TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110890/1108103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.1 KB | 199 lines

                h                                                              NATION, Page 20

The View from Behind Bars


The number of women inmates tripled in the past decade. Most
are mothers. They face a system designed and run by men for men

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Scott Brown/Los Angeles,
Julie Johnson/Washington and Naushad S. Mehta/New York


    "In a small cramped room we would hold each other close, and
he would say, `Home, Mommy, home.' When our time was over,
[guards] would literally have to pull him from my arms
screaming, crying, kicking and shouting, `Mommy, I want my
mommy!'"

    -- Terri E. Rachals, a prisoner at the Georgia Women's
Correctional Institution, recalling a visit with her son, now
seven


    What is the fastest-growing group of women in the U.S.?
Sadly, it may be women behind bars. The female population of
American jails and prisons roughly tripled during the 1980s; in
1989 alone the number of women in lockups rose nearly 22%. And
while there are still almost 17 men doing time for every female
prisoner -- 663,998 men and 39,689 women in federal and state
lockups at last count on Dec. 31, 1989 -- the women have been
gaining (if that is the word) in that respect too. Their share
of the total prison population rose from 4.2% in 1981 to 5.6%
in 1989.

    The reason for this explosive increase can be put in a
single word: drugs. As city, state and federal governments have
cracked down on the sale and use of narcotics, ever growing
numbers of women have been caught in the dragnet. About 60% of
all women in federal prisons have been convicted of drug-related
offenses, but that tells only part of the story. Many other
crimes -- theft, prostitution, armed robbery -- are also drug
related. At the Rose M. Singer jail for women on New York City's
Rikers Island, warden Robert Brennan estimates that drugs
underlie the incarceration of 95% of his inmates.

    More ironic, in the field of crime, women are achieving a
dubious sort of equality with men. Mandatory minimum-sentencing
laws passed in the late 1970s and early '80s have forced judges
to hand out long sentences to women. Says Carole Laughton, an
inmate of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in
Clinton, N.J.: "With equal opportunity and all that,we're
getting longer time. It has hurt us."

    Once women are locked up, however, they swiftly find they
are no longer equal. Until recently, there were so few women in
prison that little attention was paid to their special needs.
Even now, prison authorities argue that the number of females
is so small, relative to males, that there are no "economies of
scale" in designing special programs for them. Female prisoners
are thus confined in a system primarily designed, built and run
by men for men.

    Women, to be sure, share many of the problems of male
prisoners, notably overcrowding. The California Institution for
Women at Frontera currently bulges with 2,500-odd inmates,
instead of the 1,011 it was built to hold. At the Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., many inmates
are double bunked; a visitor can easily see beds sticking up
over the half walls that separate individual cubicles. With two
lockers and two small metal closets filling up the narrow
confines of each space, prisoners barely have room to turn
around.

    But many difficulties faced by women prisoners have no
parallels among men. While male lockups may train inmates for
such high-paying trades as welding and mechanics, courses in
women's facilities still concentrate on homemaking or low-paid
skills like beautician and launderer. The pity is that women
inmates, often the sole support of their families, are "more
motivated career-wise than the men," says Paul Bestolarides, who
directs a program at the Northern California Women's Facility
in Stockton that includes training in landscaping and electrical
work. Too often a woman leaves prison even less equipped to earn
an honest living than her male counterpart.

    Health care, or the lack of it, is a crisis in some women's
prisons. The federal system's only hospital for women, in
Lexington, Ky., has not consistently employed a full-time
obstetrician-gynecologist -- a shocking deficiency given that
Justice Department figures show that 1 in 4 women entering
prison is pregnant or has recently given birth. Pregnant inmates
typically get little or no prenatal care, though many are drug
abusers with a high risk of medical complications.

    About 80% of women entering state prisons are mothers, 85%
with custody of their children. By contrast, 60% of male state
prisoners are fathers, and less than half have custodial
responsibility. Though a convicted drug dealer hardly fits the
stereotype of a good mother, jailed mothers say separation from
their offspring is the harshest punishment. Their alternatives
are grim: put the children up for adoption, release them for
foster care or, most often, leave them with relatives.

