Rebel Justice

95: The Hidden Sentence for Mothers – with Not Beyond Redemption’s Founder Camilla Baldwin & Solicitor Eben Vaughan-Philipps

• Rebel Justice - The View Magazine • Episode 95

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Imagine serving three months for a non‑violent offence and imagine being released with no priority for housing, and a wall between you and your child. That’s the hidden sentence thousands of mothers face, and it’s where Not Beyond Redemption steps in with free legal advice and representation to keep families together.

We sit with founder and solicitor Camilla Baldwin and solicitor Eben Vaughan-Philipps to unpack how the charity grew from a single clinic to a nationwide network in all 12 women’s prisons. They explain why contact often collapses after short sentences, how special guardianship orders and court delays can lock mothers out, and what it takes to rebuild family life: trauma‑informed support, consistent legal teams, and step‑by‑step contact plans that start with calls and can lead to overnights. A powerful case study shows what perseverance looks like when the stakes are a child’s sense of home.

We also challenge the economics and ethics of custody. With most women imprisoned for non‑violent offences at around £65,000 a year, electronic tagging and community sentences offer a smarter path, protecting children’s routines while cutting reoffending. Camilla and Evan share front‑line realities from pin‑phone barriers to prejudiced assumptions, while making the health case for connection: sustained contact improves mental wellbeing and even life expectancy for mothers and children. Along the way, you’ll hear how pro bono law firms and barristers, trauma awareness, and judicial engagement are reshaping a system that has too often treated imprisoned mothers as beyond hope.

https://notbeyondredemption.co.uk/

https://www.justgiving.com/charity/notbeyond-redemption

info@notbeyondredemption.co.uk


Credits

Guest: Camilla Baldwin & Eben Vaughan-Philipps

Producers: Charlotte Janes & Nico Rivosecchi

Soundtrack: Particles (Revo Main Version) by [Coma-Media] 

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Host:

You're listening to Rebel Justice, the podcast from The View magazine. When we think about justice, we think about it as an abstract, something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But justice and the law regulate every aspect of our interactions with each other, with organizations, and with the government. We never think about it until it impacts our lives or those of someone closed. Our guests are women with lived experience of the justice system, whether as victims or women who have committed crimes, people at the forefront of civic action, who put their lives on the line to demand a better world. We ask them to share their insight into how we might repair a broken and harmful system with humanity and dignity. We also speak with people who are in the heart of the justice system, creating important change. Judges, barristers, human rights campaigners, mental health advocates, artists and healers. Today's episode features a conversation with CEO Camilla Baldwin and paralegal Eben Phillips from Not Beyond Redemption. Not Beyond Redemption provides free family law advice and representation to mothers in prison, helping them reconnect with their children and navigate complex legal systems that often overlook their rights. In this episode, we talk about their powerful work, the unique challenges that mothers face behind bars, and the lasting impact of separating women from their children. We also explore what needs to change within the justice system from sentencing and social care to alternative approaches like tagging that could allow more mothers to remain a part of their children's lives. Thank you for being with us today. Could you both introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your roles at Not Beyond Redemption?

Camilla Baldwin:

I'm Camilla Baldwin and I'm a solicitor and I've had my own practice in London in Mayfair for about 30 years. Before that, I was an immigration judge, and before that, I worked for Withers and Kingsley Napoli. So I've done family law since I qualified in 1992. And I set up the charity, so I'm the founder of the charity and I'm a trustee and I sort of helped run the charity.

Eben Vaughan-Philipps:

And then my name's Eben Vaughan Phillips, and I'm currently a paralegal at Not Beyond Redemption. I've been here for about two and a half years, and I recently passed on my solicitor's exam, so I'm almost a qualified solicitor just to wait for the admin side of it. Um but yeah, no, it's been a really wonderful journey so far.

Host:

Amazing, congratulations. So for listeners who might not know, what does the charity do in practice and why was it set up?

Camilla:

