In May, the daily Star-Ledger, published in Newark, New Jersey, ran a series of articles based on interviews with female prisoners in New Jersey. The inmates described as every day occurrences in state prisons “unnecessary and degrading strip searches; verbal abuse; sexual innuendoes; late-night cell visits [by the guards]; trysts in a bathroom or a storage shed; threats when it was over.”

One of the women interviewed, Chelsea Ward, 35, told the Star-Ledger that her story began not in prison, but in the prisoner holding cell next to a judge’s chambers at the Essex County courthouse. That’s where police officer George Bradley told her that he would get drug charges against her dismissed if she had sex with him, Ward said.

Ward then described acts of sexual coercion and other abuses by the prison guards at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in New Jersey, where she served time for a drug-related crime. In 2000 Ward and seven other inmates filed a lawsuit against Edna Mahan, New Jersey’s only women’s prison. The most common incidents of violence and mistreatment of female inmates by prison guards include rape, sexual extortion, groping during body searches, male guards watching women undressing or in the shower or the toilet, and guards taking nude pictures of inmates. In order to intimidate women from reporting this abuse, guards threaten prisoners with the loss of rights to their children and visitation; issue “tickets” for alleged infractions that lengthen prisoners’ sentences, and place women who speak out in solitary confinement.

The rise in the number of reported abuse cases coincides with an explosion in the number of women in U.S. prisons. The female population in prison grew by 592 percent between 1977 and 2001, double the rate for men. There are now about 150,000 women in state and federal prisons in the United States.

Rising unemployment, the closing of psychiatric hospitals, and the “ending of welfare as we know it” by the William Clinton administration in the 1990s, and other cuts in social programs, combined with record numbers of arrests, mandatory minimum sentencing, and other “tough on crime” laws, have all contributed to this unprecedented boom in the incarceration of working-class women.

In 1973 the New York State legislature enacted the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which require prison terms of no less than 15 years to anyone convicted of selling two ounces, or in possession of four ounces, of a narcotic. At that time, there were 400 women in New York prisons. This number grew to more than 3,100 by January 2002, according to a 2002 report by the New York-based Women in Prison Project.

Women of oppressed nationalities, who comprise 60 percent of women in U.S. prisons, have born the brunt of these policies. Forty-six percent of the female population in prisons nationwide is Black.

According to the Women in Prison Project, in 2002 an estimated 1,040,000 women were caught in the web of the U.S. justice system—either in jail or on parole or probation.

Among them, 40 percent held no job prior to incarceration. Of those who had jobs, two-thirds reported never receiving more than $6.50 an hour.

The bipartisan assault on social programs over the last two decades, which includes the closing of many psychiatric hospitals, has turned prisons into the largest mental institutions in the country. Nearly one-third of women in prison across the country are diagnosed as mentally ill. Human Rights Watch reported that mental illness among inmates is three times higher than for the population as a whole.

The overcrowding of prisons and lack of medical staff often result in long delays in obtaining medical attention. An increasing number of prisons have also turned over medical services to private contractors. Others have begun charging inmates for medical attention supposedly to deter prisoners from seeking medical attention for minor matters or for avoiding work.

According to the National Institute of Corrections, in 1994 only half of the state prison systems surveyed offered services such as mammograms and Pap smears for women. Where such services are offered, female inmates often face long waits to obtain care.Shackling of all prisoners, including pregnant women, is government policy in federal prisons and the U.S. Marshall Service, and exists in almost all state prisons, according to Amnesty International. “Shackling during labor may cause complications during delivery such as hemorrhage or decreased fetal heart rate,” says a recent report by the group. “If a caesarian section is needed, a delay of even five minutes may result in permanent brain damage to the baby.”

Inmates who give birth while in prison are sometimes allowed to keep their infants at a nursery cellblock for a year or two. While these have existed in prisons before, in the past five years an increasing number of states have built prison nurseries. This is the case in Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, New York, California, Washington, and Massachusetts. The costs of the nurseries are “recouped” because the infants do not become “wards of the state,” the Star-Ledger reports. In one of these programs in California, children may stay with their imprisoned mothers until they reach six years of age.  
 
 
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