Gaie Delap: Prison service mistakes put me in jail, so I’m suing the MoJ

The knock on the door came at 10pm on 20 December 2024. The police arrested me, gave me 10 minutes to pack a bag and took me back to prison.

They sent me to Eastwood Park women’s prison through no fault of my own, so I’m suing the Ministry of Justice for unlawful detention.

All this started in 2022, when the police arrested me at a climate protest. They took me to the local station and released me on bail with a tagging order. I have deep vein thrombosis, which makes it unsafe to wear an ankle tag. But the prison service failed to find a wrist tag that fitted. Instead I was placed on home detention curfew and had to be in my home from 7pm-7am – this restriction continued for nearly 600 days.

I was tried in August 2024, and despite sticking carefully to the curfew conditions and having no prior convictions, I was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

My time behind bars was a portal to an alien and confusing world. I was released after three and a half months and ordered to spend my remaining sentence electronically tagged and then on license.

When the electronic monitoring services came to my home in November, once again they didn’t bring a wrist tag that fitted. But this time their simple failure of planning turned the whole system against me. Instead of coming back with another tag, or putting me on another home detention curfew, the probation service declared me “unlawfully at large” and said there was a warrant out for my arrest.

I spent the next month terrified I would be dragged back to prison, when it wasn’t my fault. And five days before Christmas my fears came true.

My first prison experience was bad enough, but my time at Eastwood Park women’s prison was one of the worst things I’ve had to endure. I spent Christmas, New Year and my 79th birthday alone behind bars, cut off from the outside world. They didn’t give me a date for my release – I had no hope. I was furious, and I felt powerless. The failure to provide a simple device led to the violation of my human rights.

Thanks to support from Good Law Project, the prison service found a suitable wrist tag and released me from jail on 31 January 2025. But I’m still living with the legacy of my recall to prison. A knock on my front door can trigger a moment of terror, and I still have nightmares about prison.

Together with Good Law Project, I’m now suing the Ministry of Justice for wrongful detention. The failures that led to my wrongful arrest were deeply unjust, but this was never just an isolated mistake. It was the outcome of a system riddled with systemic failures and warped priorities, and a society where protest has become a dangerous act.

Because when a state would rather lock up a retired teacher and grandmother in an overcrowded prison system than confront the crises we are protesting about, the justice system itself has failed.

One of the things that gave me some comfort while I was in prison was a poem by Sir Ben Okri which asks, “Can’t you hear the future weeping? Our love must save the world.” Those words remind me why I took action – to fight for the future of the planet, and to fight for our right to peaceful protest.