Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’?

‘No place for a vulnerable young woman’: Styal Women’s Prison, which has seen more suicides than any other women’s jail in England. Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian

Every now and then I learn something about the world today that sticks into me like a fish hook and I find myself asking friends, colleagues, “Wait, did you know this? Did you know this was happening?” The most recent felt like a horror-movie trope. It’s the part of the film, about a third of the way in, where a woman is locked up with the lie that the incarceration is for her own good.

A lack of mental health beds means a woman is taken to prison “as a place of safety” and there she’ll stay, unsentenced