Inside Holloway - First Season

Holloway was the largest women's prison in Europe.

For over 100 years,

it was synonymous with Britain's most notorious female criminals.

Women whose crimes truly shocked the nation.

Like Ruth Ellis who changed history.

That was her way out, was to shoot him,

because she knew she wasn't strong enough to tell him to stay away.

And Cynthia Payne who was sent down but rocked the establishment.

It was sex in the suburbs, dressings up, and spankings and bondage.

We uncover the scandals hidden behind Holloway's walls

with first-hand evidence...

She said, "I'm going to take Myra for a walk on Hampstead Heath."

So I said, "fine."

..and expose the brutality of its past regimes.

It was done evilly and cruelly and brutally.

Punishing them, attacking them, really beating them up.

From the very beginning, Holloway was infamous as a harsh

and squalid prison.

But through its grim history, what was life really like

for the women locked up inside?

In its 100 years as a women's prison, Holloway's inmates have

included some of this country's most high profile female criminals.

Women like Moors Murderer, Myra Hindley.

Serial Killer, Rose West.

And the woman then labelled Britain's most hated, Maxine Carr.

But for Holloway's former governor, Julia Killick,

it was vital to understand that men and women end up in prison

for very different reasons.

The differences are vast.

Women come from a background of quite a lot of vulnerability.

There's a higher level of domestic violence,

there's a higher level of childhood abuse.

There's a higher level of interaction with psychiatric

services prior to coming into custody.

There is one dominant problem

that leads to over half of all female crime.

Relatively speaking, women are more law-abiding than men.

So in a way, they need some added reason to push them over

the edge into offending, and often, most often, that is drug addiction.

50% of the women that arrive,

we need to put onto a health care unit because of addiction.

Drug and alcohol addictions can lead to truly appalling crimes.

One of the most shocking cases that revealed the dangerous impact

of alcohol addiction was that of Holloway inmate, Amanda Hutton.

In September 2011, police burst into her Bradford home, searching

for her son, Hamzah Kahn, who hadn't been seen for nearly two years.

What they found were his mummified remains,

mouldy, and swarming with insects.

Hamzah had died 21 months beforehand,

starved to death at the age of four and a half.

He was wearing a one piece child's, you know, baby grow

type garment that was for a six month child.

This thing bursting at the seams around him.

A video of her arrest revealed Hutton was so drunk

she could hardly stand up.

Here is a woman who was so stupefied by drink that just the normal

responses of motherhood had broke down completely.

She was hardly aware that she had a child.

Pictures from inside Hutton's house revealed the appalling

and squalid conditions that Hamzah grew up in,

surrounded by filth and bag after bag of decaying rubbish.

The worst violence, the worst cruelty, the worst neglect

of children that I've seen has been associated with severe alcoholism.

Because once drugs and alcohol get into the picture,

a lot of ordinary morality goes out of the window.

Hutton was sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter.

Once at Holloway, she was able to enter a detox programme.

Studies in Holloway show that women behave very differently to men

once they're in prison.

Women are more social, have more homosexual affairs, and are far less

violent towards each other, even with the most provocative cases.

Another recent Holloway inmate was ex-nursery worker, Vanessa George.

On the surface, she loved children,

but she was also harbouring a very dark secret.

She was being trusted with these children every day and what the

poor parents didn't know was that covertly, Vanessa George

was taking vile pictures of tiny children

and posting them on the internet for the sexual enjoyment

of friends she'd made online.

In a men's prison, George's paedophilia would have made her

a target of attacks by other inmates.

Yet in Holloway, she didn't live in constant fear of reprisals.

Because women express anger in a particular way.

When men are angry and frustrated for example at being locked up,

they're more likely to direct that outwards perhaps in aggression

or violence.

Whereas women are more likely to direct it at themselves

in the form of severe self-harm, cutting or self-mutilation.

The women are punishing themselves and these days,

many are offered psychotherapy to try to combat

these feelings of guilt and self-hatred.

Prisons today do all they can to help rehabilitate offenders.

But Holloway's Victorian founders thought very differently.

For them, imprisonment meant constant punishment and brutality.

They believed prisons should instil fear by their very presence.

The original Holloway built in 1852 is this incredible

kind of Gothic castle.

This was an incredibly imposing building.

It doesn't look like your modern idea of prison at all.

