Double the guilt, double the shame – convicted women

Publicerat 24 Jan, 2006

Being given your first shot of heroin by your mother when you are ten years old and then, years later, stepping outside the prison walls with only a plastic bag in your hand and nowhere to go - this can be the fate of a woman who is released from prison in Sweden today. The Equal project Better Release has tried to do something about this.

Anita is 45 years old and has served two sentences at the Sagsjön penal institution. The first time she was released, the Better Release project did not exist and the help that was offered did not break through her protective shell. Anita was imprisoned because of problems relating to her drug abuse, which began when her daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia and her world fell apart. The man she loved at the time introduced her to the numbing but treacherous comfort of drugs.

Today, Anita lives in sheltered accommodation in the country and works with horses. She has been able to establish good relations with her daughter, something that the Better Release project also helped with.
“They pushed me to contact her, and if I didn’t have enough money left on my telephone card then I was allowed to use the staff telephone, it was not a problem,” says Anita.

“I was consumed by anger and I was very self-destructive,” she says.
While at Sagsjön, Anita met and worked with Ewa Asplund, a social worker and therapist. “Ewa Asplund wanted to get me to cry as I find it difficult to show my feelings.”

Did she succeed?

“Yes, when the time came to leave the prison,” says Anita with a laugh. “It may sound stupid but I felt at home at Sagsjön this time. But I did actually cry during the sessions with Ewa too. At first I got up and left when I began to cry and that was OK. But then Ewa said that I should try to stay a while, and at first I stayed for five seconds. The next time I stayed for five minutes and eventually I could stay and even talk about how I felt.”

Ewa Asplund is a social worker at the city unit of a group for the care of drug abusers in Gothenburg. She has many years of experience in her field, is a trained therapist and has also worked as a health inspector in the prison system. When the Better Release project appeared a few years ago, she was quick to join and the city unit supported her. Ewa Asplund began working with women at Sagsjön. The desire to work with women was also the reason why she joined the project, because women are in many ways the most vulnerable members of society – both inside and outside the prison walls.

Better Release aims to improve the release process for prisoners in Swedish prisons. One of the institutions covered by the project is the Sagsjön women’s prison in Lindome, south of Gothenburg.
Initially, Ewa Asplund visited Sagsjön and held lectures in which she presented information to large groups of prisoners. This did not work at all, so Ewa began working with small groups instead. A first, the women did not want to listen and were suspicious, especially when they heard that Ewa was a social worker.

“Many of the women have bad experience of the social services,” says Ewa Asplund. “They might, for example, have tried to get help from the social services and it turned out that they had such serious problems that they lost custody of their children. It can obviously be difficult to trust a person from the social services after something like that.”

Ewa Asplund had to fight for six months to gain the trust and confidence of the women, and she did this by being there and spending time with them. She played cards, sat and talked to them in the smoking-room and joined in other activities such as cooking or dancing. Meanwhile, all kinds of rumours circulated. One was that Ewa Asplund was co-operating with the police. In order to put a stop to the rumours and prevent them from obstructing the progress of the work, Ewa gathered the women together in small groups to sort out the misunderstandings.
“There is a lot of prejudice against the social services, but there is also a lot of prejudice within the social services, it goes both ways,” says Ewa Asplund.

When the women realised that Ewa was in fact there with good intentions, it became apparent that they felt an enormous need to talk and her diary was soon fully booked. Apart from practical advice on things like appeals, she could also offer therapy. Sometimes, she had 13 to 17 sessions with 45 minutes per person, which made for long working days.

The discussions with the women were often about existential issues, they talked about life and the human condition. They also talked a lot about children and what they need. In Ewa’s experience, many inmates, whether they are criminals or drug abusers, are people who grew up without acknowledgement or attention, they have never been allowed to “be someone” but have always been pushed into the background. As many of them have children of their own it was even more relevant to talk about children’s needs. Many women do not know how to behave towards their children as they themselves never had a healthy relationship with their own parents.

