LINDA Allan does not know the exact date of her daughter Katie’s death in Polmont Young Offender’s Institution, which an inspection report last week found to be a “leading edge prison”. She knows only that Katie was alive when her cell door was locked on the evening of Friday, June 3, and that she took her own life sometime before prisoner officers found her dead in the morning.

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But she is dreading that looming anniversary, preferring to remember Katie with visits to her favourite beach, the sound of her laugh, her compassion and kindness. June 4 is when they will be forced to remember the trauma of last year, the police coming to the door, phoning her husband, collecting her son from school. The family will gather at Glasgow University Chapel. “One of our safe places,” she says, “where [chaplain] Stuart MacQuarrie and the university will do what they have done for almost a year – support us and help us heal.”

This week has been tough, with the publication of two reports on the prison where her daughter should still be serving a sentence for a drink driving offence in which she hit and injured a teenage boy. The first, a review of mental health provision commissioned as a result of the suicides of Katie, William Lindsay and others, made a total of 80 recommendations, including the creation of a bespoke suicide and self-harm strategy for young people. Meanwhile a separate inspection report, with more than 100 recommendations, highlighted poor performance in terms of health and wellbeing. Yet, both also describe the institution as “impressive” and “leading edge”. Allan claims the way problems have been glossed over feels like “pouring acid on open wounds”.

“All we want is honesty,” she says. “Stop pretending it’s something that it’s not. Let’s talk about it how it really is and change it.” The reports, and some subsequent coverage, left her feeling she and her husband Stuart – who have both campaigned relentlessly not only for justice for Katie, but to highlight the failings that led to the suicides of others – have been recast as liars. “It’s as if we are making it up,” she says with a hollow laugh.

She no longer works as a civil servant, focusing on her recovery along with campaigning work, and is left questioning her faith and belief systems. “I had three years left to retirement,” she says. “I was looking forward to Katie graduating. We were a normal family.”

Normal was turned upside down in February 2018 when the third year Glasgow University geography student a guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous and drink-driving and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, through her victim favoured a community alternative.

Whilst at prison she was strip searched, lost 80% of her hair due to stress-induced alopecia and was later found to be self-harming. She took her own life less than a month before due to be released on a tag.

Reading the mental health review this week, which recommends that isolation for young people is “minimised” feels very raw to Allan. Isolation was part of her daughter’s life despite regular visits. “She would describe being locked in her cell from Friday night to the Monday morning other than an hour out for rec,” she says. “She hated the weekends.”

What Allan still struggles to comprehend is the policy of segregation for those who are identified to be a risk of suicide in so-called safe cells, dubbed suicide cells by prisoners. “The last day we saw Katie – the 3rd of June – was awful,” she remembers. “She was really, really upset. She never cried on visits because it was public and she knew it would be seen as a sign of weakness.

“She had dark shadows under her eyes and by this time she had a wig, and she just burst out crying when she saw us. She had never done that, even in the very early days.

“Eventually it came out and I said: ‘You must tell someone what’s going on, Katie.’ A prison officer was right there and heard our conversation. And she begged with me: ‘Don’t tell anyone because they will put me in a suicide cell.’”

Despite all the strength apparent in months of campaigning it’s a hard memory to revisit. “I’m her mum,” she says. “I should have protected her. I should not have left.” She is working through that guilt, she says, in part through therapy and yoga.

But she’s also making sense of what happened through painstaking research she hopes will drive change. She and her husband have poured through reports and statistics, producing a report in April that showed in the past 10 years 40% of prisoner deaths were suicides. They found 32 of the 82 people who took their own life in that period were under the age of 30, with risk most heightened in the early days, weeks and months of sentencing.

As a former learning disability nurse Allan brings considerable professional experience too. “You can’t rehabilitate people if they are not exposed to love and compassion,” she says. “It’s a sick regime. Katie wasn’t one of our vulnerable citizens when we went in. But that’s mainly who we are putting in this institution. Kids who have been failed from the day they were born. William Lindsey, Robert Wagstaff, Liam Kerr, Jordan Barron ...” All are young men who took their own lives at Polmont.

She has no doubts about the quality of many of the facilities on offer at Polmont – the impressive education facility, activities and theatre space. But, as pointed out by last week’s reports, attendance is only 50% in many classes, despite waiting lists. Sometimes a lack of staffing means prisoners cannot attend, often issues around engagement are more complex.

But she is concerned about the attitude of some staff towards self-directed activities. Katie was told she was not allowed watercolour paints, and that she had “too many books”. Who says to a young person who is reading: “You’ve got too many books”?” she wonders.

The system, she says, is dehumanising from the strip searches of prisoners to the treatment of visitors. She remembers asking if she could buy a young woman, whose visitor did not show up, a drink. “I was told it wasn’t allowed”.

Yet she still has hope that it can be better. “There are an army of people building in front of us, alongside us, behind us who have been shouting about this for years,” she says. “I think we are helping to give them more of a voice. And as long as I have breath in my body I will fight for it to change.”