Imprisoned women

September 29, 1993
Issue 

Imprisoned women

Picking Oakum: women and criminality
SBS Television
October 7, 8.30 p.m. (8.00 Adelaide)
Reviewed by Ignatius Kim

This is an excellent documentary from Britain's Channel 4. It takes its name from the common form of British women's prison labour in the last century when women convicts sat isolated from each other in tiny cubicles plucking loose fibres from old rope.

Picking Oakum makes powerfully clear that while prison conditions may have changed since that era, the criminal justice system's treatment of women in Britain today remains as oppressive.

Women are three times as likely as men to be imprisoned for first offences. The majority of offences are theft-related or the non-payment of fines. In prison, any vocational training is restricted to traditional skills related to secretarial or domestic work.

Women are also more likely to be drugged or institutionalised in high security mental institutions to maintain control over them. While men in prisons outnumber women by 28 to 1, in high security mental institutions, the ratio is only 5 to 1.

The Chief Health Inspector found that prison medical services were using drugs that had been banned by the National Health Service.

Women of colour in particular are subject to further oppression. They suffer severe racism, and their numerical representation in prison is far higher than within the general population.

Picking Oakum was made by six women who have spent time in prison, combining interview and drama in a hard-hitting and, at times, sardonic way to indict the criminal injustice system's oppression of women.

The six have been politicised by their experiences and talk about a range of related issues, including the establishment media's treatment of women offenders as "evil ladies" and "wicked girls". As one of them comments wryly, "maybe our first crime was in being women".

This episode of Connections is not to be missed.

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