However, the question of what children need is not something that only women need to talk about; the same applies to many male inmates according to Ewa Asplund. They need to be given the same chance to discuss these issues as the women, and to learn how to establish and maintain a good relationship with their children. Learning to understand what children need will also help them to understand themselves. Ewa Asplund shows us what she thinks is a good article which was published in the newspaper “Expressen” on 6 October 2005. The headline is: "Children who are loved do not become rapists".
“It is rare that these issues are written about in a good way. Usually the articles just take up the details of the crime itself and the perpetrators are portrayed as twisted, evil individuals,” she says.

In the article, a male doctor and a male professor of psychology say that more time and effort should be devoted to teaching school pupils about the emotional needs and development of children, as these pupils are not just children themselves but also the parents of the future. This would, according to the authors of the article, protect society in a much more effective way than, for example, the chemical castration of rapists. Ewa Asplund also finds it interesting that two men chose to write on this subject in this way.
“It’s unusual,” she says.

Ewa describes the average inmate at Sagsjön as a 40 year-old woman who has one child, takes amphetamine and has never received treatment before. In Ewa’s experience, amphetamine is the drug that is most abused by women. This is partly because the drug makes you thin, something that appeals to a lot of women given the ideal of beauty that prevails today.

“Amphetamine is also a drug that shuts down your emotional responses and stops you from feeling,” she says. “You become calm and full of self-confidence. This is another reason why women take the drug. It gives them self-esteem and keeps them thin at the same time. There are of course many reasons why people become drug addicts and reality is multi-faceted. Everyone who abuses drugs has their own history and their own reasons.”

We ask Ewa if women inmates are in a worse situation than male inmates:
“Yes, in the same way that women are at a disadvantage in society in general. Women are second-class citizens, that’s the nature of the power structure. This applies to women in prison in the same way as to all other women.”

“What we can say is that women inmates often feel a great sense of guilt and shame because they have not been able to act as parents or because they have disappointed or failed the people around them. They have often had to take a great deal of responsibility for other people early in life. It may be that they had to take care of their own parents, for example, and that they reached a point where they just couldn’t cope. It is also often the case that they live in a destructive relationship and are dependent on a man. Destructive relationships can form stronger ties than healthy relationships, which is why women often go back to men who abuse them.”
In the course of her work, Ewa has also noted that men do not like it when their wives or girlfriends begin to think for themselves, which is one of the aims of the therapy sessions that she offers.
“Women need to learn to say no,” she says.

Anita also thinks that women are in a worse situation.
“Yes, I do,” she says. “A woman who has children and who has been in prison is blamed much more by society for having failed her children than men in the same situation are. Women are the bottom of the pile in general. It is much more acceptable for a man to let his children down; it’s more common and not at all as shameful in the eyes of society.”

She gives us an example from her own experience when she visited the employment office after her first release to find work. The employment officer asked Anita if she had children and the oficers’s attitude changed dramatically when she answered yes.
“A woman who fails her child is considered to be unreliable and society looks down on her,” says Anita.
This experience also explains why she is reluctant to move from her sheltered accommodation and to apply for work elsewhere.

Today, the penal system lacks a safety net that makes it easier for former inmates to return to society. Ewa Asplund says that none of the women at Sagsjön today want to return to the life they led before they came to the institution. Many of them also enjoy living at Sagsjön. Ewa explains that this is because of the structure that exists there – a structure that was previously lacking in their lives.
“If you have no internal structure and calm, then you need an external structure to create a sense of security,” she says. “Routines and schedules, which are a central part of life in an institution, provide stability, and this is appreciated by most of the women.”

But the women need support in order to change their lives. The social services should provide part of this support, but there is also a need for co-ordination between different bodies. The work must begin inside the institution or prison concerned, and the inmates must have somewhere to go when they are released.
“If you leave prison with a plastic bag in your hand and nowhere to go then it is obviously fairly easy to fall back into the pattern of behaviour you had before you were locked up,” says Ewa Asplund.

