Former Inmates Share Experiences from Holloway Prison

Upon revisiting Holloway Prison, former inmate Gerrah Selby recounted her experience, stating, “I remember people screaming and banging on the doors, these maddening screams.” She added, “For ages I couldn’t go to sleep, through the noise and the being too scared to fall asleep, but I so wanted to sleep through my sentence.” Gerrah, who received a four-year sentence for offenses connected to animal rights activism, was among six former inmates who revisited the facility, once Europe’s largest women’s jail. They were accompanied by the creators of a new documentary titled Holloway, which recently premiered at the London Film Festival. During their visit to the now-demolished north London prison, which was crumbling at the time of their return, the women, aided by a trauma therapist, contemplated their incarceration and the circumstances preceding their arrests. Seated on dust-covered chairs against a backdrop of peeling walls, the women found their memories resurfacing vividly. Tamar Mujanay, first arrested at age 11 following a fight, later became involved with gangs and was imprisoned for two years when she was 18. She shared with BBC London, “I’d always heard about Holloway in the media and the history of it. But getting into that space, I didn’t know what to expect.” Mujanay described her feelings, saying, “I felt so small, it was like another dimension. It’s just rules, rules, rules; you feel powerless.” She added, “There’s no sense of nurture. It’s like ‘you’ve done a crime, you’re here to do the time’.” Tamar found the frequent return of women to the prison particularly concerning. She stated, “The amount of people I saw coming back was really ridiculous. There were drug addicts, those who had experienced domestic or sexual abuse; all these things that they were not getting help for. “When I spoke to them, there was an emotional disconnect and they were happy to be inside.” This led her to question, “What support are they not getting, that means that they happiest when they are back in this place?’.” Daisy-May Hudson, a co-director of the documentary, articulated their aspiration that the film would foster empathy for the women incarcerated at Holloway. Hudson commented, “It was to give their stories context; prison is perceived as this place that we just send people off to, but we know nothing about the lives of the people inside there.” Both the filmmakers and the former inmates aimed to explore the reasons women were initially sent to Holloway and to consider how justice could be improved in the future. Sophie Compton, another co-director, informed BBC London, “Everyone thought Holloway going to be there forever. It really shows that systems that we think will be there forever can crumble.” She elaborated, “We were going past the building quite a lot; we started to speak to women who had been in the prison and we realised how significant it was as a site for British women’s history and we felt that needed to be marked and honoured.” Compton also raised questions: “When a massive prison is bulldozed, that invites so many questions around what is going to be built in its place.” She asked, “Where are the women that were in prison in Holloway when it was bulldozed? Where did they go?” Tamar described her return to Holloway as “very personal.” She explained, “After I was released, I found there was never a place or a space that I could ever get that power back that was taken from me, and to heal.” She continued, “I was so caught up with practical things like getting back into society, I didn’t have time to recreate myself.” Mujanay noted the positive impact of the therapy session: “The [therapist] session really helped me a lot, sharing with the other women. I felt like it helped me to build my strength of character back.” She concluded, “Going back on my own free will, compared to all the rules I had to live by when I was last there, that was liberating for me.” Sophie Compton mentioned a term used by the system: “‘decanting’, to move prisoners.” She remarked, “So women were decanted and I think that’s so lacking in humanity, agency and empathy.” Compton further stated, “We always wanted this film to act as ‘I kind of had an invitation to rethink’, and an invitation to reimagine some of these systems.” She observed, “Now it’s finally coming out, there is a big public conversation happening around the women’s justice system.” Compton noted a shift in discourse: “Finally more people in power are saying things that we have been saying for so long, which is that our society is addicted to punishment and that punishment is the only way that the system interacts with people who have done something wrong.” She concluded, “That fails to put context and hence create the possibility for things to change, and for that reason we felt like it’s really important for us to engage with Holloway’s closure.” For more content, listeners can find the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X, and Instagram. 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