‘Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is the room to act.’
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
In October last year I gave a lecture at Liverpool Cathedral to mark Prisons’ Week and the 200th Anniversary of LDCSA, the charity Adelaide House, which provides Approved Premises for women leaving prison. It was established when the founder was visited by her cousin, the great prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. I’ve posted the lecture and the text of it below, and if you don’t know anything about Elizabeth Fry, it’s worth a read or listen, as she was extraordinary. If you’re working in criminal justice, and feeling a bit disheartened, read about Betsy Fry and feel some hope again.
Anyway, I ended my lecture thinking about what Elizabeth Fry would think of the women’s prison estate these days. What would she hope for ? What would she want to change?
And so I wrote my own hope list. Here are the changes I’d like to see….
1.A reduction in the use of imprisonment.
2. Stop sending women to prison for short terms. If a crime carries a penalty of less than two years imprisonment, it should be punished with a suspended sentence or community penalty.
3. Use problem solving courts – these courts support people through the period of their sentence, and having seen them used for women in Manchester and Glasgow, I’ve seen women flourishing rather than fading. I’d like to see more of them.
4.Use diversion – many people should never be arrested, charged or convicted. Their offending, if it is that, is due to systemic issues such as poverty, poor housing, addiction or health issues. Give them support for those things, don’t just punish.
5. There is recent research showing that young women who have been in state care are much more likely to end up being criminalised. As are young women who have been excluded from school. There needs to be special attention paid to see why this is happening. and we need to work to find different ways to manage the behaviours that often show up out of loneliness, confusion, fear but are treated as wrongness which needs punished.
6. While prisons do exist, and increasingly I find myself moving to an abolitionist perspective – they need to be resourced properly, but we should not be creating more prison spaces. We should be trying to empty our prisons.
7. I’d like to see people’s understandings of the law and punishment and prisons become better informed so that they understand they aren’t something that do us good as a society, certainly not as they currently are.
What do you hope for ?
Hopeful Uncertainty : Lecture: Liverpool Cathedral 5th October 2023
Thank you to all who’ve invited me here – the Liverpool Diocesan Council for Social Aid (LDCSA), Adelaide House, the Diocese of Liverpool, and Liverpool Cathedral. I’m honoured to have been asked to give this year’s Prisons’ Week of Prayer Lecture. Thank you to all of you for attending tonight. I’m very glad we’re here together.
I read Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘Hope in the Dark’ on the subject of climate crisis, a year or so ago. I was off work with secondary trauma – a consequence of ten years of research into the sentencing of mothers and the criminalisation of women, and I was in a very uncertain place. When I read this line, I was gripped.
‘Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is the room to act.’
Rebecca Solnit’s reframing of uncertainty as a place of hope and spaciousness, opened up an entirely new perspective to me and gave me the title for tonight’s lecture. I don’t know who you are or what has brought you here tonight, but I expect that we all have a common interest in, or concern about the prisons in this country, or other countries around the world. We may have questions or worries about all that is expected of prisons, or for the people who live and work in them, and perhaps we have a shared wish that they were different to they are. Prisons are overcrowded, courts are unable to cope with the workload and victims’ concerns go unheeded. As populist punitive rhetoric gathers momentum it would be easy to feel hopeless. In prisons’ week it is hardly the elephant in the room, rather the loudly spoken truth, that prisons harm rather than rehabilitate. Our system of punishment often seems to lack justice in the broader sense, the evidence is overwhelming that reoffending is increased by prison time, and our prison system and all those who live and work in it are under increasing strain. We are living in very uncertain times and criminal justice policy and practice is part of that uncertainty.
As you’ve heard I give this lecture in the context of the 200th anniversary of the Liverpool Diocesan Charity for Social Aid or Adelaide House as it is now known. I had the immense pleasure of visiting the premises of Adelaide House today. The services and opportunities for women made possible by Adelaide House came about because Ann Waterhouse, and her husband Nicholas the founders of the charity, were visited by Ann’s cousin, a woman named Elizabeth Fry. We don’t know the substance of their meeting, the nature of their relationship or the way the conversation unfolded, but we do know that because of Elizabeth’s visit, Ann and Nicholas decided to make provision for women in the city of Liverpool through Adelaide House.
