A STUDENT who killed herself in a Scottish young offenders’ institution was “not built for prison”, her allocated prison officer told an inquiry into her death.
Katie Allan, 21, was “a well-liked popular prisoner”, but was being bullied for tobacco by another inmate, as well as by others over the hair-loss condition alopecia she had, the fatal accident inquiry at Falkirk Sheriff Court heard.
Two young prisoners, who were not named, had to be transferred to other jails after Katie’s death over fears they might be blamed over what had happened.
Heather Morrison, one of two personal officers who dealt with Katie during her time at the jail, Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution, Stirlingshire, said of Katie: “She was lovely.”
Ms Morrison, 47, told solicitor-advocate Leanne Cross, for the Crown: “To be honest she was different, and not built for prison.
“A lot of the young women have a background with the secure care system.
“They were already used to the kind of system that’s in prison.
“Katie wasn’t.
“She was more mature and more grounded than the other girls.”
The probe — which is also looking at the death in Polmont in October 2018 of 16-year old William Brown, known as William Lindsay — was shown intelligence reports suggesting that someone in the jail had been bullying Katie for tobacco and that she had also received “a lot of abuse over the telephone from her boyfriend”.
The prison intelligence report said Katie’s boyfriend had informed her the month that she died that he was “dating other women”.
Ms Morrison said she did not have access to the reports, which were for managers, but she said she did have “direct experience of her returning crying and upset after a visit from her boyfriend” and was worried that due to her alopecia “her hair was coming out in clumps”+
Ms Morrison said Katie was friends with two other girls in the hall who were similar, but both had got out by the time of her death on June 4th 2018.
Ms Morrison said: “That was a big change — [after that] Katie never had the two friends she’d made — her little supports that she had.”
The inquiry also heard that the fact that Katie had a history of self-harm was not known to residential officers in her hall, and had not been mentioned in an admission form filled in by a mental health nurse when she arrived at Polmont on transfer from the former Cornton Vale women’s prison near Stirling where she had spent a few initial days after being sentenced.
The inquiry earlier heard that Katie, a “high achieving” Glasgow University student who continued studying even in jail, had not slept for three days running up to her death because of taunts and threats from other prisoners.
Katie told her mum, Linda Allan, that other inmates had called her “a baldy bastard, a fat cow and a snob, said that “the minute she came out of her cell she’d get battered”, that she “might as well go and top herself”, and shouted “Go hang yourself Katie, give us all peace”.
Mrs Allan, 56, a nurse, former Scottish government advisor, and herself an honorary clinical associate professor at Glasgow University, said that Katie had been “like a rabbit caught in the headlights” and “a fish out of water” after being jailed for 16 months in March 2018 for dangerous driving.
She said she had not expected to be jailed for the offence, in which a 15 year old boy was injured.
Katie was found dead in her cell, having hanged herself.
The inquiry, before Sheriff Simon Collins KC, continues.