So Not Beyond Redemption is a charity that acts for women in prison who can't have contact with their children. And I set it up legally about five years ago. So the charity was actually established in 2000, but I started working in women's prisons in 2017. So I'm a solicitor, as I said, and I have my own practice, which is 20 years old now this year, and I act mainly for quite rich people who are fighting over millions and millions of pounds. And it sounds awful, but it really doesn't make any difference whether someone has 20 million less or more in the context of the wealth of the people I act for. So they tend to litigate through their lawyers as a kind of way that normal people would argue with each other. And I had breast cancer in 2017, and then I had an ovarian cancer scare, and then I got this horrible thing called Bell's palsy, where half my face was paralyzed for a few days, which was very scary. And although um I'm very lucky, you can't really tell, it really made me lose confidence in my ability to stay alive. And I thought, well, if I'm gonna die tomorrow, I haven't really left much behind or done anything really good. And I have four wonderful children who I'm incredibly proud of, and I brought them up and done the best I can with them. But I felt that I hadn't left a grain in the sand, I hadn't really given anything back. And I was talking to a great friend of mine who actually ran a foundation and did a lot in charitable work, having been in the government, and he said, Do something you know about. I know about family law and I know about unhappy relationships and people having problems seeing their kids. In fact, when I was newly qualified, I worked in a legal aid practice in Salisbury. So I thought, well, what do I know about? And what I really know about is children and children disputes. And my daughter-in-law's father, a man called Huey Monroe, was an inspector of prisons in Scotland, and he said, I think you could do really a lot to help women in prison. I'd never even thought about women in prison, and I just knew I wanted to give something back, and I wanted to use my expertise as a family lawyer to help people. So I eventually, through Huey, was set up to go to HMP Send, which is a women's prison near Woke. And the idea was I would teach the prefects in the prison, who are called peers, about inducting new inmates. So the peers in the prisons will look after the new inmates and kind of settle them in and make sure they're okay. Generally at HMP Cent, there are a lot of people in for long sentences, often murder or whatever. And so there are a lot of what we call lifers. There are a lot of people in there for many years, so they're very settled in a way. And HMP Centre is a pretty amazing prison where there's masses of therapy, you can get education and training and this and that, and it's a pretty enlightened place. The idea was I'd teach the peers in the prisons about family law and their rights uh as a mother and things like that. The idea was I'd go once a month. So the first time I went, I sort of generally talked to about 20 women about mothers in prison and your rights as a mother. And I went a month later, so the idea would be I'd do a monthly clinic, and then there were all these women waiting to talk to. And it turned out that none of them were seeing their children. And then when I went a month later, there were people transferring from other prisons to come to HMP Centre so they could see me. And so I discovered that from about 14 years ago, the legal aid cuts meant that you couldn't get legal aid to see your children. So all these mothers were in prison unable to see their children and with absolutely no wherewithal as to how to go about trying to see their children. So if you go into prison for a short sentence like shoplifting, this happens quite commonly, the magistrates get annoyed with you for shoplifting for the 15th time. They don't think you're shoplifting to actually feed your children. So they think it's a great idea to give you a six-month sentence for shoplifting. You only do three months of that. But the consequence of that is you lose your council flat because you make yourself what is known as voluntarily homeless. So you lose your council flat. I don't know where all your stuff goes, but it disappears. Your children either get taken into care or they go and live with the relative. And so what happens when you get out after three months? I don't know why it is in England you only do kind of half a sentence, but that seems to be the way it is. You come out after literally three months, you have nowhere to live, and you're not priority housing because you don't have your children living with you. So you can't get your housing back. So therefore you can't get your children back, and then you end up sofa surfing because it it's very badly organized in this country, and it depends which county you live in as to whether you're able to get any kind of housing. And then a lot of them lose hope, start taking drugs again, and go down this downward spiral, and their kids get really massively affected. And even if you work really hard to try and get council accommodation, then you've got to try and get the children back. And there's another problem, which is a lot of the if the children go and live with grandparents or often they'll go and live with a relative, social services will recommend that that relative applies for something called a special guardianship order, which gives dominant rights in relation to your child. So if you're a mother, you always have parental responsibility for your child, which means you can make decisions about schools and medical life, etc. But if you and a say the father of your children's mother is looking after the children, say, which happens sometimes, and she doesn't really like you because she thinks you're a bad person. She also thinks her son's a bad person, by the way, but there's a lot of judging going on around maternal imprisonment everywhere, and she decides she doesn't really want you to see your children, and certainly she doesn't want you to get them back, she can kind of block you because having special guardianship gives you enhanced rights. So that's another big problem. Anyway, so what happened after that was there's also the sort of geographical thing. I was acting for someone initially who was at HMP CEN, she'd been in for a long time, she had two sets of children. Her eldest, we managed to get out of care because she did manage to get council accommodation, um, and she was down in Devon and Cornwall. But the other children, A, it was impossible to get them up to Surrey to see her because it's too far away, and the social workers weren't prepared to bring her, and neither were the relatives. And secondly, the father's family, even though he was a drug addict, where the kids live with him, but this other set of children, were really hostile to her and wouldn't enable contact. So there are all sorts of issues surrounding this quite complicated process. So I realised that all these women couldn't get access to having any sort of contact with their children. So thereafter, I set up a clinic once a month. Then I realised, and I started doing it within my own law firm. Well, including everybody, including the admin people in my practice, there are only ten of us. And it soon became clear there were literally hundreds of cases, there were hundreds of people that needed help. So I decided to set up a charity. First of all, I tried to go through other charities like the Prison Reform Trust and various other people, but they were like, we don't really do that. So I asked various charities like St. Jars, will you help me? And can I raise money for this legal clinic? And they said, Well, we're sort of focusing more on knife crime, so different charities have different focuses, obviously. So in the end, I set up my own charity, which is a real pain to do, and it takes ages, but I did it, and that was established in November 2020, and then of course we had lockdown in and around that time, but actually that gave us time to kind of get our act together. And then I was very, very lucky through a contact I had a guy called Matt Franklin, who's a partner at Sidley Austin, which is a city law firm. I said I was looking for solicitors to volunteer to help look after the women, and he said that his firm might be interested in helping. And I went and did a pitch to him, and then they were our first law firm that we work with, and now we have about 250 volunteer solicitors who help us run the clinics in the different prisons all over the country, and we also have about 150 volunteer barristers who specialise in family law, so the outreach we have is much, much bigger than the six lawyers we employ for the charity. So the charity I called it Not Beyond Redemption because I was writing a position statement for court for a woman who wanted to have contact with her children, and I said this woman is not beyond redemption just because she's been in prison, and I thought it was quite a good name. Although somebody I spoke to thought it was a terrible name. She said, Oh, it sounds like a really religious sect type charity. And I'm like, Oh, okay. Anyway, it's sort of stuck.

