WHEN Zoe came out of prison she was seriously contemplating suicide, as she had done in the days leading up to her four weeks on remand at HMP Cornton Vale. In a short space of time the 31-year-old Somalian refugee had gone from being a hard-working mother, training as a nurse, working flat out in order to do her best for her son, to someone who had had to give up her child to foster care, move flat, and had a criminal record. “Everything just seemed a mess,” she says. “I think I had a breakdown. I couldn’t cope.”

Zoe is just one of the many women who have either served a short custodial sentence, or been in prison on remand in Scotland where we have one of the highest rates of female imprisonment in Northern Europe. Many experts believe these women shouldn’t be in prison in the first place. Report after report into the prison service in Scotland has highlighted the need to reduce the number of such women who are being held. But progress has been slow. Numbers have declined by only a tiny fraction.

Many of these reports emphasise the need for community-based services to help the women. As Yvonne Donald of the Prison Reform Trust pointed out last week, “While reforms to the women’s prison estate are welcome, we must not lose sight that the services women need to turn their lives around often lie outside prison walls.”

Shine is one such service, run by the community justice organisation Sacro, which mentors women who have come out of prison or are on community payback orders. It was through their support that Zoe was, she says, able “to go on” with life. Not long after her court date, at which she was found guilty of assault and released on a two-year probation order, she was met by Sarah Brynes, a Shine mentor, and they began a period of contact for about a year. When they first met, according to Brynes, Zoe was “very suicidal, very isolated and feeling hopeless”. She is, she says, now in a “far better place”.

"Shine," Zoe says, “shows you it’s not the end of it. Everybody can make a mistake. I’ve got some hope back.”

Zoe’s "mistake" was not a huge crime She was involved in an altercation with a neighbour and was charged with assault. She ended up in custody, on remand, because she failed to turn up in court four times. It was her first-ever offence and yet for she was held in jail for a month prior to her trial. For her it was a personal disaster. Everything collapsed around her. Even before the charges were brought, she was having both physical and mental health problems including depression and epilepsy, which was rapidly worsening.

She recalls how she felt before she went into prison. “I was really low. I had worked so hard for so long to become a nurse. I had to go to college for a year, and university for nearly three years, and then just when I was about to do my final assignment, I became really sick and then had this case with my neighbour, had to go to jail, lose my son, had epilepsy.” For her that first week in Cornton Vale was, she says, “the longest week”. “Because I’m epileptic I had seizures, almost all the time for the first three or four days. Stress brings it on.”

One of the things she struggles with now, she says, is having to explain her criminal record every time she applies for anything. “Forty years from now it will be there.” She sympathises with those who might view her with suspicion. "From when I was born," she reflects, "I was brought up to believe jail is for murderers. So every time somebody hears you’ve been to jail they think, ‘Oh my god, she’s a criminal.’ People really judge you. But since I’ve gone there, you see it in a different light.”

One of the important things about Shine was it gave her something to do. She recalls how a few years ago her life was relentlessly structured, getting up at 6am, getting her son ready for school, doing a 12-hour shift. “Now I sit there and it’s like I’ve cleaned all the house what will I do next? But with Shine you’ve got something to do. They give you that." Her mentor, Brynes, persuaded her to attend Tomorrow's Women, the women's justice centre, where she was connected up to a social life and activities.

The disastrous impact short-term custody can have on women’s lives has been much researched. A report into women in Scottish prisons published last week by the Prison Reform Trust report stated: “Rather than helping to turn women’s lives around, imprisonment can often compound problems, with over a quarter (28%) of women losing their tenancy when entering prison, and a third of women reporting that they don’t know where they’re going to live on release.”

Shine works with women who are on short-term prison sentences, on remand, or on community payback orders. It’s in this area of providing support to women on remand that it is particularly unique. “No one else,” says Shine service manager Fiona Mackinnon, “works with women on remand. They have no support whatsoever.”

These women, says Mackinnon, are not, in general being held from a public safety perspective - when they come to court, less than 30% are given a custodial sentence. "But," she emphasises, "they’ve lost so much, possibly their children, often their accommodation, their job if they had such a thing, their benefits and have had to reapply. The punishment for remand is horrendous.”

There are a number of patterns Shine’s workers observe in the lives of the women they help. One is that frequently they have experienced trauma at some point, often domestic abuse. “Around 90% of women we work with have experienced trauma, either as children, as adults or as both," says Mackinnon. "And it’s that experience that leads to their addiction and subsequent involvement in the criminal justice system. You see it over and over again. The majority of these women have suffered terrible abuse.”

Zoe is one of those women who have experienced trauma. She arrived in the UK 10 years ago, a refugee from the war in Somalia. Her mother had paid for her to be trafficked out. As she recalls, “It was the war that brought me here. It was a long story and too traumatic. My social worker referred me to the trauma counselling because of all the things that had happened to me.”

Homelessness is also frequently an issue that women face, as well as loneliness and isolation. Shine mentor Sarah Byrnes observes that it is common that the women they work with don’t have family, or other, support. “A lot of the time when I see people on a weekly basis they’ll say, you’re the first person I’ve seen this week. Shine’s about getting them back out into the community.”

Such was the case with 37-year-old Karen, who was very isolated when she first started to see Brynes while she was on a payback order resulting from a theft offence. “My addiction,” Karen says, “took me to places where I offended and shoplifted and that was why I got put on the order.”

At the time Karen was struggling. Her partner was in jail, she was still grieving over the loss of her mother the previous year and she had recently been in hospital. She recalls, “I was staying in, I wasn’t doing anything. My mental and physical health was suffering.” At first, she says, she dug in her heels, saying that she didn’t want to speak to anybody. But she felt comfortable with Brynes, and began to meet up with her.

Karen describes the journey she made with the help of Brynes. “When I started off seeing her, I was using drugs. I wasn’t keeping appointments. I was in and out of the hospital. I was just going out to get my methadone, coming back and doing nothing. I’ve gone from being nearly on my last legs and wanting to maybe sleep my life away, to gradually becoming more confident, keeping appointments, not offending. To being able to ask for help.”

Currently Shine’s funding beyond 2018 is uncertain. Like many such services its continued existence is tenuous. Prison reform campaigners observe that they suffer from serious underinvestment. As Lisa Mackenzie of the Howard League for Penal Reform notes, “There is still a huge imbalance between funding for custody and funding for community services.”

Meanwhile, the users of the service are testimony to how necessary it is. Zoe reflects, “I think the best way is to just take baby steps. Don’t compete. Just take your time. But you need Shine to push you. For me I needed that lift.”