A weekly programme which focuses on people and the situations which shape their lives
Reporters: Jim Douglas Henry, Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Gillian Strickland, Desmond Wilcox, Harold Williamson

For the first time women serving sentences in notorious Holloway Prison have been allowed to talk face-to-camera about life behind bars. A Man Alive team, invited by the Home Office, talked to prisoners about lives which are spent, day by day, year after year, in the confines of a prison built 120 years ago.

Not many women end up in prison. Few are professional criminals, hardly any belong to gangs; almost all of them are young. They're an exclusive group - compared with the 40,000 men in prisons - only 1,000 strong.

In the first of two programmes they talk about what brought them to Holloway; what prison does to them; and how they react to the prison officers who, themselves, have been stripped of every illusion but who never seem to give up hope.