Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’? | Eva Wiseman

Reports reveal the true harm done by incarcerating women under the guise of protecting them

Every now and then I learn something about the world today that sticks into me like a fish hook and I find myself asking friends, colleagues, “Wait, did you know this? Did you know this was happening?” The most recent felt like a horror-movie trope. It’s the part of the film, about a third of the way in, where a woman is locked up with the lie that the incarceration is for her own good.

It’s not just films, of course, not just fiction – countless women were institutionalised in the 19th century for “abnormal” behaviours, like disagreeing with their husbands, or following “unnatural” sexual impulses. Some were locked up for postnatal depression, some alcoholism, some “moral insanity”, which meant, somehow, infidelity. But what shocked me even more than historical reports on women like Elizabeth Packard, who was incarcerated by her husband in 1860 (the doctor’s reasons included her refusal to shake his hand and the fact that she was above the age of 40), what got me asking, saying wait, was the knowledge that something similar is still happening daily, in prisons across the country.

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