The Lost Girls

Kenneth Roy

The names Kelly Holland and Arlene Elliot are all but forgotten. It is 13 years since they died, within four days of each other, in Cornton Vale Prison, Stirling. Had they lived, they would be 30 years old. Of course they are not forgotten by those who loved them; nor, as it happens, by me. In 1996, the year after their suicides and in the wake of a public inquiry which was nothing more than a whitewash of the Scottish judicial and prison systems, I spent several months investigating and writing about their short lives and violent deaths. Even now, I think about them often. I think about them every time some seedy politician or salivating journalist, bloated by self-importance and misplaced righteous indignation, calls for yet more imprisonment, yet more retribution, to add to Scotland's wretchedly punitive record. I have been thinking about them a lot this week, the week of falling crime figures, paradoxically the week when our disgusting prisons were finally declared officially unsafe, yet also the week in which the political response to a national disgrace was to demand the building of still more cages. Less, much less, has been said about the lower courts' over-reliance on custody which is the primary cause of the present crisis, or more generally about our unsavoury national taste for banging people up.
     When Kelly and Arlene killed themselves, there was a public outcry before the media's caravan of grief – always a restless vehicle – moved on. The main ground for concern was the apparently lax regime at Cornton Vale Prison, the inadequate supervision of suicide risks enabling two inmates to hang themselves more or less under the noses of the staff. Quite typically, however, there appeared to be very little popular disquiet about a penal policy which remanded girls to an adult prison; the appropriateness of prison as a place to detain disturbed adolescents was never an issue. The spate of suicides at Cornton Vale came to an end, perhaps as a result of tighter procedures, but the policy of imprisoning mentally ill people, including and especially the young, continues. It was a scandal then. It is a scandal now.
     Because depressingly little has changed, it is useful to remember the cases of Kelly and Arlene. Kelly Holland left her parents' house in Hamilton on 21 June 1995. Early the next morning, she was spotted by a police patrol 'shouting and wailing, sort of incoherently'. When the police approached, she told them to fuck off and leave her alone. They arrested her and took her to the police station. Underneath the sleeve of her sweatshirt, which she was clutching tightly to the palm of her hand, there was a piece of broken bottle. She was charged with breach of the peace, resisting arrest and possession of an offensive weapon, and spent 32 hours alone in a police cell, with virtually no human contact, before being taken to court. She was remanded to Cornton Vale, where she was strip-searched; she committed suicide later that night. Kelly was well known to social workers and to the police in Hamilton as a disturbed girl, had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and had only recently attempted to throw herself from the window of a house. On that occasion the police fatuously charged her with 'alarming the lieges', but the procurator fiscal at Hamilton, very unusually, refused to prosecute because he was so concerned about her mental welfare. A fortnight later she was dead.
     Arlene Elliot, who committed suicide four days after Kelly, also 17 years old, had a history of auditory hallucinations and self-harm. She said the voices were usually pleasant, but then they became derogatory, and then imperative. They told her to harm herself by pulling her hair and by punching her abdomen. The voices had told her that she was fat and that she should vomit. They had threatened to kill her if she told anyone and she also believed that people were looking at her and laughing at her. 'I found her to be very distressed and disturbed,' said a psychiatrist who visited her in prison. 'I concluded that she was suffering from a psychotic disorder.' The psychiatrist considered that she should not be in prison (she had been sent there on remand on a minor shoplifting charge), and that she should be treated in hospital. She never was.
     We do not know the names, the experiences, the destinies of the Kellys and Arlenes of October 2008, we do not know how many there are, and we can only guess at the shaming inhumanity of their treatment. But speak to any prison officer with an ounce of decency and you will be told that there are many people in Scotland's prisons who should not be in prison at all, who simply do not belong there. What is to be done? In the name of civilised society, what is to be done?

[click here] for The Life and Death of Kelly Holland: a photo essay by Islay McLeod