Having spent the past ten years as an activist academic working on matters relating to women in prison and their children, and knowing how hard it is to get anyone interested and committed to making proper provision for criminalised women, when I heard about the origins of Adelaide House, I wanted to know what it was about Betsy Fry, as she was known to her friends and family,that enabled her to persuade her cousin in Liverpool to change her life in order to prioritise women who were coming out of prison.
Until I began to read up on Elizabeth Fry all I knew was that she was a penal reformer a long time ago, and her face was on the £5 note for a time. Having learned about her over the past weeks, I’m close to getting her face tattooed on me somewhere as an homage – that’s how bowled over I am by her. So tonight, I want to reflect on the way that Elizabeth Fry found hope and reason to act in the spaciousness of uncertainty.
Betsy was born in 1780 into a wealthy quaker family. Quakers are members of The Religious Society of Friends, which had its beginnings as a protestant Christian tradition, believing in the presence of God in every person and key values of simplicity, truth, equality and peace. Betsy’s family weren’t plain quakers, they were rather more fun and colourful quakers, and her early years, although saddened by the death of her beloved mother, were full of family, adventures and high society. She loved the theatre, was extremely attractive and drew the attention of many men, meaning that despite having older sisters she was the first to receive marriage proposals. She and her sisters did not embrace faith with enthusiasm, calling the Quaker meetings ‘dis’, as in – I don’t want to go to dis today – dis was short for ‘disgusting’.
However, at the age of 18 she was profoundly affected by the preaching of a Quaker Minister who was visiting from the United States. Something in what he said made sense of the longing she had for greater meaning in her life. For months she followed him to wherever he was speaking, attracting the mockery of her sisters. There probably was something of an infatuation about it, but Betsy was engaged in a deeply thoughtful consideration of her future. Should she become a ‘plain’ quaker – setting aside worldly things to be more focused on matters of faith and belief? Betsy made her decision and chose faith. She spent more of her time doing activities that had always mattered to her, such as helping other people around her, but now they became her primary focus. She was aware that many children around the family’s estate and home could not read or write, and although she herself had not excelled at her education, and in fact still had problems with spelling and grammar, she decided to offer lessons to children. Beginning with just a few she soon had a ‘school’ of 50. She made provision for their families, doing what she could for the mothers by way of food and clothing. Her father began to realise, through these actions that she was quite serious about her new convictions, which centred on the necessity of salvation and the individual value of every person. He found himself admiring the woman she was becoming, rather than grieving the fun daughter he felt he had lost. Soon Betsy was married to Joseph Fry. A Quaker who she had already turned down twice, but she eventually accepted that his seriousness about her was not something she should walk away from.
At the age of 20 Betsy found marriage and the move to London exceedingly difficult. A life in which her primary focus was entertaining people and being entertained did not suit her, and she had difficult relations with her in laws. Her first child was born 1801, after a very traumatic and difficult birth. Over the course of her next 23 years, she gave birth to 12 children, one of whom died in childhood, and had several miscarriages. For many women of her generation that would have been her life in its totality. A wife, mother, and organiser of the household.
But those were not to be Betsy’s only contributions to society.
She had a gift for preaching and felt called by God to minister in that way, and so she became a minister in the Society of Friends. Her sister’s disapproved of it, and although she felt strongly that it was a vocation, she was constantly aware that she was not fulfilling other people’s expectations of her as a woman.
After 12 years of married life, and with eight children, her husband’s bank was near to collapse. Her brothers bailed him out and structured their finances to protect their sister’s family. Decisions were made about her by her husband and brothers, and her four older children were taken to live with her siblings, whilst she was left with the four youngest. She felt judgements were being made about the inadequacy of her parenting; she felt a failure and ashamed.
