'You don't feel like a human being anymore': Life inside women's prison HMP Eastwood Park

“Being locked up all day made you feel like you weren’t important. You don’t feel like a human being anymore. You’re a number on a piece of paper.”

In 2022, Annmarie Alders was sentenced to more than two years in prison for drug offences.

HMP Eastwood Park in South Gloucestershire was her first experience of custody, and something she says will stay with her forever.

The 47-year-old was put in prison after being found guilty of concern to supply drugs. She was sentenced to two years and four months and served 11 months inside.

Annmarie says she arrived at the institution, which holds more than 300 women inside, with addiction and mental health issues. Issues which she claims she was not given enough support for.

"There's a lot of sadness there," she told ITV News West Country.

'You're listening to people set fire to themselves'

The 47-year-old says for the "majority" of her sentence, she and her fellow inmates would be locked inside their cells for 23 and a half hours a day.

"It was really tough not being able to get out," she said. "It's only a small little cell and that was really hard and it played with your mental health.

"Not having anything constructive to do is hard. You're listening to people smashing up their cells or setting fire to themselves just to try and be heard and get attention.

"Being locked up all day made you feel like you weren’t important. You don’t feel like a human being anymore. You’re a number on a piece of paper. Not having anything to do," she added.

Annmarie was taking Mirtazapine, a drug for anxiety and depression, before going to prison. She says while she was there, she was never able to see a GP and was not given any of her medication - which resulted in her mental health deteriorating.

"I was speaking to a lot of the officers who were frustrated because they weren't given the skills or knowledge to deal with people going through drug psychosis or mental health issues or with learning disabilities," she said.

The Ministry of Justice says it has improved prison officer awareness on issues like suicide, self-harm and the needs of female offenders and provided training to 25,000 officers to help them support women in prison.

Since April 2021, the government says it's also rolled out a bespoke programme of support for female offenders, providing them with a key worker or a prison officer to identify concerns early and offer them support.

But Annmarie's experience comes as the number of self-harm incidents in women's prisons has reached the highest level since records began.

According to the latest safety in custody statistics for England and Wales, there were 59,722 self-harm incidents in the 12-month period ending in March – an 11% increase from the previous year.

And according to the latest custody figures, HMP Eastwood Park has the highest rate of self-harm in England and Wales.

The HM Inspectorate of Prisons said it found the rate of self-harm at Eastwood Park prison was the highest of all women's jails during a recent visit to the site.

The report found the rate of self-harm at the prison had risen by 128% since 2019.

It also raised "significant concerns" about the use of physical force to manage women who were self-harming or threatening to self-harm.

The government says HMP Eastwood Park has now set up a dedicated Safety Taskforce Group to improve the outcomes for women in the prison’s care.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We take the safety of women in custody incredibly seriously with up to £14million extra investment and the most recent report by inspectors notes incidents of self-harm at HMP Eastwood Park are coming down.”

Annmarie took on the role of a prison 'listener' for six months of her time in custody. She says the mentoring scheme, which is led by the local Samaritans branch, triggered her own mental health issues.

"I would get called out to people who were thinking about ending their own life or had self-harmed or were in distress," she said. "I had nobody to offload to."

She said she eventually gave up the role due to feeling "unsupported".

"I was getting calls out 13 times in 24 hours for 13 people who wanted to end their lives - there was so much sadness," she said.

"I am an empathetic and compassionate person and I would then find myself struggling with my own mental health.

"I'd go back to my cell and I was in a cell with somebody else and couldn’t disclose it because of confidentiality, so you would sit on information for a whole week," she said.

In response to Annmarie's claims about her experience as a listener, the head of service programmes at Samaritans Ben Phillips said the Listener scheme has been providing "vital" emotional support at the prison for more than 20 years.

"Despite the challenges faced during the recent Covid pandemic, we have doubled the number of trained Listener volunteers available at the prison, with weekly debriefings scheduled to support the volunteers’ own needs," he said.

"We have no record of a Listener raising any issues with us regarding the scheme at HMP Eastwood Park," he added.

The government says it invested £625,000 a year in funding for Samaritans to provide Listeners support for prisoners.

Reflecting on her experience in prison, Annmarie says Eastwood Park also became a place where she decided she wanted to use her own experience to help others.

She hopes one day to be able to go back into prison and support people going through something similar to her.

"I actually am working towards going back to work in prison," she told ITV News.

"Being part of it gave me a huge insight into all the problems there and the issues with the prison system itself," she added.

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