Janey Starling talks to Harriet Wistrich

Award-winning campaigner Janey Starling discusses her first book, which argues for a radical rethink of how and why we punish women. 

In 2007, Baroness Jean Corston released a damning report on women’s prisons in the UK. Written in the wake of the self-inflicted deaths of six women, it was a portrait of a system in disarray and advocated for ‘radical change’. Twenty years on, Starling argues that very little has changed.

Most of the women in our prisons are survivors of domestic abuse, many are in the grip of addictions, serving repeat short sentences rather than being admitted for rehabilitative care, and countless more are mothers forcibly separated from their children. Starling’s humane work of investigative journalism takes us to meet these women, and argues that their incarceration is ethically and economically indefensible in today’s society.

Here she talks to feminist lawyer Harriet Wistrich, author of Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System designed by Men and founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice.

Janey Starling is an award-winning activist and writer. She is a co-director of Level Up, a feminist campaign group which has secured changes to sentencing policy for pregnant women, and a founding member of Sisters Uncut. She has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, Vogue, Grazia and Women’s Health, among other publications, and has appeared on the BBC, Channel 4, Sky News, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and LBC. This is her first book.