Over the 30 years prison researcher and programmer Stephanie Covington has worked with incarcerated women, her initial assessment has remained unchanged: “The criminal justice system in every country was developed for men.”

Covington is one of a growing number of prison researchers who argue that incarceration, while harmful to many men, is more acutely damaging for women and, in many cases, largely unnecessary.

First, they point out, women are much less likely to be convicted of violent crimes than men. Incarcerating women, they argue, does little to keep the public safe.

Second, women are 10 times more likely to self-harm while incarcerated as their male counterparts and more than twice as likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). Medical care in the community would fix the underlying problems that cause women to commit crime without the immense cost and retraumatising effect of incarceration.

And third, imprisoning women can have a bigger effect on society at large. Imprisoning mothers of young children can drastically affect early childhood development, and women’s role as caregivers — two thirds of women in prison report having one or more dependents — often leaves their dependents much more vulnerable.

Now, a program specifically designed for women called One Small Thing seeks to heal — not just punish — incarcerated women. It has already been rolled out across all 12 UK women’s prisons. But can one project improve the plight of women in prison? Or does the system itself need rebuilding?

New beginnings

One Small Thing took shape in 2016 when Edwina Grosvenor, one of the UK’s foremost prison philanthropists, grew frustrated at a lack of progress in the women’s estate. She partnered with Covington, who serves as co-director of the Center for Gender and Justice in California, to bring new approaches to England’s ailing justice system.

The new program “treats trauma through the lens of gender,” Grosvenor said. It rests on two principles: first, that trauma drives women to commit crime, and second, that because women often experience gender-based violence (such as sexual assault and domestic violence), they require different approaches from men. Now running in all 12 women’s prisons in England, it is the first system-wide roll-out of Covington’s prison programming.

OST works in three stages. First, prison staff are trained to become “trauma-informed”. Covington and Grosvenor toured each UK women’s prison to teach staff about what trauma is, how it impacts women and how it can cause violent behaviour. The links between trauma, aggression and violence are well-established; understanding behaviours that trigger someone’s trauma can avoid a violent outburst.

The second stage is about becoming “trauma-responsive.” In this phase, prison staff are taught to change their behaviour on the basis of what they have learned about trauma. Women who have experienced sexual violence, for example, can experience traumatic flashbacks and lash out as a result when they are restrained by male guards.

Alternative strategies, including de-escalating the situation without physical contact, can avoid re-traumatising vulnerable women. “You don’t manage trauma-survivors through restraint,” said Covington, “it actually increases the problems.”

The final stage involves developing “trauma-specific” services inside the prison. One such program is Healing Trauma, a six-week long course delivered by long-term inmates to help women address their trauma and develop coping mechanisms to prevent violent outbursts.

“It works better when it’s the women themselves taking other women in the prison through the course,” said Grosvenor. Shared experience means a more empathetic relationship between teachers and participants, she argued, and it provides teachers with a sense of responsibility and achievement — all while saving on the cost of professional psychologists.

Research on OST’s impact is in its early stages — funding for large randomized control trials on female prisoners is hard to come by, says Covington. Nonetheless, in a forthcoming publication seen by Apolitical, 29% of women saw a reduction in symptoms of PTSD and 37% a reduction in depression after completing the course.

Breaking point

A few weeks after Covington provided training in one women’s facility in the US, two prison guards restrained a female inmate while showering because she strayed off a footpath on to a patch of grass earlier that day.

Thankfully, said Covington, the governor summoned the guards immediately and suspended them for two weeks without pay. “That’s what has to happen,” she said: governors need to lead the charge if culture is to change.

For both Covington and Grosvenor, the promise of the project is not simply to improve women’s lives while incarcerated, but to instigate a culture change across the women’s estate. But the story shows that One Small Thing doesn’t drive immediate root and branch reform. That doesn’t happen overnight, and the barriers to systemic change are immense.

First, many prisons systems are no longer under purely public control. In the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere, the carceral system is a mosaic of public and private bodies in which each governor sets their own agenda. Making “trauma-informed” incarceration the norm is significantly less straightforward when the day-today running of prisons is dependent upon the sympathies of governors or private corporations.

Second are staffing concerns. Self-harm rates among staff are rising in the UK, and some studies suggest prison officers experience PTSD at the same rate as war veterans in the US. Low pay, overcrowding and a lack of psychological support are rife. The capacity of staff to forge institutional change is necessarily limited while working under untenable conditions.

But the greatest challenge to the culture change OST wants to trigger comes from forces beyond Grosvenor or Covington’s control.

“The hardest thing about working in the prison system? Ministerial churn,” said Grosvenor. The UK has had six ministers of justice in eight years, but the lack of priority afforded to the prison system is true the world over, she argues. “It’s not the violence, it’s not the trauma, it’s the total lack of strategy that makes this so difficult,” she added.

A new dawn

One Small Thing looks set to become more ambitious in the coming years. While projects in the women’s estate are set to develop and receive more extensive evaluation, Grosvenor has begun the roll-out of another trauma-informed prison program in the high-security men’s estate and has plans to advocate for much more sweeping reforms in coming years.

The next fight, she argues, is developing systems to stop women from reaching prison in the first place. Women, she notes, are largely imprisoned for crimes of poverty — failing to pay taxes or public fines, or theft to fund their or their partners’ drug addictions. Helping women into residential care to resolve underlying trauma and addiction issues while keeping them with their children where appropriate is the next frontier in prison reform.

The UK’s Ministry of Justice agrees: new residential facilities are in the pipeline, with an open tender for contracts recently announced.

The benefits to women, their children, their communities and the public finances could be immense: “It costs as much to keep someone in prison for a year as it does to send them to Eton College, and they come out more dangerous than when they went in,” she said. “We should not be locking up people who don’t need to be locked up.” — Edward Siddons. Additional reporting by Alia Shahzad.

(Picture credit: Flickr/miss_millie)