LAWS MOTIONSLINKSWOMEN PRISONERS
~Thomas Jefferson
Fifty-four percent (54%) of these women are African-American, (the U.S. population of African-Americans is approximately 14% of the total population). Taken together, the total female inmate population is estimated to account for approximately 168,000 children born to these women before and during incarceration. Ninety percent of incarcerated women are single parents.
Women account for approximately 29% of arrests made for index crimes. Violent crimes by women tend to involve aggravated assault or the death of someone intimate to the woman and too frequently are the result of action taken by the woman to protect herself against some male who has repeatedly battered her. The majority of convictions for women involve crimes of larceny and increasingly, illegal drug traffic. The female inmate has been seen to serve anywhere from 24 to 60 months less than her male counterpart for the same crime. She is also likely to have less concurrent and post-incarceration services available to her in prison than do her male counterparts.
The average age of the woman prisoner is 29 years old. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of women prisoners have not finished high school. Twenty-five percent of the political prisoners in the U.S. are women (Prison Activist Resource Center, 1997). The average woman prisoner comes from a single-parent home that has experienced incarceration of other family members. She is likely to be alcohol and/or drug addicted and have a history of sexual and/or physical abuse. She has been unemployed or employed at less than adequate-for-needs earnings and have at least one minor aged dependent prior to incarceration. She is likely to be incarcerated at a site too far away to receive visits and support from family and friends or to keep contact with her children. Her parental rights stand a good chance of being terminated permanently during her incarceration.
Although women are provided separate facilities and no longer housed together with men, the needs of women prisoners have either escaped the criminal justice system or been deemed not enough of a priority to make provisions for them. The very same problems confronting women in the free society are exacerbated in the incarcerated woman. Women represent the fastest growing segment of the population to develop seropositive status for HIV. Women have been the least violent of offenders seen in the United States and the most frequent victims of violence both in and out of prison.
Women are the caretakers of the children and the welfare of the children remains their foremost concern when they are incarcerated. One in 16 women entering U.S. prisons is pregnant (Dowling 1997). Abortions may be difficult to obtain or in cases of inmates impregnated by male guards, they are strongly encouraged. Seventy -five percent of all incarcerated women in the U.S. are mothers.
Women account for only 6% of the prison population in the U.S. and scarce resources, as always, are appropriated to the squeaky wheel. According to conventional wisdom, the aggressive nature of male institutions would seem to dictate the greater need for resources to be apportioned to those facilities. Women still fall into the traditional second class citizen slot they've always held in this patriarchal world and this is no less true in the realm of incarcerated women.
Simple medical attention, yearly gynecological examinations, pre and post-natal care, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, is simply not available to the vast majority of women in prison. Absent severe psychiatric illnesses women prisoners are quieter, more reflective, less violent and more supportive of one another inside of prison than are their male counterparts and endeavor to create a symbolic family life that they either miss due to the separation or never had in the first place, in an effort to ease the pain of incarceration and separation, whereas male prisoners tend to see themselves as more self-sufficient and can do their own time.
The results of mandatory minimum sentences for drug law violations has rendered the entire prison system overcrowded and women's facilities haven't been spared. The traditional costing basis for housing inmates is complicated for women by the estimated additional $20,000 per year tacked on to the bill for each child in foster care where there is no family to adequately care for children of incarcerated women.
There are a few innovative approaches to the problems of convict mothers. In the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women a nursery and overnight visits with children has begun to bridge the ill effects mothers and children suffer because of being separated.
In New York's Bedford Hills a nursery has been established in which pregnant prisoners are taught parenting skills before and after the birth of their children. Tennessee Prison for Women has a weekly prison sponsored weekend visitation program which allows a child up to six years old to have a weekend visit with his inmate-mother. The Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup has a program established by the Girl Scouts and with the assistance of the National Institute of Justice to focus on the mothers improving their parenting skills, offering traditional Girl Scout leadership and general adult development courses. The girls and their mothers work in two hour sessions on issues of self-esteem, drug abuse, relationships, coping skills, reproductive systems and prevention of teenage pregnancy. In the Federal Correctional Institution at Lexington, KY, a four part program called Parents and Children Together, (P.A.C.T.), was developed after 73 babies were born to the women inmates there in 1989. The program consists of parenting classes to assist inmate-mothers improve parenting and readjustment to return to family after incarceration. There is a children's area for the inmate-mother and child to spend time together. Techniques for inmate-mothers to parent long-distance are taught and prenatal and childbirth classes are provided. (Carmouche, 1989, Jones, 1989).
Social scientists have identified the inherent danger of interference with parent-child bonding in the first year of life as the chief antagonist to development of psychosocial abnormalities, specifically, the inability of the child to form close ties with others. While our women prisoners may indeed be lawbreakers, most are capable as well as desirous of being great mothers. It would seem to be in our overall best interest to facilitate this in every possible way.