It was from this context aged 33 that she stepped into the next phase of her life’s work, and that part of her life which will be of interest to everyone gathered here. In February 1813 two men called at her house in London. They had just left Newgate Gaol and Betsy Fry was the closest Quaker woman they knew to that terrible place, and they desperately needed to unburden themselves to someone whose sympathy they could count on.’ The men had gone to visit the Gaol and seen the men but when they tried to visit the women’s yard the gaolers didn’t want to let them in. When they did enter, they were badly shaken by all they saw, describing the women’s yard as ‘the most violence, depravity and despair’ present in Newgate.
Hearing from the men that there were children in the prison with their mothers, Betsy, mother to 8 children, one of them only a few months old, went the next day with a friend to Newgate prison with clothes for the babies.
Initially, the women were told, like the men the previous day, that they couldn’t deliver the gifts to the women. The governor, Mr Newman, told them the ‘sights and smells’ would be too much for them and even if they could tolerate those, they would be attacked by the women. Betsy and her friend Anna were persistent. They emphasised their wealthy families and influential connections and ‘finally wore him down’.
The governor had not exaggerated the horrific nature of the prison conditions. As they walked through the prison where 300 women were held in terrible conditions, the noises and smells caused both women to feel extremely nauseous. Betsy described feeling ‘her flesh crawl and a cold sweat break out’. She felt as if she was walking into a nightmare. The Turnkey accompanying them remarked that he and his associates never went into the women’s area as they were too frightened. He once again advised Betsy that she shouldn’t take the risk of going in. Betsy’s response was that she’d come to clothe the babies and wasn’t leaving until she had done so. He let Betsy and Anna into the yard and the door was bolted behind them. They saw hundreds of women. Few were properly clothed. Women were made to pay for their keep, and if on arrival they had no money they had to ‘sell’ their clothes to the gaoler. All were dirty. Some were drunk. Lice crawled through their hair. Betsy and Anna stood in the middle of the yard whilst women surged around them. Betsy recorded in her journal that as she returned their gaze ‘though she saw insolence, wantonness, confusion and despair, she also saw a terrible and Godless hopelessness.’
Betsy and Anna set to the work of clothing all the babies. Many were very cold, so Betsy held them until their bodies were warmed. For three days they returned to the prison, clothing all the children in Newgate and making beds of fresh straw for all the women who were sick. It was recorded that before they left on the third day, Betsy and Anna knelt on the filthy floor of the yard and prayed for all those who lived in that prison. Women knelt around them, and both Betsy and Anna wept, as did many of the women in the yard.
One of the greatest things about Betsy was her almost total inability to see the world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and it was so powerfully demonstrated on that first visit to Newgate. She was a woman with babies, and she wanted to make sure that other women with babies had what they needed. She wanted children to be warm and clothed. It didn’t matter whose children they were. She understood what it was to be a person made in the image of God, and part of that is knowing that all people are made in the image of God.
When I read the account of that visit I wept too. Maybe I was just feeling a bit emotional, but I think that I saw a glimpse of the extraordinary power that comes from identifying with other people in our shared humanity and the possibilities for all of us that can flow from that. It also held for me an echo of the opening of my eyes to the difficulties faced by children whose mothers were in prison, although mine took place in the quiet of a university library and not inside a prison yard.
I originally trained and worked as a barrister, representing clients in the criminal and family courts. I developed a specialist practice in care cases, where the local authority bring proceedings to remove a child from their family, because of harm or the likelihood of harm being suffered by the child due to abuse or neglect. These decisions were never taken lightly and involved multiple court hearings, extensive assessments of parenting and thorough consideration by multiple professionals, including a guardian ad litem acting on the child’s behalf, to determine what course of action was in the child’s best interests. That principle is set out in section 1(1) of the Children Act 1989, where it states that the child’s welfare is the paramount consideration of the court.
