A vigil was held on Saturday at the old prison site. Photo: Niki Gibbs

THE women’s services on offer at the redeveloped Holloway Prison site must not be reduced to a cynical “tickbox” exercise, a new campaign group has warned.

Beauty Out of Ashes, set to ensure the legacy of the women’s services offered at Holloway Prison, was launched on Saturday during a vigil held in honour of those who have served sentences there.

Mandy Ogunmokun, from Highbury, is one of the members of the newly-launched campaign group who addressed the crowd.

“The women’s building needs to have life and healing going through it – it can’t just be offices,” Ms Ogunmokun later told the Tribune. “It shouldn’t just look great on paper. Women are not tickboxes.”

Ms Ogunmokun runs Treasures Foundation, a group offering supported housing to women with histories of drug abuse and offending.

During the 1980s and 1990s she said she was “in and out” of Holloway Prison.

Mandy Ogunmokun. Photo: Niki Gibbs

“Prison saved a lot of our lives – it shouldn’t be like that,” she said. “I’m sad to say I went to prison myself to get help. It’s sick to say prison saves your life.”

Opened in 1852, Holloway Prison saw thousands of women pass through its gates until its closure in 2016.

Ms Ogunmokun, who later worked in the prison helping women with drug and alcohol dependency, said Holloway was a “unique” place that saw civilian groups and prison officers working together to help women with a variety of issues, offering anger management courses, help with anxiety and depression, and supporting those whose children had died, among many others.

“You have your activists saying ‘close prisons’, and I agree, but if you’re going to close prisons you have to make sure those services are there in the community,” Ms Ogunmokun said.

The Beauty Out of Ashes group

According to Ms Ogunmokun, Beauty Out of Ashes aims to further the prison’s legacy, working to coordinate different women’s services across the borough to ensure they are “all working together, all supporting each other”.

“That’s the importance of the women’s building and all services working together – one service can’t do the job alone,” she said.

Under plans agreed by the council earlier this year, Peabody Housing Association is set to demolish the old Victorian building and replace it with a series of residential tower blocks.

Following a long campaign to secure a women’s building on the site, activists have been given one floor at the foot of a tower block in the newly-built estate. It is not yet clear who will run the women’s service.

Looking ahead, Ms Ogunmokun said she hopes to see services take the long view on helping women. She added:

“You can’t put someone in therapy and say, ‘You have six sessions’ – that’s ridiculous.

“Generations of the same behaviour is getting handed down.

“It’s about re-teaching human beings how to live. That’s what Beauty Out of Ashes is about: there’s so much tragedy, but that can be changed.”