Linda - not her real name - remembers vividly the time her daughter came to visit her in Holloway prison for the first time.

"She was only three-and-a-half and she wanted me to play with her, and to walk around with her - but of course I couldn't move from my chair.

"I couldn't put my arms round her and when the time came for her to leave I couldn't explain why I wasn't able to come with her."

Linda was arrested as a first offender in 1997 after smuggling 750 grams of cocaine from Jamaica.

Contact with her family was severed immediately and she went straight from remand to court and then to prison for a seven-year sentence.

"I knew I had committed a serious crime - but I always thought I would have time to sort things out with my daughter. I think I pushed the fact we'd be split up to the back of my mind.

"She had to stay with my sister for a time - but then went back to Jamaica to live with my mother for 15 months."

Eventually, Linda's daughter was able to return to the UK and Linda was given a "compassionate licence" which allowed her to leave prison twice a month to rebuild her relationship.

"I was lucky that I was able to go out to see her, but there was some distance between us.

"I got parole after three-and-a-half years, but even when I got out I would look at my friends' children who were about the same age as my daughter was when I went inside - and I would think about all the growing up time I had missed with her."

More than 10,000 children a year are split from mothers who are serving prison sentences, according to the Prison Reform Trust.

'Degraded'

Women prisoners are the fastest growing sector of the prison population. Between 1993 and 2001 they increased by 145 per cent. There are now about 4,400 women prisoners in England and Wales.

And the conditions they face in jail are also of serious concern to welfare groups.

Linda said she was "degraded" by her time on remand, being strip searched and forced to sleep on a mattress "covered in blood".

"A lot of women are committing crimes because of poverty or drugs - but they are not violent offences. And women don't have the same rates of reoffending as men.

"The government should look at more ways of dealing with crime other than locking people up and creating more problems when they come out."