When I had my own children, I could no longer work as a barrister – the childcare costs versus income didn’t allow for it, even though I’d only 3 and not 12 like Betsy – so I turned my hand to other things for several years. Mostly justice related and in 2011 I found myself in a university library trying to find out what happened to the children of women who were imprisoned. I could only imagine that they faced what they would experience as catastrophic loss with all the consequences of that, but I had assumed that similar to the treatment of children separated from their parents by the state in the family courts, there would be some provision for them, and careful consideration of how any separation would impact them. I became increasingly uncomfortable as my assumption, that I would find details of how they were provided for and considered, came to naught. It seemed there was no requirement on courts to even ask if a woman had children, let alone ensure that they would be properly looked after if their mother was sent to prison. As I came to the realisation that no one seemed to care about the children of women in prison I sat at a desk in the library and with my head in my hands, I wept. I was devastated by the lack of concern for that group of children. My Christian faith, like Betsy’s, holds at the centre the intrinsic worth of every person, and turned out to be a driving force for me to do something to alleviate a harm that I couldn’t ignore.
Picking up Betsy’s story again, she did not return to Newgate prison for more than 3 years. Her life was full of personal complication and sadness. She gave birth to two more children and experienced the death of one of her older daughters, also called Betsy. Her husband’s bank was rescued from failure by her family for a second time. The consequence of which was that 6 of her children were taken away to be cared for and educated by her family. Her brother and close cousin died. She continued to feed and clothe the poor around her. She ministered at Friends’ meetings across the country and as she had since childhood, she suffered from the blackness of depression, which she managed with occasional periods of rest, and alcohol. Her brother wrote to her ‘have no scruples about the third or fourth glass being a little inconsistent with the expected proceedings of public friends.’
When Betsy returned to Newgate at the end of 1816 the Turnkey didn’t want to let her into the women’s yard, but she insisted. Left alone she did then feel frightened as many of the women were drunk and seemed to see her as a threat. As she began to panic, she prayed for help and saw a woman holding a little girl. She walked to them and took the child into her arms. She placed her hand on the mother’s shoulder and turned to the women surging towards her and asked, ‘Is there not something we can do for these little children?’
Maybe it was because she’d asked the women for their thoughts on how the future might be different? Maybe it was her gentleness and lack of agenda? Maybe it was prayer. But something in that afternoon brought Betsy and the women of Newgate together, and from that came a plan – that the children of women in Newgate could be given some education. Although those in charge were against it, Betsy asked them to let her try it as an experiment. The women made a cell available and chose a teacher – Mary Connor a ‘previously respectable young woman convicted for stealing a watch.’ Thirty children, many of them born in prison, were crammed into a cell to receive basic education. It was the first school in British prison history. Once the school took its first scholars more women placed their children on the waiting list. Then the women asked for education for themselves. They wanted to be taught to read and to sew. They wanted ways of making money that wouldn’t leave them dependent on men for money from begging, stealing or prostitution.
Betsy recorded in her journal that she felt very unsure about taking the idea forward even though she thought it was something which should happen. She didn’t relish the opposition of men in authority. She didn’t want to be criticised further for spending time on things other than her family. She questioned if pride was leading her astray or if God was calling her forward. From her journal notes she recognised that what she did in Newgate would prove critical, and there would be no turning from it. Betsy decided to press forward with an attempt to set up a workshop in the prison for women, and was shocked when her own brothers and friends, themselves involved in prison reform, would not support her in it. They like the governors, believed the women to be ‘unteachable’. ‘The materials would be stolen or destroyed, scissors and needles would become weapons and the workshop would be overtaken by riot.’
But having committed herself to the plan, Betsy tried a different tack. In April 1817 she established the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. Its membership was 11 quaker women and the wife of an Anglican clergyman. Its object was “to provide for the clothing, the instruction and the employment of the women: to introduce them to a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, and to form in them, as much as possible, those habits of order, sobriety and industry which may render them docile and peaceable whilst in prison, and respectable when they leave it.’
