Women are now the fastest growing segment of the prison population. There are now almost eight times the number of women in prison than there were just 30 years ago. This dramatic increase in the number of women serving time is not the result of a sudden female crime wave. Instead, it is the unintended result of laws taking discretion away from judges in meting out sentences.
Mandatory minimum sentencing statutes prevent judges from considering such factors as the age of children under the care of the defendant, her crime free past or the extent of the woman’s involvement in the crime (often merely taking phone messages for a husband or boyfriend). Instead, the judge is forced to attribute to the woman all the bad acts of the conspiracy, and sentence her as if she had as large a role as the main conspirators.
Because this impact of mandatory minimums was unforeseen, our prisons were not prepared for the influx of women. When there is an increase in male inmates, the prisons just cram more bunks into gyms, chapels, hallways and classrooms. Of course, this has been done in the limited number of women’s prisons that exist. But when those options are exhausted, the prison system cannot simply ship the women to a men’s prison. First, the men have to be sent to another facility. Then, they must make significant renovations. Female inmates need more medical care, including prenatal and gynecological attention that male inmates don’t need. Women need different clothing, separate showers and toilet facilities.
In addition, women prisoners should be treated differently than men. Such gender-specific factors as needs related to children, and histories of spousal and child sexual abuse must be taken into account. As the former Director of the Nevada DOC, Jackie Crawford, has written, “administrators of women’s facilities need to … address female offenders’ behavioral patterns since the inmates tend to be more emotional and develop more social relationships within prison than men do.” This calls for thorough retraining of the staff before the women inmates arrive.
One glaring example of the need to reexamine rules originally designed for men when they are applied to women inmates is the policy that inmates must be shackled when taken to a hospital. This generally makes a lot of sense. However, several states apply this policy across the board – even to women inmates in labor! This is perverse and barbaric. Keeping women in shackles as they give birth to a child is terribly cruel and unnecessary. Having been present at the birth of each of my three children, I can attest that there is no way my wife could have leapt off the gurney and fled the hospital.
Facilities need to be adapted to female inmates, too. The first prison I did my time at was FPC Dublin. After I had been there ten months, the Bureau of Prisons redesignated it as a women’s camp, and our inmate labor pool revamped the facility to accommodate women. The visiting room was cut in half to allow for a larger medical facility. This surprised me, because our family visits were already cut short because the visiting room was too small to hold all of our visitors. When I asked one of the counselors how the new, even smaller visiting room would be able to fit all of the women’s families, his answer shocked me.
He said that women receive far fewer visits than men, and in the years since that time I have found out that what he told me is true: The number of visits for women prisoners is far less than for men.
The explanation I have been given is that families tend to stick by men who have committed a crime, but often abandon a woman because she has “gone bad”. In addition, women inmates often have children who must be cared for, and that burden often falls on aunts, sisters, and grandmothers who already have children or other responsibilities of their own. With prisons generally located great distances from our urban centers, the difficulties and costs of traveling that far with several children make it extremely difficult to visit. Also, the caregiver is frequently angry or resentful at having the burden of taking care of the children thrust on them because of criminal activity. The upshot is that women inmates don’t get to see their children very often, and this is as bad for the children as it is for the mothers.
There is a growing trend to build facilities that allow young children to stay with their mothers during incarceration. This may strike some as being a ridiculous idea. After all, the mother is “bad”, and we don’t want her children growing up among criminals. However, for those of us who place a high value on families, keeping children with their mothers makes perfect sense. There is no stronger bond than a mother’s love for her child. And in all but a few cases, that bond isn’t severed, even by committing a crime. Living with their mom, albeit in prison, is far preferable than bouncing from foster home to foster home. Dr. Mary Byrne of the Columbia University School of Nursing has said, “If a baby isn’t cared for by its mother, who else can function as the primary caregiver?” Dr. Byrne adds, “Sometimes the baby is passed around and nobody develops a strong attachment to the child.”
Obviously, the inmate mothers are carefully screened to make sure the child will be well cared for and safe. Experience has shown that in facilities that allow women to live with their children, bad conduct among the prisoners drops dramatically. The fact is that the mothers are very protective of their children as well as those of the other inmates.
For most of this century, American prisons allowed mothers to keep their children with them. New York has had a prison nursery program in place since 1901. Nebraska, Massachusetts, and Ohio currently have them, and California is set to open one in the fall of this year. A 1987 United Nations survey of 70 nations found that only four—the United States, Liberia, Suriname, and the Bahamas—routinely separate incarcerated mothers from their babies. (See: “Nursery Program Aids Jailed Moms in Four States”.)
Fortunately, as Americans seek to be “smart on crime” rather than just “tough on crime,” many more states are moving to establish programs to allow mothers to keep their children with them during the first years of a child’s life when it is so important to establish good relationships.
The bottom line is that each prisoner is created in God’s image and should never be treated in a way that degrades them. If you are interested in finding out more on how imprisonment affects women and their children, the Justice Fellowship page on Women in Prison has links to many wonderful resources.
Additionally, if you are interested in ways you can help incarcerated women and their children, please consider participating in Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program this coming Christmas season and all year long!
In His service,
Pat Nolan,
Vice President, Prison Fellowship |