Host:

Um, so what would a typical case look like for you going from the journey from a mother first contacting to re-establishing ties with her children?

Camilla:

So Eben's gonna answer this. Eben is one of the lawyers. You say you are paralegal, but you are nearly qualified, you are a trainee and so nearly qualified. So Eben's brilliant and got a first from Durham, I think. And she has been with us for about two and a half, three years. And so Eben supervises the clinics in the women's prisons, and then she oversees what the volunteer solicitors do, and we train them all. We do DBS checks and they do trauma-informed training like all of us.

Eben:

So the way that we are set up is that we only have on our core legal team, we've got four solicitors based in London, and then we've got two in the north as well, and we partner with different law firms, and they staff each of the clinics that we run. And this year we reached our goal of running legal clinics in all 12 of the women's prisons because obviously there's only 12 in the UK, so now we're in all of them. And the way that it works is that we have what we call buddy groups, so it will be usually about two of the volunteer solicitors, and then one of us will go along to supervise. And the way that we get our referrals is through an organization called PACT, and they're called um the Prison Advice and Care Trust, and it's kind of a makeup of support workers and social workers who are in most of the prisons, and they're a really amazing organization for us, and also for the women, and it means that you know we get that's how we get the clients and they support them. So, even for um the prisons that don't have PACT, so for the private prisons, they also have social workers and support workers, but it means that there's another line of professionals who can provide the women with that advice because obviously there are so many women in prison who are experiencing issues to do with contact with their children, so it's really helpful to have you know an in-house social worker to be able to explain that process with them, and then there might be some women who are going through more public family law, so care proceedings and foster care.

Camilla:

And they get legal aid for that, so we don't we don't look after them because they can have representative.

Eben:

Yeah, exactly. And it just means that there's an extra person to kind of go through the paperwork with them so that they understand what's going on. So it's at the initial clinic that we'll meet with the women and we will have a conversation about how we might be able to help them kind of going forwards. And I think to answer your question about what a typical case is is quite difficult.

Camilla:

So we would be referred by PACT, a social worker at PACT who say works in Bronzefield or somewhere, and they give us a list of people we're going to see when we go in with the clinics. This woman, she's got three children and she's not having any contact with one of them, and this is the problem with them. And can you help? And we've tried the women will often have work with PACT to sort of write to the father or parental grandparents or whatever, or they're in care or whatever, and got nowhere, so they come to us because we go to court and no other charity does that, so we'll represent them in court for free.

Eben:

Our assistance can kind of range from getting involved from a negotiation point of view, so you might be just writing letters to the other carer of the child and seeing if we can come to an agreement that way, or as Camilla said, it might need to escalate to court proceedings, and then we'll obviously help the women through those. So I've got one case example of um a client who was one of my colleagues, and she met her at HP Style, and we'll call this lady Joanne. So Joanne was met in June of 2023, and she was sentenced to eight months for serious driving offences, and she hadn't had any contact with her son for two months since entering prison, so since that April 2023. And before she came into prison, Joanne was actually the primary caregiver of her son, and that's usually the setup for most of the women that we meet. And her son had only gone to live with the dad shortly after Joanne went to prison because she explained that she'd had a downward spiral with her mental health following a bad relationship. And again, these are very common themes that come up kind of time and time again with our cases. It's always quite difficult to predict what will happen next, but there's usually a background of you know adverse life experiences that have obviously you know led them to this point. And when we met with Joanne, the father wasn't letting her have any kind of contact at all, and he then actually applied to the family court to get the son to live with him. So we represented Joanne at every hearing, and then we also had the really generous assistance of pro bono barristers who could actually be there at every hearing to advocate for Joanne as well. And throughout that process, you know, contact slowly builds up. It starts with FaceTime calls, and then you build up to supervised contact in a contact centre, and then it gets to supervised contact in the community.

