It is a crime that there are no jails in Wales for women, says the Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan.In a statement released on Aug 3 following a pastoral visitation to HMP Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire, the archbishop said jailing Welsh women in England imposed a hardship on many families.
His concerns, however, were not motivated merely by Welsh nationalism.
Dr Morgan urged the government to introduce reforms for women offenders that would support their successful reintegration into society after their term of imprisonment had ended.
“It seems very strange that I have to go across the border, and out of the Province of Wales, in order to visit women prisoners from Wales,” Dr Morgan noted, adding that many of the prisoners asked “can we have a jail for women in Wales?”
“Their distress at being in prison is heightened far more than it is for men because in England they feel like strangers,” Dr Morgan said, and their “biggest worry” was that friends and family would not visit “because they are too far away.”
An added burden for some of the prisoners was a sense of isolation and neglect, as some “feel cut off from Wales because English prisons do not show Welsh television channels or have Welsh newspapers so they have no way of keeping up with things happening in Wales.”
Approximately 80 per cent of women prisoners come to jail with substance abuse problems, Dr Morgan said, a “high proportion will have had contact with mental health services” and “many” will “have got caught up in crime after years of being abused themselves.”
A penal system that does not plan on the successful reintegration of convicts into society, ultimately fails society, Dr Morgan warned.
“It is vital that these women are given every chance possible to keep their lives together while they are in prison so that they have support and stability when they are released and a chance to break out of the cycle of crime,” he said.
He lauded the work done at Eastwood Park, but called for the building of jails in Wales for women.
“Locking them up far from home where, even with the best of care, they feel abandoned, worthless and forgotten will only condemn some of the most deprived people in society to a life spent constantly in and out of trouble,” Dr Morgan said.
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