Clodagh Finn: The Irish woman who led reform at London's Holloway Prison

She might not be surprised, though, to see that some media coverage focused on the ‘state-of-the-art luxury’ offered some 50 prisoners who now have ensuite accommodation, access to a TV, telephone, gym and a hairdresser.

“You’d pay a thousand a month for this in Dublin,” one visitor was quoted as saying. You might, but the difference is that you would be free to come and go from your thousand-a-month in Dublin.

What is interesting about the new prison (and the reaction to it) is that none of it is new. More than six decades ago, Mary Size was arguing that prison itself was the punishment and that reform of prisoners could never take place in inhumane conditions.

“When this matter is intelligently considered,” she wrote in her 1957 prison memoir Prisons I Have Known, “it will be realised that imprisonment itself, entailing loss of liberty, separation from family, forfeiture of a good reputation and ... the esteem of life-long friends, is severe punishment enough.”

By then, she had spent 42 years in the British prison system where she had advocated for, and introduced a wide range of reforms, ranging from prison visits, training and crafts to sport and entertainment. She even managed to get British singer and star of cinema Gracie Fields to perform at Holloway.

Entering the prison gates

Education, however, was key, she said, and that was what first aroused her interest in prison reform.

She was born in 1883 near Tuam and began her career as a teacher in a local school. She was particularly interested in the difficult children in her classes and when she qualified, she wanted to work more with ‘problem’ students.

When a friend suggested she get involved in the prison system, she applied for her first post as a discipline officer in Manchester prison. On a bleak afternoon in March 1906, a horse-drawn cab deposited her at the gates of the prison and she wondered if she had made the right decision. “For all my 23 years, I felt overawed and more like a child of 12,” she wrote as she entered a building she found depressingly grim.

Her first duty was to give prisoners a breakfast of thin porridge and dry bread in their cells. When the prison officer then ordered her to lock the doors, she replied: “The women have not had their tea, yet.”

There was a titter from the women — “The poor gal don’t know that they don’t give us tea in this ’ere place,” said one — and a scornful look from the officer.

“My sympathy went out to the women. I wondered how they could exist without a cup of tea,” she wrote.

Her sympathy for the women in Manchester prison, and the many other prisons she served in, extended far beyond tea, though. She recognised that many offenders came from deprived backgrounds and she began to introduce changes designed to restore human dignity.

On one occasion, she removed handcuffs from three women so that they could have a cup of tea at a railway station café during a transfer to another prison. When they gave her their word, she was satisfied they wouldn’t abscond, and it all passed off without incident.

Mary Size’s eye-opening memoir of her 42 years in the British prison service is full of anecdotes like that. Motivated by her deep faith, she always treated her charges as human beings and sought out the humanity beneath the crime, however serious it was.

When she was moved to Aylesbury prison, she identified the need to introduce craft workshops after meeting Sally. She had stolen some cotton from the work-room and used a hat pin bent into the shape of a crochet hook to make lace from it. She hid both in her mattress and when she was discovered, she was deprived of her privileges for 10 days. When Sally was asked about the length of her sentence, she would say, “Life and ten days.”

Countess Markievicz

Mary Size was also struck by how much comfort art provided after meeting another prisoner — one Countess Markievicz. When the countess was moved from Mountjoy to Aylesbury in 1916, the staff considered her well-behaved, but eccentric. The famous rebel, as she was called, did not have any aptitude for sewing, so after a stint making prisoner night-gowns from unbleached calico she was sent to the kitchen. The work repelled her, yet she worked quietly there at her own pace.

It was her “keen artistic abilities” that drew Mary Size’s attention. She noted that the countess — the only person she names in her memoir — sketched on toilet paper or whatever paper she could find. She also gathered old cleaning cloths, washed them and then pulled threads of blue and red from rags to embroider on them.

When Size found a beautiful embroidered portrait of the Madonna and Child inside one of the countess’s library books, she did not report it because she knew the very things that were helping her — paper and library books — would be withdrawn.

In April 1927, Mary Size was appointed deputy governor of Holloway prison in London, the first woman to hold such a position. In her 14 years there, she introduced a range of reforms including the establishment of a garden and the refurbishment of cells to make them look more like bedrooms.

The chamber-pot was hidden by a curtain and women were given mirrors. Women told her that the thing they missed most was their cosmetics. Instead, they used flour or whitewash from the walls as make-up and shoe-polish to pencil in eye-brows. They scraped red from the bindings of books to use as substitute lipstick and often used part of their margarine rations to gloss their hair.

Make-up was not allowed in prison, but Mary Size gave out gifts of hair-slides and hair-brushes as prizes for the whist drives she had introduced.

In 1941, she was awarded an OBE in recognition of her work on prison reform. She retired in 1942, but the story does not end there. She was recalled from retirement in 1946 to become the governor of Askham Grange, the first women’s open prison in England.

The neighbours in North Yorkshire were worried about having a “prison without bars” close-by. Reading how Mary Size engaged with the community, even including many of them in the life of the prison itself, is a lesson in how to bring people along with you.

When she finally retired in 1952, some 400 women had served their sentences at Askham Grange and had returned to their own communities. Less than 2% reoffended, a number she considered a failure.

“Reformation is a journey not a destination,” she wrote. She might be a bit disappointed to see that it has taken us so long to get this far along that journey.