Camilla:

Which is pretty ridiculous given that she was had this child living with her full time before she went into prison. Often you get these really weird anomalies where you've got a mum looking after children full-time, they go to prison, and then often the father or the parent grandparents sort of run amok really and kind of take advantage, even though they're in for such short sentences, and then it takes years to get it back to any kind of equality or normality.

Eben:

There's a whole other issue with contact centres as well, they are outrageously expensive, so it can cost about £80 to £100 for maybe an hour.

Camilla:

A lot of people can't afford that, they're on benefits.

Eben:

Exactly. It's it is incredibly expensive, but you know, for Joanne's case, she really persevered through everything. And the final order that she got was for completely unsupervised contact, and it's overnight, so she can have sleepovers with her son, and she now shares the holidays, so the school holidays equally with dad as well. And I think the key message for us is really that Joanne was very aware that it would be a gradual process and that contact had to take place obviously at her son's pace, and she was just very committed and very patient and dedicated through the whole course of the proceedings, and that hard work is obviously then reflected in the final order. But these proceedings are very, very emotionally draining, they can run, you know, a year and a half, two years plus. Every single hearing is very difficult for them. And especially, you know, so many women that we meet, there have been circumstances where there might have been, you know, domestic abuse perpetrated by the dad, and then you're faced with the situation of maybe having to see them in court, and it just brings up so much, so many difficult emotions. It's incredibly, you know, it's not an easy process at all. So it's obviously we're there to support them as much as possible and to advocate for them, but there's also so much that they have to do to kind of be resilient through it all.

Camilla:

They do really well, they do. I mean, yeah, also all these women have never had anybody constant in their lives. I think sort of over half of women in prison have been abused as children, seven out of ten have reported domestic abuse. You know, their probation officers change, nobody's reliable. And what we do is very unusual for a charity because we act for women in prison and when they're out of prison. So we sort of help them in both places. So the prisons love us because there's no sort of, oh, we've left prison now, so you've got another completely different set of people. Also, the uh volunteer lawyers are very committed people and they treat the cases like they would in their own law firm, which means that they have constant people, so they have their little team in that law firm, and generally the barristers are amazing and will keep on to hold of the cases so that they have this little pod of people that are actually reliable and they can get hold of them very easily. Um certainly when they leave prison a lot more easily than when you're in prison, but it has a huge effect on their confidence in having trusted relationships and stuff like that. So, in terms of the stats, about 4% of the prison population, which is about 87,000 people in July 2025, are women. That's about three and a half thousand women, of which 66% are mothers of dependent children, but it's thought to affect about 17,500 children, so it has a much wider reach, obviously. Nearly 60% of the sentences are for six months or less, so it's incredibly disruptive for a very short period of time, but then it has massive adverse effects, five, ten, possibly the rest of your life. And what's mad about it is 72% of women in prison, this is a figure from 2020, for non-violent crimes. So nearly three-quarters of the women in prison are in prison for non-violent crimes, so which costs a lot of money, it costs about £65,000 to have a woman in prison. And if you tag them, which costs four, you could make sure they pick their children up from school, they looked after them overnight, and they dropped them back and they had to stay in, for example, and all sorts of things. It'll be so much better for these children. Also, uh the children, so if you're if you've got a parent who's been in prison, you're very likely to end up in prison yourself by the time you're about 18. So you have within the prison population, you have quite a lot of young women who are between sort of 18 and 21 who are not quite young enough to be in the youth offenders' institutes, but they are not what I would call adults, and a lot of them have children at that age. And this whole what we're trying to do is stop the cycle, if you like. So if we can help these mums have contact with their children, even if when they the mums reach out to their children off when they're teenagers and they're angry with them, they don't want to have contact with them. They know their mum was fighting to have contact with them, and I think it has a huge effect on everybody's mental health. I mean, I had no idea that if you're a woman in prison, your life expectancy is so much shorter than everybody else's, has huge effect on their mental health. Uh, you know, this has such a positive outcome.

Eben:

And it's always difficult, you know, when you're in a charity organization to measure your success, but I think we do quite well at doing that. So we send out these questionnaires kind of pre and post-engagement with us, and they always come back, you know, with wonderful responses. And a lot of the questions are centred on, you know, how hopeful they feel for the future and whether or not you know their feelings of self-worth have improved. And we always get really wonderful quotes from our clients after we've engaged with them as well, which is just so heartwarming, and I think that's the moment where it really kind of you see why you're doing the work and you really see the impact that it's made on someone.

Camilla:

Like there was a woman who hadn't had contact with her daughter for years and years and years, and we managed to get sort of what's called letterbox contact. So, in some contexts, it's absolutely not appropriate for them to have direct contact with their children for whatever, you know, maybe they've committed a violent crime or they've got mental health issues or whatever. And this woman got this card with a love heart on it from her daughter saying, Mummy, I love you, or something. It was just heartbreaking, wasn't it?

Eben:

And it's you know, every story is so individual as well. So it's not necessarily that the outcome is them seeing their child every day. There might have been a very long period where that hasn't happened. And for some mums, just being involved in their child's life and being able to get school reports and updates about what's happening with them, just to know that they're out there somewhere and that they're happy is you know, that's all that they need.