    With any of these options, there is no guarantee that the
mother will not lose touch with her kids. Often she will not
understand the child-welfare system, says Brenda Smith of the
National Women's Law Center in Washington; she will not, for
instance, know the name of the social worker or judge who
oversees her child's case. Begi Ahmetovic, 30, who is serving
4 to 12 years for shooting her husband, left her two sons, now
10 and 12, in the care of their paternal aunt. "She doesn't let
my kids come to see me," Ahmetovic laments, and she wonders
whether they see the frequent letters she writes. Ahmetovic
saves copies to show them someday "that I didn't forget them,
and that I love them." The aunt says she is trying to protect
the children from further trauma.

    Visits from children are rare in any case, because women's
prisons, like those for men, are often all but inaccessible by
public transportation. When children do manage to get there, the
sessions can be heartrending. Some facilities, including the
Georgia Women's Correctional Institution at Hardwick, where
Rachals is housed, have created bright, toy-filled visiting
rooms, but more often the quarters are grim and frightening. In
Chicago's Cook County jail, a thick glass pane separates family
visitors from prisoners. "It's a terrifying thing for a child
to reach out and try to touch his mother, and find out he
can't," says Gail Smith, who heads Chicago Legal Aid to
Incarcerated Mothers.

    Rarely, if ever, do the female prisoners get any help from
the fathers of their children. In fact, says Allyn Sielaff, New
York City's correction commissioner, husbands, boyfriends and
brothers usually drop a woman convict "like a hot potato." While
wives and girlfriends line up to visit male inmates, visiting
days at women's prisons are virtually all-female affairs.

    Forgotten by their men, women prisoners turn to one another
for solace. Like jailed men, some form homosexual relationships;
some authorities believe the number to be as high as 40%. More
striking, the females often form surrogate "families" behind
bars, with women of different ages playing the roles of mothers,
daughters and aunts. "There's an older lady that lived in my
room with me. She was just like my mother," says Susie Ruales,
27, who is serving 12 years for cocaine possession in the
Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna, Fla.

    Ruales and her "mother" both happen to be Hispanic. But
other such families are interethnic. That would be highly
unlikely in a men's prison, where blacks, Hispanics and whites
often segregate themselves and interact only violently. Warders
who have worked with inmates of both sexes unanimously testify
that the women are far less violent. In California there has
been no riot among women prisoners in the past dozen years.

    There is, however, one big exception to the camaraderie in
women's prisons: older inmates cannot abide the "crack kids,"
brassy, street-smart young women in their late teens and early
20s. Dolores Barnes, 52, a three-time inmate in New Jersey's
Clinton prison, launches into a classic
what's-the-matter-with-kids-today tirade: "They can't cook,
clean, wash clothes or take care of themselves. They have no
respect for their elders and no obligation to their kids." These
"animalescents," as other prisoners sometimes call them, often
squabble among themselves. "There are a lot of fights," says
Rikers inmate Arlethea M., 18. "They throw the phone at each
other and hit people on the head with an iron."

    Unfortunately, as long as the public's get-tough-on-crime
mood lasts -- and it has endured for the better part of a decade
-- the number of crack kids and women prisoners seems bound to
keep soaring. Which means that their particular needs can no
longer be ignored. Some steps have been taken. Rikers Island,
for example, maintains a nursery for babies born to prisoners,
allowing the babies to stay with their mothers for up to a year.
Hardwick and other institutions have parenting and outreach
programs for inmates' children. Federal legislation enacted last
year makes pregnant prisoners and their newborns eligible for
special food supplements. And more prisons are expanding drug-
and alcohol-treatment programs.

    Those who work with female inmates are happy to see the
changes but wonder why more isn't being done in the first place
to prevent women from falling into the ruts that lead to prison.
"Is incarceration the most rational way to deal with a woman who
is a drug addict?" asks commissioner Sielaff. The country would
do well to invest in programs for drug abusers, for battered
women, for incest survivors and for the children of inmates,
says Elaine Lord, superintendent at Bedford. But instead, the
nation's prison systems, much like the overburdened school
systems, have become the social program of last resort, a
catchall for society's neglected troubles. "It's a very
expensive way to deal with social problems," notes Lord. And an
ineffective one that breeds recidivism and new generations of
jailbirds. It is useless to go on endlessly building new
prisons, says Sielaff. "We can't build our way out of the
problem."