The 12 members pledged to visit the prison, pay the salary of a resident matron and provide for necessary materials and arrange for sales of work.’ Betsy needed a man’s support and Joseph Fry her husband invited all the men in charge at Newgate to dinner at their home. He told them how much he supported his wife’s endeavour. The Governor was unconvinced but agreed to attend a meeting with the 70 women who were going to form part of this experiment. The first meeting took place, and another some days later. The women had agreed to abide by a set of rules – a condition of the experiment set by the Governor. What the women weren’t expecting was that these rules would be drawn up by them, in discussion with the Ladies of the Association. A set of 12 rules were agreed, many of them setting up structures for self-determination within the workshops – a division of classes, each with monitors responsible for supervising others.
Two weeks’ later with the workshop well underway, the Reverend CB Taylor who had previously described Newgate women’s yard as ‘hell about ground’ wrote this about the women he observed working ‘their countenances wore an air of self-respect and gravity, a sort of consciousness of their improved character, and the altered position in which they were placed.’
There are several important things to note in how Betsy progressed matters. She recognised the dignity of the women in Newgate. She listened to them when they told her what they needed, and she used her influence, connections and uncriminalised status to put into place support and improvements for them. She didn’t work alone. She found others who shared her vision and values and between them they carried the work. She felt the discomfort of her non-conformity to societal roles, but she lived authentically and with courage.
I don’t have time to tell you all that Betsy accomplished in the remaining 28 years of her life, but if I tell you that her children complained that holidays with her were exhausting and tiresome because she ‘had an inability to ignore prisons or evangelistic opportunities’, you will have a sense of how she lived her life.
But in brief – her work at Newgate carried on and extended beyond the prison itself. As well as being instrumental in achieving reforms such as segregation of the sexes in prison, female matrons for female prisoners, the provision of education and employment, she inspected prisons, drafted reports for parliament, was the first woman to appear before a parliamentary select committee to give evidence, advocated reform and established new campaigning groups. Her work on the convict ships is of note. At the time when women in Newgate were deported to Australia they were brought in open carriages from the prison, through crowds who lined the streets and pelted them with rotten food. This frightened the women so much that the night before women were moved to the ships there was often a riot in Newgate. Betsy persuaded the governor to send the women in closed carriages, and she and the other ladies of the Association travelled with them as a sign of solidarity. She negotiated with ships’ captains that women and children should be allocated a food and water allowance and be provided with a bag of provisions including books and sewing materials so that when they landed the women would have something to sell, rather than immediately being taken into sexual servitude. In a 12-year period she visited every convict ship before it left England. She was also involved in improving nursing standards, establishing soup kitchens and homeless shelters, campaigning against the death penalty and her thoughts on prison reform were sought in Prussia, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Betsy Fry was, as they’d say in Ireland, some woman for one woman. It is hard to fully grasp the extent of her influence in prison and penal reform across the world.
I’ve been asked to share a little of my own journey as it follows on from Betsy Fry and her concern for children whose mothers were imprisoned. My moment in the university library led to me applying at the age of 39 with 3 primary aged children, to do a PhD exploring the consideration given to children when mothers were sentenced. The title was ‘Who cares?’ because I wasn’t sure that anyone did. I suppose like Betsy, I saw a problem and I threw all that I had at trying to solve it and in the process became an accidental academic and an accidental penal reformer. As I said earlier, I realised there was differentiated treatment of children separated from their parents by imprisonment, and I knew that I needed to have robust research evidence in order to advocate for change. I interviewed judges about their sentencing practice, children about the experience of their mum being in prison, and reviewed case law and sentencing guidelines. I found that although there was some case law and the guidelines suggested children should be considered when sentencing primary carers that didn’t often happen in practice, and that children suffered a range of harms when their mothers were imprisoned.