Camilla:

And I think they accept, you know, the realities of life, like the client I acted for before the charity was set up, and then initially when the charity was set up, she had, as I said, two children that live with the the father was a drug addict and who's actually died, and live with the grandparents who didn't want to have any contact with the children. Judge deemed it better for the children just to not have contact with their mother. She'd been in prison for 10 years, that's a long time. And they couldn't, you know, really remember her. They'd gone, she'd gone into prison when they're like two and three or whatever, and they were sort of in their early teens. And that's incredibly sad for her, but she did accept that. Whereas her other daughter who'd been in care, who was 15, she managed by some miracle to be housed. But they said you can't have your daughter living back with you, age 15, unless you furnish it. So, in fact, in that instance, I went to everybody I knew and asked if they had anything at all. We managed to pull together a car load of stuff for her, and then she was able to have her daughter back, and that had its difficulties. You know, the daughter had been in care for years, she kept on disappearing on the mother, the mother had been in prison for a long time and then was quite institutionalized. And you know, it's difficult, but I think it makes such a huge difference to people's lives, doesn't it? Sometimes we have amazing results where we acted for actually a prison officer who ended up in prison for a very short period of time, and then she was in prison for a short period of time. She had the children living with her, and then the father took the children. It turned out the father had a bit of a drug sten, and then we managed to get the children back eventually, but it took months because the courts have huge delays, they get counselled hearings, and that's a huge problem. But ultimately, that was a fantastic result where she ended up with her children back living with her, they had contact with their dad, but in an appropriate way, and it was all great. But it's just as big an impact sometimes just to have letterbox contact, you know, that's huge for these people, and a huge so it's not kind of measured by how much direct contact we achieve, it's measured by how they feel about their lives and what we've achieved for them in the context of their often very troubled lives where they had a very abused childhood and stuff like that.

Host:

What kind of difference does maintaining the bond between a mother and her child or children have, not only for the mothers but for the children? Can there be an impact on reoffending rates? Obviously, mental health?

Camilla:

Yeah, well, both mother and children will live for longer if they have relationships with each other. It's like a primal bond that we have. And mentally, both the mother and the children do much better when the children become mothers themselves, if they are having a relationship with their family. As children, you have a relationship with your parents, you do much better in life. I mean, I didn't realise that it has such a physical impact on people's health that you know, a lot of the women who've been in prison die much, much, much earlier than the general population. So, what I was trying to do is kind of break the cycle of you know, you go to prison, then it's very likely your child will go to prison. Um, because they'll have been in care generally, and then they'll end up, you know, being picked up by the county lions gangs, and then they'll end up in prison by the time they're 16. So I think it just has massive mental health and physical health outcomes. You live longer, you're happier, everyone's you know, more I mean, it's the whole attachment theory is that you know, you've just everybody is attached to their families.

Host:

Yeah, that makes complete sense. We heard how the charity was founded. Eben, what motivated you to become involved in this work and how does it feel different from other kinds of legal practice that you essentially could have gone towards?

Eben:

That's a good question. I would say that my motivation stems from a feeling that I've had from quite early on. So I knew that I wanted to help others and to make a positive difference in people's lives, but I didn't necessarily know what that would look like career-wise or what path I was going to take. So I ended up deciding to study my undergrad degree in criminology, and that was mostly just because I didn't really find anything else interesting at the time. Um, but I was always very intrigued about the circumstances that lead individuals to become involved in the criminal justice system, and I was very aware of you know how complex and personal each person's journey into prison is. And then during my studies, I took part in this prison exchange programme in HP Franklin, which is the category men's prison up in Durham, and as part of the program, the university students go inside the prison and you learn alongside the inside students, so those being individuals in the prison, and you kind of get together and you debate different topics in the criminal justice system, and it's all it's really, really informative. And I remember going into the first session, thinking of myself as the most open-minded person in the whole world, completely free from bias at all. Um and after the session ended, we were talking to the tutor, and she was obviously asking us, you know, how we found it, and I remember saying something along the lines of how surprised I was that it just felt so normal, and I felt like I was just having a chat with someone I met at a bus stop. And I kind of came away from that realizing that part of me must have expected it to not feel normal, and just because you know, I'm going into a prison, I'm speaking with people in prison, it must in some way feel strange. And I think you know, that that day I really realised, you know, there's a people that are the same as you or me. Why on earth would it feel any different?

Camilla:

Because you expect it to feel different the same.

Eben:

Yeah, yeah.

Camilla:

It sort of felt a bit like when I went into my first clinic, I was quite frightened you have to hand your ID and you have to hand your mobile phone and your iPad in, you hand everything, and that you kind of your keys, everything, and a certain protocol about going into prison, and then you feel quite vulnerable, you go through all these gates, you've got no idea on you. It's stressful, and then mentally in your head, you expect them to be different, and they're not. They're lovely people who've just got themselves in a total mess, and they're really aware of that, they're doing time for it.

