Punk Justice

This is Rosa.

Her life-long friend is in HMP Downview for a non-violent offence. Rosa misses her deeply, but there is nothing she can do to change the situation. 

She knows her friend would fare much better serving her sentence in the community. Her mental health has long been unstable – Rosa has always played a part in talking to her and helping her through it. She imagines her friend, sat alone for the most part of the day, her paranoid thoughts spinning deeper out of control yet surrounded only by officers untrained in mental health support more likely to bully her for being “criminal” and “crazy” than to help her. 

Rosa is filled with fear. For now, all she can do is campaign for people like her friend to be treated better by the criminal justice system: to be treated with respect, dignity, and given support rather than driven into crisis by punitive measures instead of rehabilitation. 

She takes to the streets, blogs, writes to her MP relentlessly, talks to everyone she can about it. All this does make a difference, she knows. But it’s not the same as seeing her friend being treated with dignity and being there for her in person.