After the completion of my PhD research, which is published as a book, should you be interested in reading it, I got funding to make training resources for all legal professionals involved in the sentencing of mothers, judiciary, magistracy, probation staff and lawyers, and delivered training to many professional groups. I took my research to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights and asked them to hold an enquiry into the rights of children whose mothers are imprisoned. They agreed to do so and in 2019, almost 201 years to the day after Betsy Fry was the first women to give evidence to a parliamentary committee about the imprisonment of women, I gave evidence to the Human Rights Committee. The Committee found that the rights of children were indeed being breached and made several recommendations to the government. Although all were accepted, they have still not been acted on. I was disappointed by that, but partly because of that inquiry the Sentencing Council developed new guidelines which clearly set out that courts should consider the impact of a sentence on dependent children. Of course, that doesn’t mean it always happens but its progress. I’ve worked with judiciary in Scotland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and other European countries on ensuring children are considered when women are sentenced. More recently I’ve been involved in working to see the abolition of the imprisonment of pregnant women, as prison is not a safe place for an unborn child or its mother. I worked (without much success) to get government to improve communication for prisoners with their families during the covid lockdowns, and currently I’m looking at procedural justice for women in prison and their ability to participate properly in court proceedings concerning their children.
Betsy did her thing. I’m doing mine. Many of you are doing yours. But I have to say I find it painful to see how little has changed in two centuries.
We have separate facilities for women. Women in prison receive education, and are clothed, and there is health care and bedding. Their children, other than some babies under the age of 18 months are not in prison with them. They aren’t pelted with rotten food on their way to convict ships, nor are they sentenced to death for stealing a cheque.
But although the prisons may no longer smell or feel so dangerous, the stench of harm is ever present. The pain can feel visceral.
In the past year approximately 5000 women were imprisoned in England and Wales. This is twice as many as 30 years ago. Many women have not yet been found guilty of a crime or have not been sentenced and ultimately more than 50% of these women are found not guilty or are given non custodial sentences. 69% of women sentenced to imprisonment have committed nonviolent offences. TV licence evasion was the most common offence for women to be convicted of in 2019. There is an increase in the use of short prison sentences, 76% of women in prison have been sentenced to less than two years in prison (meaning they will spend one year inside) and 2/3 of those are sentenced to less than six months (meaning a 3-month jail period). 20 years ago, less than a third of women were sentenced to less than six months
Any sentence under two years can be suspended, and the crimes punished by these short sentences will have been less serious and could have been punished in the community rather than in prison but the use of community sentences has dropped by 61% in a decade. The overuse of short sentences of imprisonment mean that a woman can lose her children, her home, her job, and has little prospect of getting them back when she finishes her sentence. When women appeal their sentences approximately 46% of appeals are successful.
High numbers of women in prison have mental health problems, a problem with alcohol or drugs. 53% have experienced emotional, sexual or physical abuse. A third have spent time in state care as a child. A quarter have no previous convictions prior to being given a prison sentence.
Prison is still an incredibly stressful place to be. Self-harm rates in prison for women have reached a record high.
Prison does not rehabilitate and prevent future offending. Women who’ve received a prison sentence rather than a community sentence are more likely to reoffend (26%). 58% of women are reconvicted within one year of leaving prison and this rises to 73% for those sentenced to less than 12 months.
Why is this? Well some answer may be found in the fact that only 4% of women were in paid employment 6 weeks after release and less than half of the women leaving prison leave to settled accommodation.
It’s not good. I wonder often what we as a society think we’re achieving when we lock people up.
It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the problems and disappointed that the pace of change is so slow.
So, we’re going to go back to my new hero – Betsy.
I admire and respect all that she did, and I’m glad that she did it. And I’m trying to understand why she did the work she did:
She didn’t do it because she had time on her hands – 12 children, 25 grandchildren, and the caring burden of many relatives and friends fell to her
She didn’t do it without it affecting her – exhaustion and depression were the backdrop to much of her life. She drank too much and worried about it. She felt constantly guilty when she chose work over her family.
