The one thing I always said while in prison was, “When I come out, I will make it my mission to change the perception of women in prison.” I’ve never faltered from that.

I’m 52 now, and since I was 20, I’ve had some really toxic relationships, and most of the men that I was involved with were mixed up in crime. I always expected that something would go wrong. In 2014, when I was sentenced for the crime that would send me to prison, for conspiracy to defraud, I was in a domestically abusive relationship. A lot of coercion was going on, and the authorities didn’t know much about it. I ended up with a sentence of just under eight years.

I’ve never seen so much despair as I did in prison. I’ve never seen such an absence of hope. There’s a huge element of bullying and self-harm that takes place in prison. In the four years I was there, there were four suicides. There didn’t seem to be much rehabilitation. Nobody was being encouraged to come off their drug usage. It would just switch to methadone or medicine form; once they were released, they weren’t over that addiction, and they would return to street drugs.

One of the worst things, which I’m still living through the damage of, was being separated from my children. I’ve got a 31-year-old who didn’t speak to me for 10 years after I was arrested. She felt completely let down by me: she’d just become a young mum herself and couldn’t understand how I hadn’t put my children first. We’ve been rebuilding our relationship in the last year, and we are now closer than ever. My then-16-year-old was really unsupported. She was put into her first taster flat, which is what they call it when you’re 16. She had no support. She couldn’t go to college like other people of her age because she couldn’t afford to. She was working in factories and walking home late at night. She told me she was worried that if she didn’t get home at night, there was no one there to raise an alert because she was going to her own home. She came to visit me and was so emotional. After two visits, I decided that she shouldn’t come any more because she was so heartbroken and was worried about me being in that environment. And you know, she’s never got over that; she’s struggled so badly with her mental health and gone through so much trauma. She struggles every day.

“I’ve never seen so much despair as I did in prison”: a former prisoner on why women’s jails should be abolished