Spending time in a female prison has helped presenter and activist Katie Piper put aside her preconceptions, and acknowledge the trauma that leads women to commit crime
Katie Piper is counting her lucky stars today, and when someone who has suffered as she has tells you they’re feeling fortunate, you can’t help but listen. The TV presenter, writer, activist and model has spent the past few months jetting back and forth to America, spending weeks at a time in female prisons, to explore how women parent behind bars.
And it is an experience that has made her very grateful for her own upbringing. ‘We weren’t wealthy – we didn’t have a lot of money – but we had our parents’ time, and we had consistency and stability. I now realise we were really privileged. It wasareally rich childhood,’ she says.
It’s the polar opposite of what she has been witnessing, meeting women incarcerated in the US who are desperately trying to raise their children within a prison environment.
But it wasn’t an experience she had planned. ‘It isn’t necessarily a placeIwould have naturally been drawn to; it wasn’t somethingIput myself up for. ButIwas contacted by a group at a women’s prison in the UK. They were looking at women who had inspired them, and they’d done this project on me. They’d even named part of the prison after me!
‘They asked if I would come in and meet the women, andIfelt like I couldn’t really say no, they’d put so much time in. It wasn’t something thatIwould have volunteered myself for without prompting, butIhold my hands up now and say that my prejudgment was completely wrong: it wasn’t as black and white as I thought.’
Piper says that working with the women, both in the UK and later in America, ‘opened her eyes’ to the realities they have faced in their lives.
‘Over 80 per cent of the population are locked up for drug-related crimes. And most drug-related crimes are either because men have used them as mules, or because the women themselves were addicts. And, frequently, that addiction was brought about by childhood trauma, or trauma in their adult years.
Some people will say, “Those women made a choice, why are you giving them airtime?” But you have to remember, male and female crime is very different.Avery small percentage of the female prison population are locked up for violent crimes. You’re not going to go into jail and meet multiple Rose Wests and Myra Hindleys; the reason those women became so prolific is precisely because it’s so rare in a female prisoner.
‘Some of the women I met were serving life sentences because they had murdered people – but frequently the people they had murdered had