Eben:

And then I went on afterwards to study law, and again wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, but I knew it was probably something to do with family law, human rights law, and then whilst I was still studying, I saw this job advertised, and it just felt like everything aligned, and you know, when you feel that you're in kind of the right place at the right time and it just made sense. And my motivation now, since I've been doing this work, I really enjoy, you know, being able to empower our clients to find their voice and for them to really be able to participate in the family justice system in a way that they wouldn't be able to otherwise. And I've seen, you know, how the small interventions, parents being able to receive child school reports or just really understanding their parental rights can really give them that sense of power and hope for the future. Um, and I think that mothers in prison they really face very harsh judgment and are punished. Often beyond their sentence, because the separation from their children is really adding an extra layer of trauma into their lives, which isn't really fully acknowledged. And I know that I speak for the whole team and I say that it's so important for us to cultivate a space where our clients feel that they can be open and honest with us and that they can trust us, and it's about reminding them that they are still seen as mothers and as people, and that's kind of at the heart of the work that you know why I do it.

Camilla:

I remember being in court with a lady who was literally leaving prison three days later. And when you go to a county court, you get shackled, it's completely ridiculous. Okay. So she's coming out of prison three days later, she's in prison for fraud or something, it's not a violent sentence. And the uh court officers who were in charge of the generally sort of criminal population, but because it was a family law case but had come from prison, they wouldn't unshackle her in the hearing. And I'm like, this is completely barbaric, and they were so prejudiced against her, and you come across a lot of prejudice against women in prison, more I'd say, than men, that people are very shocked that women are in prison or they have a criminal sentence and they think if you're a mum in prison, you're a bad mother, when actually you're probably stealing in the first place to feed your children. And I really have been really, really shocked how some of the judiciary are really, really prejudiced against them and make total assumptions. And people on the street, I mean, I remember saying to a friend of mine, I'm going to set up this charity to, you know, to continue the work I'm doing helping mums in prison. She said, Oh, I don't know why you're doing that. It's a self-fulfilling population. Meaning it's kind of their fault and it goes around and round in a circle and you can't change anything. And I thought, what isn't this like one of my close friends? Just crazy. You know, and I've been really horrified at how prejudiced a lot of people are, aren't they? Sometimes with the CAFAS officers there, the social workers who do reports for the family law courts, they can be really prejudiced against the women. Often you find social services are. They just expect them to, you know, if they're mothers in prison, they're bad mothers and they're bad people.

Eben:

And it's so difficult, you know, when you have professionals who have stereotypes and biases like that, and especially when it comes to you know the children's social workers who are tasked with making recommendations about contact, and if they've gone into the situation already having these feelings about, well, the mum's in prison, so she shouldn't be having contact with her children, then that's such a hoodle to get over in the first place. It's you know, they're supposed to be independent and neutral, and unfortunately, there is still an issue with that.

Host:

Thank you. Obviously, you've mentioned misconceptions about women, particularly mothers in prison. What are some of the systemic challenges that you face when trying to work with women in prisons or in the courts and social services?

Camilla:

Well, there are huge delays in the family courts, massive delays. Hearings get cancelled, you know, it can take two, three years to get through the courts. This uh, this woman who'd been in prison for a short period of time, who'd had her kids living with her before she went in. We couldn't get an emergency hearing, an emergency hearing for about five months. We're talking, so we're very lucky that the patron of the charity is Sir Andrew McFarlane, who's the most senior family law judge, and we're incredibly lucky to have his support, but also the fact that he listens to us. So there's talk about us training the judiciary, which includes all of the judiciary down to the magistrates, and people that often have the power to make these very short sentences, because we're not sure that the people who make those very short sentences realise what a terrible impact it has. So it's it's delay, it's the prejudice, it's getting hold of courts, isn't it?

Eben:

Yeah.

Camilla:

Pushing things through.

Eben:

We often say that the prison is like a client in of themselves, because just yeah, trying to speak to your client in the first place isn't always straightforward. It can be really difficult to just you know have a video link booking. Sometimes it's weeks until you can actually speak with them. That's really not ideal if you've got court directions and deadlines coming up, and there's certainly for some judges and some courts, there's a lack of appreciation of how difficult it is. Yeah, and then the one of the ways that our clients can contact us is that they have pin phones, which means that they can put numbers on their phone and they get approved. Um, but sometimes for whatever reason there seems to be like a massive delay with even just being able to put them on the pin phone, or it just never happens. So it's just really tricky trying to communicate with each other, which is why PACT and the social workers in the prison are amazing.

