LONDON (Reuters) - Pauline Campbell last saw her 18-year-old daughter Sarah as she was led from Mold Crown Court on a Friday morning to start a three-year jail sentence for manslaughter.
By the Saturday evening Sarah was dead, killed by a self-administered overdose of prescription antidepressants, despite telling prison warders what she had done.
The shock of her only daughter's death in January 2003 almost killed Campbell, a 59-year-old former lecturer. But it also galvanised her into becoming one of the country's most tireless campaigners for the rights of women in prison.
"I go bananas every time someone refers to Sarah's death as suicide -- it's letting the Home Office off the hook. Sarah's death was effectively death by neglect," Campbell told Reuters in an interview.
Arrested 14 times for demonstrations outside women's jails where women have died, she eventually forced the Home Office last year into accepting responsibility for her daughter's death, but has yet to receive an apology.
"I was told on the phone that Sarah was dead, four hours after she had died -- she was in the morgue by then -- at which point I collapsed on the kitchen floor and went into cardiac arrhythmia. I think I came very close to a heart attack."
Campbell's relentless campaigning helped prompt the government to commission a review of female custody which in March recommended the closure of all 14 women's jails in England and Wales.
Its author, Labour peer Baroness Corston, said many women prisoners were on remand or jailed for minor non-violent offences and should not be locked up. Community sentences should be the normal punishment.
Only the most serious and violent female offenders who posed a threat to the public would be kept behind bars, in a network of small secure centres scattered around the country.
The recommendations are still sitting on the desk of Justice Secretary Jack Straw -- who has taken over responsibility for prisons from the Home Office -- while he considers his response to the radical advice.
An original promise to respond by autumn has slipped but last week Straw told a meeting of the Howard League for Penal Reform that he would reply "very shortly".
Earlier this month, Prisons Minister David Hanson told a meeting of crime reduction charity Nacro that he would be making a "positive response" to Corston's proposals, adding that the government would publish detailed plans by the end of the year.
The number of women held in custody across England and Wales has more than doubled to 4,500 in the last 10 years although fewer than one in five are held for offences of violence.
Unlike troubled men, who often react by attacking others, women in prison attack themselves.
