This June 1, 2018, file photo shows a housing unit in the west section of the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix in Collegeville, Pa.
Jacqueline Larma / The Associated Press
This June 1, 2018, file photo shows a housing unit in the west section of the State Correctional Institution at Phoenix in Collegeville, Pa.
Jacqueline Larma / The Associated Press
Anne from York asked us what prisons and jails are doing about women who give birth during incarceration. I hate to start your day off on a bit of a downer, Anne, but let’s go ahead and dive into what the numbers tell us about how many women are locked up, what happens to them and their children if they give birth, and where there have been policy changes.
First off, let’s discuss the population size of women in county jails. Nationally, the number of women in jails or prisons grew at a significantly faster rate than men, a trend that started in the 1980s. In a report released last fall, the Prison Policy Initiative and ACLU found that 101,000 women were locked up in jails, slightly more than the 99,000 held in prisons. Out of those women held in county jails, more than half are there without a conviction and are just waiting for a trial or sentencing.
(In case you didn’t know, the difference between jails and prisons has to do with crimes and sentences. By and large across the country, prisons house people with felonies who have sentences of 12 months or longer, while jails house people awaiting a trial date or they’re serving a sentence of less than one year. Pennsylvania is odd in that county “jails” are called prisons because people who are serving up to two years for a crime will be housed in them.)
The Prison Policy Initiative also found that the women’s incarcerated prison population in Pa. grew from 15 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 42 people in 2015. Currently, about 2,500 women are incarcerated in Pennsylvania — roughly 6 percent of the total prison population.
And with a long history of correctional facilities catering to men, corrections agencies can struggle to accommodate women. For example, many women held in prisons or jails don’t have easy access to feminine hygiene products. One woman I spoke with said she and other inmates would have to cut up used underwear and wrap toilet paper around the cloth to make DIY panty liners.
But what about something as complicated as giving birth?
For a broader national perspective, I spoke with a former coworker, Alysia Santo at The Marshall Project, who reported for a year on this issue and produced the documentary “Tutwiler” alongside the Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon (“Heroin(e)”, “Recovery Boys”), which will begin streaming this year.
Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:
Joseph: Alysia, tell me what you were doing in Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler Prison?
Alysia: We wanted to document the experience of women who are pregnant and incarcerated in one of the most notorious women’s prisons in the country. For context, in 2014 the Department of Justice did an investigation and found some really shocking findings about what was going on there and the amount of sexual abuse happening with women in custody there. Since then, they’ve done a lot to try and turn that around, which is one of the reasons they opened up the door to us and allowed us to show a program they were proud of, a prison doula program. A couple years ago they started to provide each pregnant woman incarcerated there with a doula, who would support them through the entire pregnancy and be there for them during labor, which the women used to have to go through alone.
J: Tell me about the patterns nationwide. Nationally, we’ve seen female incarceration rates skyrocket. There are more women incarcerated now than ever before. So, it stands to reason that there will be more pregnant women. How have prisons handled that?
A: Well, I think the interesting thing is that there is no mandatory national standard for the care of women who are pregnant and incarcerated. So states do it all in different ways. When you think about nutrition, for example, many state departments of correction do not have guidelines for their women’s prisons to follow in terms of what is required for those in their care who are pregnant. So, you’ve got babies in stomachs growing, needing particular nutrients, and you have prisons that don’t actually have a policy that requires them to provide that nutrition.
J: Do we know what happens to the babies?
A: One of the things that stands out about this topic, in particular, is it’s not tracked. The most recent data from the Bureau of Justice statistics was collected 15 years ago. We don’t know exactly how many pregnant women go to prison or jail, and we don’t know what happens to those babies, either. Some children are taken by the state, and this is one of the more traumatizing outcomes because at least for the women I spoke with, they don’t know where their children are. So they spent nine months carrying a baby in their belly. And then all of a sudden within a day of giving birth, they actually have absolutely no idea where their child is. And it’s something that’s hard to imagine.
J: Anything being done — good or bad — in regard to addressing this growing population?
A: Somewhat. There’s been some more attention paid to this than in the past, for one. There was recently a national survey conducted by an independent researcher to try and put a number on how many people in prison are pregnant. That’s important because it’s really hard to get people to think about solutions when we don’t know how many people this is affecting. I think a lot of people assume that pregnant women don’t get sent to prison, but it’s estimated that about 12,000 pregnant women experience incarceration every year in this country. It’s also becoming more and more of a topic at correctional conferences. and, there’s the growth of prison doula programs, not just the one we documented in Alabama, but there’s a doula program in Minnessota’s prison system. These doulas are trying to spread their work across the country and they’re getting some traction on it. So, I think there are more people understanding that this is something that happens in prison, and it’s something that should be paid attention to.
Thanks for the question, Anne. If you want to learn more about other efforts legislators have made, here’s an article by WHYY and Keystone Crossroads about a package of bills that were aimed to help pregnant inmates. And here’s a quick explainer on what we do and don’t know about the issue, nationally. And thank you to everyone who submitted their questions to us in the past week. Keep them coming. Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday. — Joseph Darius Jaafari
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