Special: Women in Prison

By Cynthia E. GriffinSpecial to the NNPA from Wave Newspapers LOS ANGELES (NNPA) – With the campaign to amend the three strikes law defeated by voters and moving on to another battlefield, the impact of incarceration on communities of color, particularly African-Americans is again coming into focus. The picture is particularly grim when it comes to women. According to statistics from the California state Department of Corrections, by 2000 the female prison population had increased 311 percent in just 14 short years as a result of mandatory sentencing laws. And while African-Americans are only 7 percent of the state’s population, they represent 33.5 percent of California’s prison populace. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of all of the state’s inmates have substance abuse issues, and by 1999, 50.1 percent of all new female felon admissions where drug offenses – a 210 percent increase across 40 years. This compares to a 187 percent increase during the same period for men.Roughly 80 percent of the women are mothers, and the majority are single caretakers, according to Barbara Bloom, a researcher and co-author of the report “Profiling the Needs of California’s Female Prisoners.” Women in prison have an average of two children each, which equates to nearly 20,000 children with a mother in prison. And, according to Denise Johnston, director of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, an estimated 30 to 50 percent of male children of incarcerated parents will become incarcerated themselves. The figure for female children is 3 to 5 percent. Helena Payne is a living embodiment of that statistic. At 24 years old, she lived with her grandmother for 80 percent of her life because of her mother’s incarceration and alcohol addiction.”I’ve been in and out of institutions -jail and group homes – since I was 14, Payne said. “Fifteen months is the longest I’ve managed to stay out of an institution.” Describing herself as a rebellious youth who grew up on the streets without much adult supervision, Payne was convicted of robbery in connection with her 10-year drug addiction and spent 27 months in prison. Now the young adult is in a sober living facility in South Los Angeles operated by Susan Burton, a woman who can empathize with Payne’s situation. “A policeman killed my son in 1981, and by 1985, I was in all kinds of trouble because of the pain,” Burton said about the death of her then-5-year-old son. Before her son’s death, Burton said she had only experimented with drugs, but after he was run over, she descended into drug abuse and ended up in prison off and on for 19 years for possession of a controlled substance. Once she was released and finished addiction treatment, Burton began working with seniors trying to help them cut the cost of their medications. She wanted to get her license as a home health aide but discovered one crucial impediment – people convicted of felony drug possession cannot get a variety of health-related licenses. Still wanting to stay involved in community activism Burton thought back to her own experiences coming out of prison and realized that many women needed a safe haven that would take them out of the environment that fed their addictions. They also needed assistance obtaining documents such as social security cards. “Proposition 36 began to create alternatives to incarceration but these women have not received that option,” Burton said of the women she helps. Options are critical to women on parole who are trying to turn their lives around, Burton said, because it is very easy to violate parole rules and be returned to prison. “CDC can violate you if you don’t show up for an appointment; for not getting housing; for not having a place where they can come and visit you,” Burton said. “They don’t utilize all the resources because their caseloads are too heavy and their patience is short. It’s easier to violate someone.” To begin to combat the cycle of recidivism, Burton took the pennies and dollars she saved working in the health field to create A New Way of Life. The program, begun initially in 1999, provided women transportation to appointments, self-esteem building, drug resistance education and general support. Then in 2002, Burton was able to purchase a two-story home at the east end of a neighborhood of modest single-family homes in South Los Angeles. “It’s called Flora’s House after my mom, and nine women live here,” Burton said, In addition to providing shelter at the house, a grant enabled her to convert the garage into a computer learning center where the women take classes and gain computer literacy. “I go into the prisons every month and talk to the women about changing their lives,” Burton said of her recruitment and education strategy. And some like Joanne Jenkins of Los Angeles, take her up on the offer of help. But the road to a New Way of Life was not short or easy for the 45-year-old mother of two. After three times in prison, including a five-month stint for suspicion of burglary, Jenkins had enough. “I was tired of doing nothing with my life, tired of getting high. There wasn’t too much more to do but get straight,” Jenkins said. She had spent 23 years involved in using drugs and stealing to support her habit and her desire to look good, and this was the first time she ever wanted to be clean. What masked her drug use, Jenkins said, was that she was always well-dressed and healthy looking. Today she has been clean more than a year and is working to earn a chef certificate from Los Angeles Trade Tech and eventually to open a bed and breakfast in Oregon. But the one thing that she is reticent about are her children, who are in foster care and are part of the hidden cost of incarceration on the community. Burton said a major problem for women going to prison is the loss of their children, because they lack the resources to provide for them. Najah Shahiv, founder of the Family Knotts Express, a service that transports children to see their incarcerated parents, said that most of the women go through a traumatic period after their arrests. “They have no idea where their children are, who has them, if they’re being fed and cared for,” Shahiv said. “And once you leave county jail and go into the [state] prison system, there is a period of eight weeks in which you can’t make a phone call. You don’t have money on you. That’s a period of time where there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of fighting. The women are just going through a huge, huge situation. At least in county jail, they can all collect and check on their kids.” By contrast, Shahiv said men typically have someone to maintain the home and the family. According to researcher Charlene Wear Simmons, in a 2000 report, about two-thirds of mothers incarcerated in California were the primary caregiver for at least one child prior to their arrest. She also found that after mothers are jailed, 60 percent of their children live with grandparents, 17 percent live with other relatives, and a full 25 percent live with non-relatives in foster care. Many of the children are present when their mother is arrested, adding to the trauma of separation. Simmons also found that officials in the criminal justice system do not have a formalized requirement to routinely inquire of women when they are arrested, sentenced or jailed about what has happened to any children they may have. Johnston, director of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents found that the impact on children of incarcerated parents can be profound. In infants, it can mean the children have difficulty bonding with their parents, and for older adolescents it can mean they themselves get involved in criminal activities and eventually incarceration. “There are also social and political forces in affect on the children as well. What does it look like in the community where nealry one-third of the men have been incarcerated? What does the model for males in such a community look?” Johston said. She also pointed to another study that found that children of incarcerated parents think differently about the legal system. For example, these youngsters would be less likely than children of those just on parole to call the police, if they were in trouble. This pointed out Johnston, has definite ramifications for the issues of child safety. In general, researchers have noted feelings of shame, social stigma, loss of financial support, weakened ties to parents, changes in family composition, poor school performance, increased delinquency and increased risk of abuse or neglect. And the emotional trauma is not all on the children’s side. Shahiv, a former Department of Motor Vehicle employee who was in prison for two years for selling registrations, said she had to re-educate herself. “I had to make my soul not be so hard toward my children, because of the bitterness you feel from your surroundings. With them coming to visit, it was like learning how to re-nurture, because you are so hard hearted,” said Shahiv, who did not lose her children because of her supportive family. “For women who never visit with their kids, and for them to get out of prison and get back home and be expected to function, it’s possible, but it’s hard. It’s really, really hard.” Exacerbating the alienation the children and their mothers feel is the fact that more than half of incarcerated women do not see their children. That is in part because of the capricious nature of the visitation system, and in part because the majority of inmates in the state’s women institutions are from Southern California but most prisons are in Northern California. The Urban Institute Justice Policy Center in an October 2003 report that women are typically house in prisons an average of 160 miles from their children.