Camilla:

They can go and see whoever it is and say, right, they need your lawyers need to speak to you, and they'll get them in their room and run a video clinic or something so we can get hold of them easily and they can deliver documents and stuff like that. So in the prisons where there aren't the PACT charity, which is Peterborough and is it Bronsfield, um, then it's much more difficult. They do have family liaison offices, but in some of the prisons we have to send stuff through the mail, and that's your legally privileged letter in an envelope and then put them in another envelope and say this is section something or other. But that's also the way that most of the drugs that aren't dropped off by drones get into prisons. So if the man or woman with the sniffer dog is off on holiday for two weeks, nothing happens to those letters, they'll just go in a big pile until the sniffer dog's been through them, and then they'll just be chucked in your room. And if you're sharing a room with someone else, then often it will be opened, the external envelope, anyway, won't it? And then someone else might have read your stuff, and so it's quite difficult to keep it private as well. And in some prisons, getting security clearance for our volunteer lawyers is very difficult. So the prisons are really difficult, the courts are really difficult. I mean, everyone's trying really hard to help, the governors of the prisons are amazing, the social workers through this charity called PACT are amazing, there are various other organizations we work with. If we possibly can, we work with everybody, you know, women in prison are amazing, the prisons reform trust are amazing. There's a theatre company called Clean Break who are incredible because we're trying to a lot of women get remanded in prison, which means before they have their trial, they're put in prison, and often there's because there's allegations of domestic violence, but there you don't get any officer looking after you like you do once you've been convicted. You don't have any kind of structure like education, and you know, you're in prison for this length of time, we're going to look after you. What do you do you need therapy? What are you going to do educationally? How are we going to look after you? There's none of that. So it means that the self-harm and suicide rates are much, much higher amongst the remand population of women than they are in the convicted, because you know once you've been convicted, how long you've got sort of thing. Anyway, so we're working with a bunch of charities around that. It's just there isn't enough money in the court system and women in prison at the bottom of the food chain, aren't they, in terms of how they're treated, I suppose.

Host:

You've mentioned before how many of these women have very short sentences. Do you feel that prisons are at place for them, or would you perhaps suggest another option in a dream scenario?

Camilla:

Yeah, so I think prisons prisons were built for men, they didn't work for men either, but they were built for men. And the only people I've ever known thrive in prisons are people I've known who've been to boarding school because it's sort of a similar thing. You're locked up for three weeks at a time, and you know, people who I know who've been privately educated, who've ended up going to prison for fraud, have done brilliantly because they're so used to it, terrible food, and you're locked up. Women really don't respond very well. It's like going to the moon, they're cut off from their children, from their families, from their communities, from their friends, where they lived all their lives. And it feels like you're on the moon. It feels like a completely alternative paradigm universe. And it would be so easy, particularly as 75% of the women in prison are in for non-violent crimes. I mean, I'm absolutely fair enough if someone's murdered someone, for our own public protection and for the feeling of security, the general public would want those people to be in a secure environment where they can't endanger anyone else. I totally get that. But with non-violent crimes, you could easily just tag them, which would cost a fraction of the cost, and get them doing community service or get them living in halfway houses. I know one small thing, which is the charity we work with a lot, and they do our all the trauma awareness training for our volunteers. So everybody who's involved in the charity does trauma awareness training. They have set up something called Hope Street, which is a kind of halfway house where women can go after they come out of prison with their children. That sort of works, but it's miles away from where most women live, and women want to be back in their own communities. But that kind of thing, a sort of halfway house, if there are enough of them, would be a really good place. So you could be with your children or at least live at home but check in. But the real problem is domestic violence. There's so much of it, it's completely rife. And I that is the numb of it all, and I don't know how you can change that because so many of these women's been at the hands of abusive relationships from their parents, generally the fathers, um, all male members of the family, and there's this awful cycle that I literally just don't know how you get to the answer of. I mean, we've been involved recently, haven't we? With a guy called Freddie Beard, who's running a charity um to do with healthy masculinity. And he was talking to us the other day, and we're thinking of trying to work with him about that, but really you need to start at kindergarten age so you can unlearn that the way to behave is to hit someone when you get frustrated. I mean, and that's so difficult because I just don't see how without a massive, sort of total different way of thinking. But it is possible for us to all have a seismic shift and change our society in a way that's more acceptable.

Host:

You've been able to reach every women's prison in England. What has been key to that growth?

Camilla:

