I can’t begin to understand all the complexities, or the twists and turns in the Paris Hilton saga — which saw her first released from her 23-day jail sentence for parole violation after three days to undergo house arrest, and then returned by her original sentencing judge to the Century Regional Detention Centre in Lynwood, California only a matter of a few hours later — but what I do know is that the coverage of her case fails abysmally to acknowledge how incarcerated women experience a prison sentence, and the all-too-real tragedies of women who self-harm and take their own lives inside whether in the US, or elsewhere.
New research to be published this week by the Howard League for Penal Reform shows that only one woman took her own life in British jails between 1985 and 1990, but that in the last ten years, 70 women have died while in custody. This year alone, five women have already taken their own lives — they are recorded as “self-inflicted deaths” by HM Prison Service. This amounts to 12.5 per cent of all suicides this year in British prisons, despite the fact that women make up only 6 per cent of the prison population. Add to these figures the staggering numbers of women who self-harm — one in two female prisoners self-harm at some stage in their sentence — and there is an undeniable phenomenon about how imprisonment is experienced by women.
This phenomenon simply can’t be ignored, and those who sentence a woman to imprisonment — whether that woman is a millionaire celebrity, or an everyday drug user (which is why most women get sent to jail) — are knowingly putting women at risk. They are imprisoning women in a penal system, whether in Britain or in the US, that was specifically designed for men, and are thus far too often knowingly sentencing those women to die. Put simply, self-inflicted injuries and “self-inflicted” deaths are a foreseeable consequence of current western sentencing policies, which are desperate to be “tough on crime”, no matter what the cost.
With the exception of an handful of women who pose real dangers to the public, there is simply no need to incarcerate women at the rate that we do, and every reason to deal with those women who offend through community penalties, curfews and electronic monitoring — as advocated most recently in the US by the review conducted by Baroness Jean Corston. Yet the Hilton case, with its sneering, jeering and cheering when she was returned to jail, merely seemed to confirm a “common sense” view that female offenders should be sent to jail, as opposed to challenging that assumption and looking more carefully at what happens to those women who are sent inside, and how we could punish them differently.
The Corston Review about the imprisonment of women had a very interesting subtitle: “The need for a distinct, radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred and integrated approach”. This seems to summarise perfectly what we should have been discussing in the wake of Hilton’s return to jail, rather than cheering from the sidelines at a woman who is clearly experiencing emotional difficulties at a very stressful time.

Guardian