Prison worked, says truants' mother
Woman 'brought to senses' now supports jail as a way to tackle bad parenting
Audrey Gillan
Guardian
Monday May 27, 2002
A mother of five who became Britain's first person to be jailed for failing
to send her children to school said yesterday that she deserved her prison
sentence. Patricia Amos, who was freed from London's Holloway prison last
week after a judge reduced her sentence on appeal from 60 to 28 days, told
the Guardian she had been brought to her senses by her experience and would
make sure that her children attended school from now on.
Her two daughters, Emma, 15, and Jackie, 13, had a woeful attendance record
at Banbury comprehensive school, Oxfordshire, and in spite of numerous
warning letters and court summonses, Mrs Amos allowed them to "go to school
or not to go to school entirely as they chose".
After 14 days in prison, much of it spent in her cell alone, Mrs Amos said
that the "whole horrible thing worked".
She said: "I did deserve what I got. Everybody deserves their education and
I was denying my children their rights through my own stupidity and
ignorance. I'm not saying it's what should be done for everybody but I do
think it works. It has brought me to my senses."
Mrs Amos said that while her sentence was too long, the government should
introduce a sliding scale of punishments for parents such as herself
"ranging from seven days up, which I think is reasonable".
A court heard last week that Emma had turned up for school on 55 out of 190
occasions between last September and February, an attendance rate of 29%.
Her sister Jackie turned up 64 times, an attendance rate of 34%. For the
month of April, Emma's attendance was nil.
Speaking for the first time, the teenage girls said that they felt guilty
when they heard about their mother being sent to prison. Sitting in the
living room of her 25-year-old sister Kerry's house in Banbury, Jackie said:
"I was upset and I was angry at the amount of time they gave her. I will
stay in school from now on."
Emma said: "I was really upset. I had the most time off out of us both and I
felt it was all my fault. It has done the trick but it shouldn't have been
my mum that got done for it. It should have been me and Jackie."
Emma claimed that she was being bullied at school. "I was also being bullied
by some people in my class and that would do my head in and I didn't want to
go to school," she said. "But now I won't skive off school ever again. We
are going to stay in school and show that we can be a proper family again."
Jackie said: "A day leads to a week and a month and then it leads to a year.
And you don't want to go back because everyone calls you a skiver."
Mrs Amos said that that everything was fine with the family until her
mother, who lived with them, died in 1999. She said she had let her mother
be the mother of her children. Her own children were more like her sisters.
She explained: "She was with me constantly, she used to look after the
children and basically I relied upon her. She would get up at 5am and got
the children ready for school." Then one day the girls came home from school
to find their grandmother lying on the floor. She died 24 hours later.
Mrs Amos said: "The whole family was devastated. Emma was pulling her hair
out and banging her head against the wall. Jackie became clingy and wouldn't
let me out of her sight. I couldn't even close the door when I went to the
bathroom.
"It was like getting a bottle of Coke, shaking it, taking the lid off and it
going everywhere. My whole world had been turned upside down and shook
about. I just gave up because I felt so guilty that I had asked too much of
her and so I started blaming myself."
Mrs Amos said that she did try to make the girls go to school but they would
not go. "They always got up and would say they were going. They would go in
their school uniforms and take their schoolbags and then tell me they had
been to school."
Already addicted to pethidine, the class-A synthetic opiate painkiller
prescribed to her after she had a kidney removed, Mrs Amos began to abuse
heroin. She said she had been attending a drugs clinic for her pethidine
abuse [she had been taking 12 a day] and "fell in with the wrong crowd".
She is on a methadone prescription and urine tests show that she has been
clear of illegal drugs for 18 months.
During this time she was also convicted of shoplifting. She explained that
it was not until she received bereavement counselling at Holloway that
anything clicked into place.
She acknowledged that attendance was never the family's strong point. Her
eldest daughter Kerry, 25, admitted that she had a few problems herself and
Mrs Amos has a previous conviction from 1994 when she failed to send her
daughter Elizabeth to school.
Unexpected
The prison sentence was entirely unexpected and the family had made no
preparation for the absence of a mother of two young daughters.
Mrs Amos said: "My children were left at home on their own not knowing where
I was. Nobody from the court, nobody from social services did anything for
these poor children that they were supposed to be so concerned about. Nobody
told them I was going to prison and not one of them went to make sure they
were fine."
Instead, Mrs Amos called Kerry from custody at Banbury prison and told her
she was heading to Holloway for two months. She said: "It was horrible in
Holloway, not an experience I would wish on anybody. You are locked up 24
hours a day and missing your children. Put it this way, it brings you back
to reality."
Mrs Amos said that her girls are not bad, certainly not "delinquents".
Everything will be back on the rails now she has got the help she needed,
she said. And there is one thing that should ensure it does not happen again.
She explained: "The girls know if it happens again I will go to prison. None
of us want that."
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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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