I think we've been incredibly lucky with the wonderful people like Eben who worked for the charity. Yeah, I think it's just been one of those things, like you said, the stars were aligning you, starting to work for the charity. And I remember when I first met you, this incredible girl, and I've just been so lucky, like through Matt Chankland at Sidley's, they then introduced us to all these other law firms in London who did pro bono work, and there was like this pro bono affair that was like speed dating, where every charity got like a four-minute slot to say what we did. But as a result of that, we we now have 10 law firms who are on board helping us all over the country, like the family law barristers, they literally give up their term for free, and that's just incredible of them to do that. And then we have an amazing trustee who fundraises for us called Olivia Warram, and she has raised all this money. The law firms all give us some money to help fund the supervising of the cases that they oversee. And then we have money from private trusts and foundations, etc. Because if we couldn't pay for the lawyers and we have only one Abin person and a bit of rent, we wouldn't have the charity. So it's just like all the stars have aligned, and then when Sir Andrew, the most senior family law judge, agreed to be our patron, that was a wonderful thing for us because he really listens to what we're saying, needs to change, and just all the stars have aligned, don't you think? Because I wanted to be in all the women's prisons within five years, and five years is next month, but I didn't think it would actually in November. Yeah, but I didn't think it would actually happen. And also when I first started, people were quite prejudiced about women in prison, and somehow there's a lot more now on the radio and in the social media about it, and you know, they're sending less women to prison, but that's only to save costs. Unfortunately, it's not actually for kind of positive reasons, but it's better for us that people with short sentences don't go in for whatever reason. So I think there's a lot more emphasis on it now, and people are interested. They've set up the women's justice board, which I think is incredible. So I think it's an element of luck and timing and hard work.

Host:

What is your vision for Lot Beyond Redemption in the next five to ten years?

Camilla:

I'm thinking about trying to go into the men's estate, but there are very different problems with that. You know, it's a much, much bigger thing, it has a lot more issues in terms of there seems to be a lot more drugs in the men's prisons, and obviously men react very violently on the whole when they have bad news. Women don't generally do that, they tend to self-arm or try and kill themselves, but they're not going to attack the volunteers that go in to try and help them. So there are all sorts of different issues which we're sort of grappling with. We're also, having listened to one of your earlier podcasts, who was talking about the charity that's been around for 100 years in America. In American women's prisons, when they come out, there's a sort of halfway house where they can be with their children, they get them funding, they get them uh trauma-informed therapy, they seem to be so much better, they get them housing, they seem to be so much better off and coordinated than it is in this country. So one area is we not just help women in prison, but we help women who maybe would have had a custodial sentence, but now they're sending less women to prison for short sentences. We help them in the community.

Eben:

And I think that you know we're very alive to the fact that it is quite a changing landscape, and especially with you know the new sentencing guidelines coming into effect, and criminal judges are having to take into account whether a woman has dependent children, that tangibly you know, might result in fewer women being sent to prison in the first place. So we're looking at more you know community-based alternatives and how that might work so that we're keeping up with the changes that are happening.

Camilla:

I didn't realise when I first started doing these clinics in the women's prisons that in the criminal justice system, when you are being sentenced to prison, they have a sort of sentencing review and they have do a little report on you. It is a question, do you have children? Not whether they're dependent on you, but it's just one of many questions, and it's not a dominant thing. And I was absolutely horrified by that because in any question in the family courts, it is what is in this child's best interest. In the case of any question about the child's welfare, whether change of surname or they should be adopted out or whatever, how much you should see your children, is what's in the child's best interest. And I assumed wrongly that in criminal justice sentencing it would be the same. You know, you've got three children who are completely dependent on their mother to look after them. It's completely mad to me that you put that mother in prison and then they go into care.

Host:

So, final question: how could our listeners support your work, whether legally trained or not?

Camilla:

Well, obviously, giving money would be great because we need to pay for the lawyers and you know, a relatively kind of cheap charity in a way, because we literally employ six lawyers, one admin person, and we pay a bit of rent. So, in terms of we don't have lots of fluffy peripheral costs and we don't employ anybody else. So, funding it costs about £450,000 a year to run the charity, um, which means it's beautifully run, and that's the way we like to do it. And then, of course, if you are a lawyer or have legal expertise to get involved with volunteering, if you are a lawyer or training to be a lawyer to give up your time for free to help one of these women, if you wanted to do that, we do some family law training, you would have to have a DBS check and have trauma awareness training. And generally that's through the solicitors' law firms nationally. Any kind of help. So somebody recently who's in the art world has offered to try and help, and she's going to local schools to find out if they're interested in I think fundraising in that case, but anything really.

Eben:

Um, and then obviously anyone else can follow us on social media so you can support us through our journey and you know track our progress. And you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn by searching for not beyond redemption. And then we also have a website that you can get in touch with us, which is not beyond redemption.co.uk. There's a just giving page um, yeah, for personal donations and obviously for corporate donations. You can contact us by emailing info at notbeundredemption.co.uk. Thank you.

Host:

And listeners can find that in our show notes.

Camilla:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Host:

A huge thank you to Camilla and Eben for joining me and sharing their insight and compassion for this vital work. If you'd like to learn more or get involved, you can find all of Not Beyond Redemption's links, including their website, social media, email, and GoFundMe in the show notes. You've been listening to Rebel Justice. If you'd like to support our work and receive four digital editions and one print issue a year, subscribe to the View for just £20. Make sure to follow us on our social media. We're on Instagram at the underscore view underscore magazines. And you can also find us on LinkedIn, X, and TikTok. If you'd like to reach out to us directly, you can email inquiries to us at press at theview magazine.org. Please share this story.