Special Report: Mothers Behind Bars
Sarah From is the Director of Public Policy and Communications for the Women’s Prison Association. The WPA has been working for a long, long time to help women with criminal justice histories realize new possibilities for themselves and for their families. Sarah joined me last year for a Radio Mom Show segment dealing with the subject of ‘Mothers Behind Bars.’ Here is a transcript of the interview…..
RM: A couple of weeks ago, there was a story in the news about a mother who had been jailed and separated from a two month old nursing child. This mother was eventually released and reunited with her son. But I would imagine there are many stories out there that don’t have such hopeful endings. Sarah, how many moms are currently in prison?
SF: This is a number that has really just skyrocketed in the last 30 years. There are currently over 200,000 women in prison and jail. We know that 2/3 of them are mothers of children under the age of 18. We also know that the growth has really just been astounding. From 1977 to 2004, the number of women in prison has grown by 757% and again, the majority of them are mothers.
RM: Do you know how many women are in fact pregnant when they enter the prison system?
SF: Well, the best estimates we have are that about 6% of women are pregnant when they enter prison. But when you include women who have had a baby within 1 year of their arrest, that number jumps to almost 1 in 4.
RM: Now this might be a silly question to ask, but do women end up in prison for the same reasons that men do?
SF: Some of the reasons are the same, but a lot of them are different. The number of women in prison for violent crimes, for example, is smaller for women than it is for men. Women tend to be in prison, about a third of them are there for drug crimes; about a third for what are called property crimes, which includes things like theft and fraud; and about a third for violent crime.
But when you really start to unpack both the violent crimes and the property crimes, you often find substance abuse, trauma, and mental health issues behind those crimes as well. We know that women in prisons have higher rates of mental health issues, certainly of past trauma including sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, and substance abuse than their male counterparts. For women, these factors really contribute to the crimes that they commit and to ultimately their involvement in the criminal justice system.
RM: What impact does the gender of the incarcerated parent on the children and their arrangements for child care?
SF: We know that of the mothers in prison, 2/3 of them were the primary caretaker of the child before they went to prison. When the mother goes to prison it really is a big issue about where the child goes. When men go to prison, at least in New York State when a man goes to prison, 88% of the time the child goes to the mother. But in the mother’s case, when the mother goes to prison, only 20% of the time does the child go to the father. We know that the majority of children wind up with female relatives of the mother, usually a grandmother, sister, aunt, and then about 20% of the children do wind up in the foster care system.
RM: Sarah, I know that you’ve just returned from a visit to a parenting facility in a maximum security prison. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your experience?
SF: Sure. I actually had the chance to visit two parenting centers; one at a men’s maximum security prison, and one at a women’s maximum security prison, both in New York State.
It’s worth noting that in the men’s prisons, there are a lot of efforts to really work on parenting skills and maintain connections with children on the men’s side as well. But in terms of what I saw with the mothers, New York state is lucky in that we have some of the model programs in the country for connecting children with their mothers while they’re incarcerated. Even so, it is a really rough road for the mothers.
Some of the barriers that they’re facing are simple geography. Most mothers are incarcerated up to 100 miles from where their children are. This means that the visits to the prisons can be, just in terms of time but also in terms of how much it costs to visit, can be really prohibitive. As a result, women don’t get a lot of visits at all, especially from their children. It can be really expensive and can eat up a week’s grocery money to transport a grandmother and two children to a prison that may be hundreds of miles away from home.
There are also a lot of barriers in terms of communication. Many states impose inflated phone rates for collect calls from prison. What this turns into is really a backdoor tax on the families of the incarcerated, so when Mom calls home from prison, the family has to decide whether or not they take the call versus whether they pay that electric bill because the calls can be upwards of $30 for just a few minutes, and those charges add up really quickly.
There are also a lot of issues from simple burned bridges. The women who are in prison, a lot of them have had past histories of substance abuse. They may not have been the best moms in the past. Even if they get to the place where they’re really working on their parenting and trying to maintain connections with their children, sometimes that’s not welcomed by the caretakers that are on the outside. So from top to bottom, there are a lot of issues, as well as the legal issues that go into maintaining custody of a child while you’re incarcerated, which are very complicated.
RM: What types of programs or services are generally provided to the mothers in prison?
SF: It really varies form state to state and from facility to facility. There is no constant across the board. One of the easiest things that prisons can do—and would be great if more women’s prisons and men’s prisons did this—is to set up more family-friendly visiting areas. Again, when a family is traveling, often from far away, they may have young children in tow and then they arrive at a visiting room which is crowded, it’s noisy, and all there is a table and chair available to a family to visit with their mom. That’s not a great situation for the child. The child may be bored, it’s already an uncomfortable situation, and the visiting rooms can get a little hectic.
