PRIVATE PRISON CONCEPT APPEARS TO BE MAKING, NOT SOLVING, PROBLEMS

Currently there are 90,000 women in prison in the United States. The
average age is 29, and 58 percent have not finished high school.
Ninety percent are single mothers. Over half of female inmates have
children under 18, and the majority of them were the primary
caregivers at the time of their arrest. One out of every three women
in prisons, and one out of four in jails, are being held for
non-violent offenses. The most typical convictions resulting in
imprisonment for women are property crimes, such as check forgery and
illegal credit card use. Eighty percent report incomes of less than
$2,000 per year and 92 percent report incomes under $10,000.

Economic inequities in our culture have led to discrimination in the
court system, making it nearly impossible for poor, uneducated women
to get a just review. In addition, tough-on-crime policies and
inflexible sentencing guidelines have extended to non-violent crimes
that have caused the number of women behind bars to soar at a rate
exceeding even the rapid increase among male prisoners.

Driven by economic incentives, the number of privately run prisons
also has increased. This has created a whole new set of problems in
the criminal justice system. Last year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons
agreed to pay three women $500,000 to settle a lawsuit filed against
the bureau for abuse by correctional officers. The U.S. Justice
Department came to the conclusion that the number of instances of
sexual assault of women prisoners may be far higher than the number
reported, due to inmates' fear of reprisals. Yet a recent Justice
Department report found that at many private prisons 80 percent of the
corrections officers had no previous experience. They rarely offer
drug treatment programs and appropriate health services. And most
devastating, private prisons tend to take the "overflow" inmates from
federal facilities - often landing mothers hundreds of miles away from
their family and children.

These and other statistics offer a chilling glimpse into the private
torture that women prisoners endure to the exception of their male
counterparts.

It's time for legislators to rethink the role of private prisons and
to demand more accountability from those institutions whose only claim
to increased efficiency is less crowded conditions.

The rape and other abuse of female inmates must stop, the mother-child
bond must be better preserved and the bias against low-income, poorly
educated women who commit non-violent crimes must not continue to be a
factor in the trial and sentencing process.