Women in Prison
The growing number of women in prison in the United States is soaring at an alarming rate. Despite the fact that women prisoners make up only ten percent of the jail and prison populations they are filling the women’s prisons at a five hundred percent increase in comparison to a only twenty years ago. Usually they are arrested for committing non-violent or drug related crimes. Women are being given harsher and longer terms of incarceration and this is making for problems in the prison system. Prisons are not designed for women and their needs. They were designed primarily for men and so the same plan has been used to house and care for women. The problem is that there are many health issues for women that differ greatly from those of men. These issues need to be dealt with if there is any hope that women leaving jail will be rehabilitated and ready to move on with their lives as good American citizens.
Too often women who are jailed have suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse. This is not to excuse the crimes they committed, but it is a consideration that most men do not have to deal with. Due to these issues women are also more likely to have illnesses that must be tended to while they are in prison. This can include sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis C as well as cervical cancer. These issues are largely ignored. So is the abuse problem in the prisons themselves. The staff at prisons including the guards and medical staff often sexually abuses women. Fear keeps them from complaining about it, but unexpected pregnancies can be the fallout of sexual abuse. They can also be the results of family visits with a spouse.
The resulting pregnancies can be a big problem. You would think with so many women in prison being pregnant, either because they get pregnant while their or they enter the system in that condition, that there would be some system set up to make sure they get the right amount of calories, proper prenatal care and education of pregnancy and child birth. But, this is not the way it is. Not only that, but most prisons only give a woman a limited time, twenty four to seventy two hours, to bond with their babies before taking them away and handing them over to a relative or into the hands of a foster family until the prisoner gets out. There are a few prisons in the United States that have tried to improve this situation by allowing the women to raise their babies in prisons with them.
California has taken this a step further and has a program that allows female prisoners to have their children in a special designed prison. This program is only open to those who have committed non-violent crimes. These women in prison still have to work; they get up at six a.m. and feed their children by seven a.m. before the kids go to the day care area and the mothers go to classes, therapy or begin work. This program is under fire from women’s groups who object to these women living a privileged life. They have to fight to put their kids into good day care while female prisoners have their children with them. Yet, statistics have proven that women who are in these programs in California have only a fifteen percent rate of return to prison life while those who are away from their children have a forty seven percent return rate.