She didn’t do it because it brought her affirmation – a preacher of the day said, ‘we long to burn her alive’ and her own family often questioned her choices.
She didn’t do it because she had it all together, and always got things right – she experienced plenty of failures, disappointments, and public shame in her personal life.
She didn’t do it because she had the skills or standing or influence.
So, what allowed Betsy to hold on to hope and keep going despite all the uncertainties?
I think it was her imagination and her faith.
Even as a small child she’d had a vivid and often terrifying imagination, and I suspect it was this powerful imagination that allowed her to see how things could be different. She wasn’t curtailed by the status quo. She could see other ways of doing things and her work was to enthuse, cajole, and persuade other people to try out her ideas.
Her faith set the parameters of her life. It drove her to care for others on both an eternal and immediate basis. When she preached, she didn’t ever say ‘you’. She said ‘us. The challenges, promises and blessings of the gospel were for her and for everyone she met. She believed that she had been saved from death and darkness, and that every person was both worth saving and save- able. As she herself said, there just had to be a person to act as the catalyst for change.
So, I can’t help but wonder what she would see if she walked into our prisons and courts today? Where would her imagination take her?
Where can our imaginations and our faith take us?
If you could draw up a list of the things, you’d like to change what would be on it?
This is my imaginative hope list:
A reduction in the use of imprisonment.
Stop sending women to prison for short terms. If a crime carries a penalty of less than two years imprisonment, it should be punished with a suspended sentence or community penalty.
Use problem solving courts – these courts support people through the period of their sentence, and having seen them used for women in Manchester, I saw women flourishing rather than fading, I’d like to see more of them.
Use diversion – many people should never be arrested, charged or convicted. Their offending, if it is that, is due to systemic issues such as poverty, poor housing, addiction or health issues. Give them support for those things, don’t just punish.
There is recent research showing that young women who have been in state care are much more likely to end up being criminalised. As are young women who have been excluded from school. There needs to be special attention paid to see why this is happening. and we need to work to find different ways to manage the behaviours that often show up out of loneliness, confusion, fear but are treated as wrongness which needs punished.
While prisons do exist, and increasingly I find myself moving to an abolitionist perspective – they need to be resourced properly, but we should not be creating more prison spaces. We should be trying to empty our prisons.
I’d like to see people’s understandings of the law and punishment and prisons become better informed so that they understand they aren’t something that do us good as a society, certainly not as they currently are.
There are so many individuals who believe in these things. Who hope for change and who keep stepping into the uncertainty. Many of you here tonight are those people and I am so grateful for you. For your determination and dedication and unwillingness to lose hope.
Rachel Brett, the now retired representative for human rights and refugees at the Quaker United Nations’ Office in Geneva is one of those people. A brilliant lawyer and a committed Quaker, I’ve had the privilege of knowing her for the past ten years. A few years ago, I was finding things hard – not seeing positive responses from government when I lobbied them to make changesfor children. I asked her how she kept going – seeking change in criminal justice and human rights, when so often it feels as though all you are doing is banging your head against a brick wall.
‘Shona’, she said, ‘Working for change is like a game of Snakes and Ladders. The only possible way to succeed is to stay on the board.’
We can see looking back at history that change is possible and does occur. Today we are the catalysts for that change. It is holy work.
I end with a description of Betsy from her brother, Joseph John Gurney,
‘The law of love, which might be said to be ever on her lips, was deeply engraved on her heart; and her charity, in the best and most comprehensive sense of the term, flowed freely forth towards her fellowmen of every class, of every condition. Thus, with a peculiar grace she won her way, and almost uniformly obtained her object….
This perseverance was combined with a peculiar versatility and readiness for seizing on every passing occasion and converting it into an opportunity of usefulness.’
Thank you for listening to me.
May we leave this place tonight with a mindset of hopeful uncertainty
a greater imagination for the possibility of change,
and the peculiar versatility and readiness with which to achieve it.
Dr Shona Minson 