account and need to be able to justify a specific sentence in terms of
the effects on the woman's children," Professor Wedderburn said.

"A high proportion of the women will have grown up in care. If their
children get taken into care, we have some evidence that this makes the
second generation more likely to offend. It's a vicious circle."

Another difference between male and female prisoners is that many more
women are imprisoned on remand, but are released after trial. A quarter of
all women in prison are there on remand, but two thirds of them do not
receive jail terms when sentenced.

"Courts rarely see women criminals because of their relatively low numbers,
and they don't know what to do with them," Silvia Casale, a criminologist
and adviser to Holloway Prison, said. "Sending them to prison is a gesture
of despair in a way. It looks like a safe place, but it really isn't."

Worst Offenders

England and Wales are on course to become the EU's prison capital. Only
Portugal locks up more per head of its population, but Prison Service
statistics show that the gap has narrowed. In 2000 Portugal jailed 127 per
100,000 people followed by 124 for England and Wales, 115 Scotland, 114
Spain, 97 Germany, 94 Italy, 90 Luxembourg, 89 France, 87 The Netherlands,
84 Austria, 83 Belgium, 80 Ireland.

Worldwide, the United States came top with 702 prisoners per 100,000
people, followed by 465 Russia, 385 South Africa, 330 Estonia, 208 Czech
Republic, 170 Poland.