The way the numbers look today we don't simply have 90,000 women in prison. We have 90,000 women in prison and 225,000 children at risk to follow in their mother's footsteps. If we have 90,000 women in prison at an estimated $30,000 per year, per inmate, for an average of 2 years and 225,000 children (estimated averages show approximately 2.5 children per female inmate) at an estimated $20,000 per child per year in foster care, then our 6% female prison population is costing approximately $14.4 billion to punish for crimes that may be directly relatable to their economic disadvantage, under education, poor choice of male companions, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism or any combination of these circumstances.
It does seem to have become the American way to throw money at problems as though the very exorbitance of the amounts are a solution instead of looking at the root causes of the problems and specifically directing funds to deal with specific problems. The threat of the next explosion of criminality in our population already overshadows the bounds of the juvenile justice system.
In California the concern for the children of inmate-mothers has taken the form of halfway houses where the inmate and her children reside during the last months of her sentence to provide some of these parenting skills and reorientation back to society.
The crimes of the majority of the population of women inmates do not seem to warrant the reverberating cost to society that incarceration brings. The punishment seems much too harsh to serve a retribution model of justice and one wonders what greater good is served by fostering conditions that almost certainly guarantee that the children of these women become seed for an already bloated correctional system of justice.
Is there any justice in a girl being sexualized by close family members, developing distorted perceptions of her world and inappropriate coping mechanisms that lead to crime and all the attendant abuses of the correctional system so that she may return to society further alienated, more damaged, disrespected, disempowered, feeling less safe and less cooperative with society? Can a public safety theory of justice be claimed while these things continue to occur?
At the Fresno Pacific College's Center for Peacemaking and Conflict Studies a restorative justice model is being developed and promulgated. Restorative justice is a process that seeks to Amake things as right as possible. The principles are simple. The first principle is that ACrime is primarily an offense against human relationships. Second, crime is a violation of law and assumes that laws are written to protect safety and fairness in human relationships. The concept involves the cooperation of offender and victims in an effort to heal and restore the human relationship. It uses encouragement, teaching new ways of acting and being in the community and intervention at the earliest point possible in response to crime that utilizes the natural community as much as possible. Offenders that are not ready to cooperate or who pose significant safety risks are placed in settings where the emphasis is placed on safety, values, ethics, responsibility, accountability, and civility, where they are exposed to the impact of their actions on the victims and invited to learn empathy and better skills to become a productive member of the community.
There is a strong aversion to the coercive tactics of other models of justice. The restorative model emphasizes the importance of the role of the community institutions that teach the moral and ethical standards that edify the community, to reclaim its offending members and the transforming ability of empathy, compassion, forgiveness and trust. (Claassen, 1997). The major obstacles to implementation of this type of model will be obvious to the aware. It isn't punitive enough to satisfy the retributionists. While it may prove to serve the greater good to reclaim our wayward members, it will require that individual community members become more involved with the process than merely being a taxpayer.
In the majority of women's facilities the prisoners can expect to be isolated and alone, confronted with more sexual abuse at the hands of their male guards, decreased privacy in the form of male guards attending while women prisoners shower, undress, be strip searched and have their body orifices probed for suspected contraband, all without criminal consequences to the guard. Males guards continue to hold contact positions over female prisoners in spite of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners authority concerning Custodial Sexual Misconduct, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the protections of the United States Constitution, all of which the United States has ratified and presumably agreed to in fact as the law of the land, but has failed miserably in truth.
In April 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) which has effectively compromised any real investigation and prosecutions of custodial sexual misconduct.
The true figures on how much sexual misconduct goes on will not emerge any time soon. The Department of Justice keeps no record of the complaints it regularly receives of custodial sexual misconduct. The Department of Justice keeps no record of the type of abuses complained of, nor even of the institution involved.
As one digs into the actual lives and experiences of those individuals remanded to its clutches, the real picture of criminal justice in America begins to look less and less like the pictures portrayed in the newspapers, movies and television. What begins to emerge is a portrait of sinister tyranny that would rival Dorian Gray's and on closer inspection would seem to be informed by the kind of mentality seen in Nazi Germany or perhaps the KKK.
If this tyranny can be visited upon the weakest, least able to defend among us with such a vengeance as we now see, how long will any of us remain noncriminals?
"Our task of creating a socialist America
can only succeed when those who would resist
us have been totally disarmed."
--Sara Brady, January 1994
[
References
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995. State and Federal Correctional Facilities Census, 1995 Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Justice.
Claassen, Ron 1995. Restorative Justice Fundamental Principles, 1995 Fresno Pacific College, Fresno, CA
(cerj.org/fundprinc.html)
Clear, Todd R., Cole, George F. 1997 American Corrections, 1997 Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA pp 586
Dowling, Claudia Glenn 1997, When Mom Can't Come Home, Part 2, The Way We Live October 1997, LIFE magazine, New York, NY
Dyer, Caneila A. 1997, Women In Prison: Their Family Relationships and Their Depiction in the Media, 1997, University of South Florida
Human Rights Watch, 1996 All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Womenm in U.S. State Prisons 1996 (hrw.org/summaries/s.us96d.html)
Prison Activist Resource Center, 1997 Prison Connections:
Eleven Things You Should Know About Women in Prison In The U.S., 1997
(persephone.hampshire.edu/wmpig/vin4/eleven.html)