Inside Scotland’s pioneering women’s prison

“They speak to us like human beings,” says Lucy, when I ask about staff at the Bella Community Unit in Dundee. This isn’t like any prison she’s been in before.

Named after a local wartime welder called Bella Keyzer, who blazed a trail for women’s equality, the centre is a UK first.

Bella has been specifically designed to not look like a prison. There are rooms not cells, no bars on windows and cameras are concealed.

Inspirational messages about hope, forgiveness and redemption are hung in picture frames or tied onto the branches of trees. The furniture is painted in bright pastels and there’s a play park for visiting children.

The unit works to ensure offenders can live independent and productive lives when they are released back into the community. The women are given a budget of £40 a week to order food, which they cook themselves.

Some are nearing the end of life sentences. Anna, we changed her name, was convicted of murdering her ex-partner.

She has won enough trust to work in the community and walks unaccompanied to prepare food at a local lunch club.

In the kitchen there, I ask what she would say to people who think the approach at Bella is too soft for those who have committed the most serious crimes.

”We are not in prison to be punished”, she replies, ”our punishment is loss of liberty, our punishment is births, deaths and marriages we cannot be involved in, when things happen on the outside that you are not part of and your family grow and move on.”

Bella is an expensive experiment. It cost £11.6 million to set up and accommodates only 16 women.

There was a community petition against the unit when it opened two years ago and staff accept there is still work to do.

But the long-term goal is to break a cycle of re -offending through rehabilitation.

Anna wants to use her experiences inside to help other women when she is released.

“What would you rather,” she asks, “lock them up, throw away the key? Then you are damaging the children and the families and causing more trauma, potentially creating more criminals.”