Patricia Amos can't cope - why put her in prison?

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Patricia Amos is in hospital in Holloway Prison, reportedly traumatised after starting a 60-day sentence for being a bad parent. She is the first mother to be jailed under Jack Straw's draconian 2000 Criminal and Court Services Act. Her crime was "condoning" her daughters, Emma (15) and Jackie (13), in their poor attendance at an Oxfordshire school.

This is barbaric. Ms Amos is not a violent person. She is no threat to society. She has not robbed, defrauded or killed anyone. She has not been imprisoned to protect herself or her family. Her daughters were not running wild as criminals. They claim, whether truthfully or not, that they stayed away from school to help their mother after their grandmother, who lived with them, died two years ago.

The law imprisoning the parents of truants is classic Blairite legislation. Responding to a media hype over truancy, it gave Mr Straw a day's headline and a party conference speech. It sounded tough. It sounded good. It has led Ms Amos to 60 days in jail.

In prison this woman cannot look after her daughters. They must live with their 25-year-old sister, who has three children of her own. They have had to be excused school to visit their mother in prison. It is hard to see what conceivable "debt to society" Ms Amos is rendering in Holloway, or what "rehabilitation" might be considered appropriate. There is no suggestion that she wilfully kept her children out of school or that she was hostile to their education. She just could not cope.

No other country in Europe would have sent Ms Amos to prison. From everything we hear, she was a desperate woman who could not handle her daughters after they became teenagers. There, but for the grace of God and this Government, go half the parents in London. When the Blair and Straw teenagers got into scrapes, a "word was had with the police". Ms Amos's children were not even in trouble with the police.

Though her case was clearly a challenge to the truancy officials, dropping this sort of bomb on an already fragile family is cruel. The education secretary, Estelle Morris, yesterday welcomed the jail sentence and spoke of it as "sending a message" to all parents. Ms Morris must be a miserable minister if the only way she can send a message to parents is by seizing some unfortunate mother and throwing her in jail. Why was the father not seized? Was that too difficult?

Ministers want to appear tough in their war on truancy, especially given the failure of their wars on drugs, hooliganism and mugging. But Oxfordshire magistrates are not obliged to dance to the Government's craving for publicity. Of the one million children who reportedly truant each day, the authorities could surely have chosen a less pathetic case for exemplary-punishment. Ms Amos must consider herself the "collateral damage" of mediadriven politics.

I do not regard myself as Left-wing or soft on crime. I believe prisons are needed to protect the public from hardened criminals. But I have to pinch myself to see the Amos case as anything but the 19th century revived. It might be taken from the BBC's weekend re-enactment of Charles Dickens's childhood.

The cost of taking Ms Amos from her children and putting her behind London bars is £22,500 a year. It would be cheaper to pay a personal tutor for the children, or a mentor to help look after them.

"There must be another way of teaching kids a lesson without locking their mother away," said the girls' sister. Apparently, none that Oxfordshire magistrates or the Home Office or Ms Morris could envisage.

Truancy is wrong. It deprives children of learning and leaves them at the mercy of the streets. But truancy is rarely the wilful act of a parent. Children cannot be driven to school with the barrel of a gun. Nor are schools blameless. Teachers frequently "play truant" from their classes by falsely calling in sick or going on courses during term. Besides, a school I know in north-east London regards a 20 per cent truancy rate as the only way it can function. If the truants turned up there would be chaos.

This Government eulogises family cohesion one minute and the next it uses breaking that cohesion as a form of parental punishment. This is total hypocrisy. Sixty per cent of women in prison have children under 18. The children rarely have fathers and such imprisonment regularly means family collapse. The state is punishing children as a way of punishing their parents. It is a modern version of the whipping boy. I am surprised that such punishment is not "cruel and unnatural" under European law. It is state-sponsored child abuse. That a Labour education secretary can welcome it is astonishing.

Britain is obsessed with jailing women. The numbers have doubled in seven years and are soaring towards the Victorian peak of 4,000. Almost none of these women is Category A, violent or a threat to society. A third are first-time offenders, usually for failing to pay a fine. The overwhelming majority have fallen foul of the drugs laws, 40 per cent as drug addicts. If Ms Amos is not an addict on going to prison, she will be lucky not to leave as one.

Locking up women for parental inadequacy is primitive. It is a sign not just that family has failed but that neighbourhood and school have failed. It signifies a collapse of social morality, a retreat into crude, medieval discipline. These women are not street thugs or tyrants, about whom ministers seem able to do nothing. They are victims. The only help politics can offer is to put them behind bars.