Women's Life Behind Bars: Punishment or Reform? | |
Washington, D.C. 05 July 2006 |
The fastest growing population in the American prison system is women; over 950,000 women are currently under some form of correctional supervision. Some prison reform advocates say time behind bars may pay the inmates' debt to society, but society is the loser in the long run, they add, because of the often devastating effect incarceration has on female prisoners' families.
"MCI Framingham, where I did my research, is the oldest running prison for women in America," she says. "It was the perfect location to spend some time because I could tell, through spending time there, the whole history of women in prison in this country, as well as some of the stories of women who are in prison today."
Rathbone says she found many aspects of life behind bars familiar. "Like any building being lived in by 500 to 600 women, it was really a space of women getting together, trying to help each other, perhaps falling into rather bitter cliques," she says. "But certainly not a place where women were attacking each other or threatening each other, the way so often happens in men prisons. This comes from the reality that almost none of them are violent offenders. More than two-thirds of men are incarcerated for crimes against people and property, like theft, assault, murder and so forth. The same amount of women, more than two-thirds, are incarcerated for crimes that have to do with bringing pain and injury only to themselves, crimes related to sex abuse and drug abuse."
She was surprised to learn that most of the women at Framingham were the primary caretakers of their children. "The fact that they have been locked up for often long sentences for these minor, nonviolent crimes means that their children are left without any caretaker at all," she says. "So not only are we punishing the mothers for their questionable choices, but we're also punishing the generation after them."
"What really concerns me more than anything is the ability of these women to take care of their children," says Massachusetts State Representative Kay Khan, a strong advocate for protecting inmates' mother-child relationships.
Massachusetts state representative Kay Khan |
Author Christina Rathbone says sometimes, something as simple as a free phone call can make a huge difference for children. "Most people in prison can only make collect calls from prison," she says. "That means that if their child is in the foster care system, they can never call their children because no state agency accepts collect calls. Many of the children I met and spoke with didn't really understand why it was that their mothers couldn't come home. And more troubling, didn't understand why their mothers couldn't call them on their birthday or at holidays."
Rathbone says while it's crucial to maintain the bond between mothers behind bars and children outside prison, any effort to reform the current criminal justice system must look beyond the end of the women's sentences. "Too large a segment of our population believes that offering education to people in prison is a waste of money, when it has actually been proven time and time again in studies that it costs infinitely less money to educate someone in prison and then have them released and not return to prison than to do nothing with them in there and have them just come right back," she says, "because it costs an average of about $40,000 a year to hold someone in prison in this country. $40,000 a year! That's more than it costs to go to Harvard and we're getting nothing for it, not even a high school diploma."
Rathbone says these women came into prison under-employed, but if they're given the appropriate educational and training opportunities, they will leave prison with options for making a decent living - and life - for themselves and their children.
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