The force of Pauline Campbell's (pictured) passion was inspiring, says Natalie Hanman. Photograph: Graham Turner
I first met Pauline Campbell, who was found dead by her daughter's graveside last week, at a service station on the outskirts of Manchester in the summer of 2006 writes Natalie Hanman. I was researching a feature on women and the criminal justice system, and Eric Allison, the Guardian's prison correspondent, told me that she was the person to speak to.
My partner drove me there and said he'd wait in the car while I went inside. I thought I'd only be 20 minutes or so - I was after some contacts for women who had served sentences in prisons in the UK, but I didn't really know what to expect. An hour later, wondering where I had got to, he came to find me and, peering through the window of Little Chef, saw Campbell and I sitting at a table, seemingly deep in conversation.
And we were. Nothing could have prepared me for meeting Pauline Campbell in person. Clutching a pile of paper heavy with the stories of women let down by the UK criminal justice system, she struck me as determined, intelligent and assured, her straight back, smart suit and neatly bobbed hair no doubt an authoritative armour against the weighty grief of a mother bereaved that she so clearly carried with her. As Julie Bindel wrote in her moving tribute to the prison campaigner, it was only when Campbell spoke that you got the sense of a woman who would be howling in pain if she was not able to keep herself so busy campaigning for the rights of women in prison. The force of her passion for the cause was incredibly humbling and inspiring, rooted as it was in such a devastating personal experience - the death of her daughter Sarah Campbell, aged 18, after taking an overdose of prescription drugs in Styal prison, Cheshire, in 2003.
Pauline Campbell would have berated me for that last sentence, as I saw her do many times, voice thick with measured grief and anger, every time someone omitted to say that Sarah had died in the "care" of Styal prison. It was the way she signed off her many campaigning emails, too - her constant reminder to the world that her daughter's tragic death was avoidable.
Campbell's unstinting activism - the 28 vigils outside prisons each time a woman died a self-inflicted death, which led to her being arrested 15 times (how could the police dare to arrest her?) - are recounted in Campbell's obituary. Her direct action moved other people to act, too, as is evident in a letter sent to the Guardian following her death last week.
She certainly made a real, deep impression on me, and the type of journalist I want to be, as I'm sure she did on the many people she met. Since her death, the tributes have been flowing thick and fast with sadness and a great deal of respect. You can read some of them here, here and here, including a comment from Pauline Hart, the mother of Jennifer Clifford, one of the 14 women who died from self-harm in the "care" of UK prisons in 2003, the year of Sarah Campbell's death. "The world has lost a good person today," Hart writes. Indeed it has.
