One of the fundamentals of modern jail craft is the idea that it’s hard to convince prisoners that you care about their welfare if they’re living in squalid conditions. This has been understood for years, with fluctuating amounts of buy-in from politicians about how important it was to offender management that inmates felt cared about.
Self-harm, meanwhile, has long been an issue of concern. I remember, in the 1990s and 2000s, detailed conversations with prison psychologists about why women’s prisons had disproportionate amounts of it: one idea, which I always found the most convincing, was that women, where they had children, were almost always the main carer, so were in a state of constant anxiety about who was looking after them. Another theory was that psychological interventions such as anger management courses had been devised for male prisoners; women responded differently to the discovery that they could have controlled their anger – by blaming themselves. That was also plausible.
