We use limited cookies
We use cookies where necessary to allow us to understand how people interact with our website and content, so that we can continue to improve our service.
View our privacy policyGovernment failures which recalled the 78-year-old to prison have now been turned into justification for an extension to her sentence. We’re joining Gaie’s family and a groundswell of legal and prison reform charities to demand immediate action from Shabana Mahmood
Gaie Delap received a slip under her prison cell door this week. It said her release date would be moved back by 20 days due to her being considered ‘unlawfully at large’ whilst waiting to be recalled to prison. During that period she had been sat at home with her bags packed, unable to be monitored because government services wouldn’t provide the right-sized tag for her.
It’s the latest twist in a chilling sequence of events for Gaie since she protested the climate crisis. Gaie would be serving the remainder of her 20 month sentence on home curfew had it not been for the failings of government contractor Serco and their inability to provide a tag that would fit her.
Back in November, the Electronic Monitoring Service (EMS) visited Gaie’s home to fit an electronic tag to her wrist. She’s unable to wear a tag on her ankle due to having deep vein thrombosis, and the tag the officer brought for her wrist was considered too loose. But instead of receiving a second visit with a more suitable tag, Gaie was notified of an impending arrest warrant to drag her back to prison and by Christmas she was alone in a jail cell.
Earlier this month we reported on Gaie’s discovery that the officer who tried to fit the tag on her had recorded the incident as a licence breach under the description of a “refusal for installation”– a claim that has has outraged her family who believe the incident was fabricated to cover up EMS’s failings.
News of Gaie’s extension comes just days after prisons minister James Timpson announced plans to reverse the rise in female inmates and use alternative forms of punishment, claiming far too many women in prison “are very vulnerable”. Last year Gaie suffered a minor stroke shortly after being incarcerated. But her family says the director of HMP Peterborough, where she was first incarcerated, did not engage with Gaie’s GP and that they continue to worry about her physical and mental health.
As well as crowdfunding Gaie’s legal fees, Good Law Project is joining a host of womens charities, legal organisations and prison reform charities to call on the Justice Secretary to revoke Gaie’s recall to prison immediately. We’re demanding an urgent inquiry into the failings between EMS, the probation service, and HMP Peterborough.
Gaie’s continued imprisonment is a stark illustration of this government’s shocking treatment of climate activists as well as a complete lack of accountability for failures in the outsourcing of public services and nonsensical incarceration of protestors in a prison service at breaking point. We cannot and will not let this scandal go unchallenged.