‘My son was crying, mama, mama... it broke my heart’

Indefinite jail terms were scrapped in 2012, but continue to tear families apart. Amy-Clare Martin follows the harrowing case of a mother separated from her son over the constant threat of recall for a petty crime she committed 20 years ago.

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When police knocked on her front door, Rachel* had no idea it would be the worst day of her life.

She and her son, Joshua*, were still in bed, but when she let the officers inside, leaving him to play on the floor behind a stairgate, she was told she was being recalled to prison – indefinitely – under a sentence she was handed for a street robbery 20 years ago. They said her son, from whom she had never spent a night apart, was being taken into care.

Officers could not even say why she was being recalled, simply telling her it was due to “poor behaviour”. She later learnt it was triggered by a single call to police from a teenage neighbour over an alleged alcohol-fuelled altercation with a family member days earlier, which Rachel disputes ever happened and has not resulted in any charge.

“My mind just stopped,” she told The Independent. “But then I grabbed my son and said, ‘No, no, I’m not going. Why, why, why?’ I was squeezing him, saying no, I’m going to lose him. I don’t even know what I have done.”

In a panic, Rachel started packing a bag for Joshua, desperate to keep his baby things safe. She tried to gather up as much as possible, knowing that under the terms of her draconian imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence, she could serve years behind bars on recall even without being convicted of any further crimes.

Before that day, social services had been preparing to reduce its oversight of the family, who were thriving. Their social worker had tears in her eyes as she arrived to collect the toddler from his handcuffed mother. Initially, Rachel was not even allowed to change her son’s overnight nappy, but was eventually permitted to dress him before handing him over to officials.