“Everyone here pretty well has the same story.”Wendy is knitting booties A couple of pairs will pay for a packet of cigarettes. Wendy has two girls, aged 24 and 11, and a six-year-old grandson “My mum’s taking care of them. That makes a lot of difference; my eldest girl could have gone the other way at one point. My partner? He isn’t around any more.” How long did he wait for her, I ask “Oh, he stuck around about two months.” She laughs bitterly.

My mum had gone bankrupt, there were family problems, and I was providing here there and everywhere. `They’ offered me more money than I could earn in a yearAsk any of the women what are the hardest things about prison, and they say the same: being separated from their families; their guilt at having left their children; and having disappointed their parents. According to the Ramsbotham report, 45 per cent of female prisoners have no previous convictions, and 70 per cent have not been in prison before.”I was stupid, because I had a good job,” says Wendy “I just wanted to provide for my family. Her roommate, Wendy, says that they are not allowed to put posters on the outside wall, since the film The Shawshank Redemption showed an inmate digging an escape hole behind his poster.Like Aliya, Wendy, 39, is a first-time offender, serving four years related to drugs importing. They are allowed access to each other’s rooms even when their landing is locked, and most of them take education or gym classes on a daily basis They write endless letters to cope with confinement. Some, such as Aliya, correspond daily with male prisoners, as “they understand how important letters are”.The staff, they say, “are all right.

They come in every morning; bang on the windows to make sure we haven’t loosened the panes It’s quite funny,” says Aliya. When I first went in I was in such a state they gave me valium, kept me valiumed up,” says Aliya, adding: “It might have been a good thing.” The Independent was told that there would be no press access to Holloway.At Winchester, the inmates have an unusual degree of freedom. lead us to recommend that there should be an alternative local prison”. Winchester’s “best practice” is far from the “serious inadequacies in the overall organisation and management of prisons for women in this country”.”It’s like a week in a shopping centre, here It’s better than Holloway, anyway That’s a hell-hole. She shares it with 84 other women, many of whom have been there since it was opened in 1995 as part of the prison service’s attempts to accommodate the increase It is not bad, she says.

The signs requesting women “not to use the floor as an ashtray – it kills the cockroaches” are apparently a joke.Winchester is, however, a far cry from some of the women’s units identified in the Ramsbotham report, such as Low Newton, whose facilities “are not sufficient to meet the needs of unsentenced women prisoners”; or Risley, whose “ongoing problems … The women have painted it pink, and the carefully tended prison garden and hanging washing detract from the looming men’s prison next door. These are not always the violent women of popular myth (in fact, violent crimes by women dropped by 16 per cent in the same period). Asked by the Ramsbotham report what had led to their imprisonment, out of 24 possible categories nearly a third of inmates surveyed ticked “Alcohol/drugs”, while 18 per cent named “Need for money, or debt”. To hear their stories is to wonder how the monetary cost – and the social cost – of putting these women in jail balances any benefit.Aliya’s new home is the women’s annexe at Winchester Prison. They lose their children: only 32 per cent are looked after by fathers or grandmothers. The vast majority of women are deserted by their partners (“usually to their best friend,” one prisoner remarks wryly); and when they come out they have to contend with the “double stigma” of being a female offender.Yet, in the past four years, there has been a 76 per cent increase in the number of women imprisoned.