Anita knows just how important support is. She says that "Women in Change", a scheme run by prison officer Ulla Stockman under the auspices of Better Release, helped her to find herself. A group of five women were able to discuss the building blocks of life – feelings like anger, hate and love.
“Ulla Stockman planted small seeds in our heads,” says Anita. “At first, I just wanted to get up and leave the meetings, but later, during the evening, things that she had said just popped into my head and I thought - yes, that’s just the way it is. After a while I began to look forward to the meetings.”

Ulla Stockman taught Anita to channel her anger into something positive and Ewa Asplund encouraged her to remember the times when she managed to do this. Anita also found it difficult to be around people, she suffered from a kind of social phobia. Together with people from an organisation called KRIS (Criminals’ Return into Society) and from the Church, who were also involved in the project, she took the bus into town to work her way out of this phobia.

Giving inmates the opportunity to talk to someone about their situation so that they can come to understand what has happened and is happening in their lives is very important according to Anita and Ewa. This opportunity is not normally available today. Social workers do not always have the time or resources to visit an inmate regularly, and the inmate concerned may be serving his or her sentence in an institution at the other end of the country. Inmates must also actively seek contact with a social worker.

“You can’t take a social worker from just anywhere either, you have to find one from the area where you’re registered,” says Ewa Asplund. This becomes particularly problematic if you are in an institution located outside your own district, even if it is located in the same city. You may belong to a district that does not have the resources required just then, although other districts do.
When she became involved in the Better Release project, one of Ewa’s demands was that all of the inmates could be her clients irrespective of which district they belonged to.

Today, the Better Release project is in a phase in which it is providing information about its activities and disseminating its experience, and the practical work in the institutions has come to an end. There are plans to make a film about the women from Sagsjön and their return to society. The film will be part of a training package that will be distributed to relevant bodies and organisations. The aim is to disseminate knowledge and promote co-operation and co-ordination between different authorities and bodies.

Ewa Asplund stresses how important it is to begin providing the vital support to the inmates already within the institutions, and to then go on providing this support when the inmates are released in order to motivate them to change their lives.
“It is extremely difficult to change your life and break free of old patterns of behaviour,” she says. “The people who manage to do this are the greatest heroes and heroines. It requires an enormous amount of courage to really examine and reconsider your life.”

Agora is a meeting place for women in Gothenburg and is a part of the Better Release network. The activities provide a platform for meetings between different individuals and not just for former inmates. One of the objectives is that half of the visitors should be Swedish women and the other half women from different ethnic backgrounds. Agora is a resource centre that provides a variety of activities and courses in attractive premises in the city. Women on the long-term sick list or women who are excluded from the labour market for other reasons can get practical work experience, and sometimes also a job, in the centre’s cafeteria. It is also possible to talk to someone for support or advice and to talk to a midwife. This is a place where women can go when they have been released, or even when they are on temporary leave from prison.

Siw Åkesson is in charge of the operations of Agora. She tells us that the women who come there from Sagsjön appreciate the centre because they can be themselves without feeling that they have a sign around their necks that says “former inmate”. They also like the fact that there is no talk about drugs or crime.

“It’s different to come to a place like this than to places where only people with a criminal background meet,” she says. “The women often feel a great sense of shame and think that they are being judged by others. Agora provides a doorway into a more normal, everyday way of life.”

At the same time, support is still available here. Some of the personnel usually know which women have a prison background, at least when they are there on temporary leave. Representatives of Agora have also visited Sagsjön to talk about their activities and to establish contact with the inmates.
“Trust and support is important,” says Siw Åkesson.
She tells us that one of the women from Sagsjön took her first shot of heroin when she was ten years old and that she was given it by her mother.
“A woman needs a fantastic amount of strength and courage to change her life when she has been the victim of such terrible treatment,” says Siw Åkesson.

Anita has settled down well in the country. She is in contact with Ulla Stockman every week, either by phone or letter, and they are now more friends than anything else.

Is there anything that you think was negative about Better Release, or that didn’t work?
“No, nothing. I enjoyed my time at Sagsjön mostly thanks to Ulla Stockman, Ewa Asplund and everyone else who worked with Better Release. With their help, I have found a self-confidence that I didn’t know existed. Today, there is nothing that can break me,” says Anita.

Karoline Malicki Jakobsson

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