This is a fortress.

This is a place of Gothic horror.

Originally, it was a mixed prison until Victorian reformers

questioned the wisdom of locking up men and women together.

There were suggestions about immorality, about corruption.

The idea was that you had to separate men and women

into different groups, because otherwise, what were you doing

creating this pit where criminals can mate

and produce criminal children?

In 1902, the reformers decided to put this radical new idea

into practice.

Able to hold 949 convicts, Holloway became a women-only prison.

It was no longer a local jail, housing petty criminals.

Holloway quickly became a place to be feared and loathed.

With newly installed gallows just waiting for its first victims.

In 1902, Holloway had become the nation's principle jail for women.

Murder convictions carried inevitable death sentences

and Holloway was equipped to carry them out.

It was not long before not one,

but two women would step up to the gallows.

The baby farmers, Annie Walters and Amelia Sach.

In a quiet London street, the pair ran a business that would

shock the nation and confirm Holloway's gruesome reputation.

Amelia Sach, under the name, Nurse Thorne,

put an advert in the local press, offering skilled nursing before

and during childbirth, home comforts, "baby can remain."

"Baby can remain" was the code term that would have alerted

potential customers, so they would know that once they'd come

to the lying-in home and given birth they would leave without the child.

This was an age with no contraception,

abortion or legal adoption.

Sach's clients were unmarried women who'd become pregnant

and faced a ruinous future.

But, for a fee of £25, she would promise to give their unborn babies

a chance of a better life with a middle-class family.

This was an Edwardian baby farm.

Amelia Sach must have been quite a successful businesswomen,

and we know that in 1902, she had about £900 in a post office account,

which, considering a teacher would have earned maybe £15-20 a year,

is a huge amount of money.

Her clients would spend the last months of their pregnancy

at her premises,

leaving discretely just after the birth.

Once a baby was born and within a day or so, she would then

send a telegram to a woman called Annie Walters,

another midwife who worked for her.

Walters brought the new-born babies back to her lodgings

in nearby Islington.

But Walters was a drug addict.

She was an alcoholic and hooked on chlorodyne,

a potent cocktail of chloroform, cannabis and opium.

Her landlady became suspicious that she wasn't handing over

all of the children for adoption.

And she was arrested, clutching a dead baby.

Sach and Walters stood trial for murder.

The prosecution produced significant evidence that this wasn't

an isolated incident, and the pair had killed as many as 20 babies.

So the press went all out to present them as serial killers who had

deliberately, systematically set out to kill as many babies as possible.

In just 40 minutes, they were found guilty

and sent to Holloway for execution.

18 days later,

they would become the first victims of the prison's new gallows.

Up to the end, both of them were protesting their innocence.

And Amelia Sach had to be dragged, you know, sort of half-conscious

to the scaffold, whereas Annie Walters was apparently calmer

and shouted out, "goodbye, Sach" just before they're executed.

The bodies of these murderesses were buried in unmarked graves

within the prison walls.

And Holloway's sinister reputation was forged.

In the early 1900s, Edwardian society outside the prison

was being challenged by an increasingly bitter battle

on the streets to win British women the right to vote.

The Suffragettes marches and demonstrations brought them into

direct conflict with the police, and hundreds were sent to Holloway.

They were treated as first class or political prisoners.

They could wear their own clothes, and unlike other inmates,

they didn't have to work or live in silence.

But when in 1909 one of the most famous of all the Suffragettes

was locked up in Holloway, she found these privileges had been removed.

Emily Wilding Davison was a typical Suffragette.

She was a middleclass girl.

she was a very, very educated woman,

and she was a woman who was

devoting herself not to home,

not to family, or finding a husband, but to votes for women.

On their release from Holloway, many Suffragettes had quickly

committed more crimes and were sent back.

In retaliation the government withdrew the status of

political prisoner.

So just before Emily Davison was imprisoned,

the Suffragettes were downgraded to second and even third-class inmates.

They had to wear degrading prison clothing, were made to work

and condemned to silence.

Outraged, the women found ways of fighting back.

They smashed windows, and started fires in their cells.

But for Emily and some others,

the ultimate protest in Holloway was to go on hunger strike.

They refused to take food, they refused to take any water,

and this was a big problem for the government,

because the last thing they wanted was to see a woman die in prison.