BAD TEETH BECOME BARRIER FOR INCARCERATED WOMEN

Some Opt to Have Extractions to Access Prison Rehab Programs

SACRAMENTO - Sarina Borg had a tough choice to make.

She could wait for months, maybe more than a year, to have her
rotting teeth repaired by a dentist. Or she could get them pulled in
order to be reunited with her baby daughter.

In California women's prisons, dozens if not hundreds of inmates like
Borg are faced with the same wrenching decision: To gain access to a
host of vocational-training and drug-rehabilitation programs for
non-violent offenders - including a course that teaches them
parenting skills while living with their children in special housing
- - they must be cleared of any pre-existing health problems.

Just one badly damaged tooth will block them from entering a program.

"It's unconscionable," said Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-San Jose,
who has proposed legislation to shorten the waiting list for women
wanting to get their teeth fixed by a prison dentist, a measure that
passed its first committee hearing last week.

"We have women who are getting 16 and 18 out of 34 teeth pulled, and
that really destroys their future job prospects," Lieber said. "We
have to change the situation."

She introduced Assembly Bill 2877 after learning that a court
settlement agreement, which calls for vastly improved dental care in
all state prisons over the next three years, had left the three
women's institutions near the bottom of the implementation schedule.

Relatively few inmates qualify for the program that allows mothers to
serve their sentences with their infants because of the strict dental
clearance and other reasons, such as a requirement that the prisoners
retain legal custody of their children.

So when the opportunity to enroll was presented to Borg, 31, who is
from Daly City, it didn't take long to make her decision: "I said
hurry up and pull it," Borg recalled of her meeting with a prison
dentist, "I want to be with my baby."

She ended up having four teeth removed to earn the coveted transfer
to a minimum-security, dormitory-like prison in Oakland, the East Bay
Community Recovery Project. There, she could bond with her
3-month-old daughter, Kamaleia, and learn how to become a better
mother, in a setting that costs less to taxpayers than a traditional
prison. Borg is expected to serve the remainder of her two-year,
8-month sentence for robbery at the program.

Officials with the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation say the dental and health clearance are necessary
because the specialized programs are based at smaller community
prisons and don't have dentists or doctors on site. Thousands of men
also must pass the same screening to get into specialized programs
scattered across California.

"We don't want to send offenders out to these facilities and have
major dental issues or medical conditions that would put them at
risk," said Wendy Still, who oversees the state's three mother-infant
community prisons, which house 71 women.

About 900 women are enrolled in all of the specialized programs,
which cost the state as little as $90 a day per inmate, Still said, a
taxpayer bargain compared to the $121 daily tab of a traditional prison bed.

But as helpful as the programs may be in preparing women for life
after prison - and as useful as they are at reducing California's
notoriously high recidivism rate - they also have a major downside on
the personal lives of the inmates.

Mothers who undergo extractions to live with their children in the
community prisons, and who learn job skills there, have difficulty
finding work upon their release because employers would rather not
hire someone whose mouth has more gaps than teeth.

"It's probably almost as big a deal as having a criminal record,"
said Allyson West, director of the California Reentry Program, which
prepares inmates for their release from San Quentin. "They're going
to be pigeonholed because of their appearance."

Inmates with missing teeth also suffer from low self-esteem.

"I'm still young and now I have no teeth down there, you know what I
mean?" said Borg, who doesn't smile as often as she used to; she's
missing three bottom teeth on the right side of her mouth. She also
finds it hard to chew. "Me being a woman, I just feel degraded, really bad."

Prison dental clinics don't typically offer dentures, implants or
other cosmetic work.

Another inmate in the Oakland program, 31-year-old Michelle Filby, is
self-conscious about a gap on the top row of her mouth, and other
missing teeth, which she hopes to fix after her release, assuming she
lands a good job.

Still, she has no regrets. "I'd rather lose a tooth than not have my
baby, so to me it was worth it," Filby said. "But it would have been
nice to maybe get a root canal or fillings."

Rachel Roth, an independent scholar and national expert on the health
issues of women in prison, said the dental clearance policy "just
shows how desperate women are to get out of the big prisons and be
with their children that they would allow themselves to be treated in
such an inhumane way."

Prison statistics don't track how many women with severely damaged
teeth, often caused by methamphetamine use and poor hygiene, have
requested extractions to get into the programs.

About 9,000 teeth are pulled each year in California's three female
institutions, according to prison system records. More than 12,000
women are housed in those prisons.

It's also difficult to determine how California's dental clearance
policy compares with the rest of the country, because not all states
have similar women's housing programs; some institutions run
nurseries within large prisons where health services are readily available.

Advocates for female inmates who are familiar with prison policies
nationwide say California's dental-clearance requirement seems rare.

"That's extraordinary," said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a director with the
Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit agency with
authority to inspect that state's prisons. "I've not heard of
anything like that."