So what some facilities have set up with great success are family areas and children’s areas of the visiting room, which is literally a separate room off the visiting room or even just a corner or separate area where there are rugs, and toys, and books where the kids can play. In the best case scenario, the kids—it’s not a babysitting center, but the kids are there, and they play with their moms. The mother gets to interact with her child in a really natural way that really simulates what they would be doing if they were playing at home in a home environment. That’s where you really can get the best and richest interaction between mother and child.
There are also some other programs that have been set up in Bedford Hills, the New York state facility, which are really model programs. One is a summer camp program where the children’s center actually pays for the children to come from all over the state and even from out-of-state for one week during the summer to spend time with their mom. The kids are hosted by local families, and then transported to the prison every day and spend time with their moms, each day has a theme. They do animal day, they do a day of making masks, they do a lot of playing outside in the outside area of the children’s center at the prison. It’s a really unique and really valuable bonding time for the mother and child.
RM: Sarah, tell me a little bit about the work of the Women’s Prison Association. What are some of the core areas that you provide services in?
SF: We’ve been around for over 160 years. We were founded by abolitionist Quakers back in the 1840s, and we work to provide services and advocacy for women who are at any stage of criminal justice involvement. Though we do work both in the community and in correctional facilities, our work is really focused on reducing reliance on incarceration and finding ways for women to succeed in their community. Whether they haven’t gone to prison, they are in prison and are returning to the community, or they’ve actually already returned to the community.
We provide a slate of reentry services for women who are coming home, helping them obtain jobs, and housing, and health care, and reunite with their kids. We also run an alternative-to-incarceration program where women who would be serving relatively long sentences in upstate prisons instead are sentenced by the court to come live at our alternative program which is located in the heart of New York City where they leave during the day to go to drug treatment and therapy and job training and complete a pretty rigorous program. After they’re done, they report once they’re in the community back to us a couple times a week. It saves a lot of money to taxpayers because it’s a lot less expensive than prison. Women get what they actually need, which is an education, help with their resume, help getting their health stabilized and their family relationships stabilized.
We also do work in correctional facilities helping women prepare for release and supporting the efforts of women who are inside to advocate for themselves and support each other through the process of incarceration. Those are just a few of our programs, but we really do work with women who are at all stages of involvement in the criminal justice system.
RM: You specifically work in the area of public policy. Are there any current pieces of legislation or policy agenda items that our listeners should be made aware of?
SF: One of the most prominent pieces of legislation which has passed the house but hasn’t yet gone through the senate is the Second Chance Act. This is the first federal piece of reentry legislation that gives money to states to set up reentry programs. It’s a great start at looking at this issue.
However, I would point your listeners to looking at the front end of the problem, which is, while dealing with people when they get out of prison is very important, I would argue that we need to look at why we’re sending so many women and so many people to prison in the first place. So laws around sentencing reform, which many states are taking on and trying to do better; mandatory minimum sentencing laws—which a lot of states have actually rolled back because they’re keeping people in prison for so many years for mostly drug crimes in ways that are very expensive and don’t do anything to curb the root issues of the problem—are things that listeners should be aware of.
There is also some federal momentum to reduce or equalize the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine in the federal sentencing law. Currently, crack cocaine gets you a much harsher sentence for a much smaller amount than does powdered cocaine.
We haven’t talked about racial disparity, but this is one driver of racial disparity in the system. These laws were set up at the height of the drug war, and have resulted in the vast overpopulation of the prison system by people of color.
RM: Can you say a little bit more about that?
SF: Sure. In terms of women, women’s prison population is nearly 2/3 women of color. What’s interesting is that in the last six years, the number of white women in prison has actually risen quite dramatically, as has the number of Hispanic or Latina women. At the same time, the number of African American women has actually dropped. However, this has had some effect but not much on the racial disparity because still, the imprisonment rate of an African American woman is over three times higher than that of a white woman. And the imprisonment rate of Hispanic or Latina women is nearly twice as high as that of white women.
RM: Sarah, can you suggest some ways that mothers listening today, who most likely are not in prison, might help to support mothers who are incarcerated?
SF: I think that there are a number of ways. First is to see what’s available in your community. There are organizations in many communities. As the prison population increases, there are more and more community organizations that are working with people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. I really just encourage your listeners to think of women in prison as people and as mothers who may have made bad choices under tough circumstances—many of whom just want to be good mothers and do want to get better and turn their lives around for themselves and their children. To the extent that there are organizations in listener’s communities, I would encourage you to reach out to those organizations and see if there’s help that you can provide, maybe by teaching a class or becoming a mentor to a woman who is coming out or to a child whose mother is currently incarcerated, or any other way that you can help these organizations.
Another way is to reach out to the women’s prison in your state and find out: do they have family-friendly visiting area? And if not, is there someone in the system who works on women’s issues or someone who works on parenting issues who you might be able to work with to help make that happen. And if there is already a parent [area], do they donations? Do they need books? Do they need someone to come in and help supervise visits or volunteer in the parents’ center? Those are some things listeners can do.
I would also encourage your listeners to check out our website which is www.wpaonline.org. That’s one way to keep abreast of what’s going on with Women in Prison in this country.