Emily Hartley

Emily Hartley, 21, was a talented young White woman from Yorkshire. Emily was a musician, actor and poet. 

Emily had a long history of mental ill health. During a mental health crisis, she set fire to her shared home and was imprisoned for the first time, where she wrote many letters about her experiences of imprisonment. 

In April 2016, she took her own life in an out of bounds area of New Hall Prison. She was the youngest of 22 women to die in prison in England and Wales in 2016. An inquest into her death found that a lack of professionalism and failures in care contributed to her death.

A decade before to the day, the same coroner had found the same failings in the death of Petra Blanksby: prison was not the right place for women with mental ill health. Two women, ten years apart, both criminalised for their mental ill health.

Since Emily’s death, her family have campaigned to highlight the fatal consequences of imprisonment.