HOW MANDATORY DRUG SENTENCING IS HARMING WOMEN AND FAMILIES

Imagined Families

Women Behind Bars
by Dera Jo Immergut

Nadine Pecora is twentysix years old. She has a kind face surrounded by
brown curls, speaks with a broad Brooklyn accent wears sensible looking
plastic framed eyeglasses and clothes that would not set her apart in any
mall in America. On a translucent August morning, she sits with her son
Nicholas, a shy eightyear old, enjoying the sunshine that falls on a
treelined patio. She laughs and jokes with Nicholas about his infant
brother, about school. It's a moment of utter normalcy in the life of a
mother and sonand that's what makes it so exquisite for Nadine. Most days,
her life is anything but normal. She is two years into a tenyear to life
sentence in a maximumsecurity prison, the Bedford Hills Correctional
Facility in Westchester County, New York.

The patio adjoins the prison's visiting room, where inmates meet with those
from the outside. Ordinarily, Nicholas comes with his father for a brief
visit every weekend, but today, the hours mother and this son have together
stretch luxuriously: Nicholas is spending four days at a unique "summer
camp" run by Bedford Hills. At night, he goes to the home of a volunteer
host family in the plush suburbs surrounding the institution. By day, he
plays badminton with Nadine, eats pizza, or just hangs out and talks. "It's
just me and him," Nadine says with a smile. "On a regular visit, either my
mother's there, or my husband's there. Now; he can tell me things he might
not want to say when anyone else is around."

Nadine was imprisoned for selling drugs to an undercover policeman; it was
her first arrest. She smiles ruefully, and her voice drops as she talks
about her case. The life sentence is part of the state's mandatory drug
sentencing law, she says, "but I don't know where they came up with the ten
years" that defines her minimum sentence. She shakes her head. "I mean, I
could understand if I had a prior record, but my first time arrested? It
makes no sense." The conviction is under appeal.

Because her crime was nonviolent, she will be eligible for the state's
workrelease program in 2003, "Nicholas says he's gonna come pick me up
when I get out for good he'll have his license. He tries to make a joke
out of it." She laughs, turning to her son, whose sneakered feet don't
touch the ground as he slumps in his chair. "Right? Who's gonna pick me up
when I come home? 'Who's gonna be able to drive?"

Nicholas gives his mother a wan grin. "Me," he says. Nadineis hardly living
the life most American women imagine for themselves, yet her situation
grows less unusual with every passing year. Since 1980, the number of women
entering U.S. prisons has shot up nearly 400 percent, double the rate of
men. As of September 1997, some 762,200 women were living behind bars, the
vast majority of them imprisoned, like Nadine, for nonviolent drug or
prostitution offenses. And like Nadine. more than threequarters of them
were mothers.

A 1991 survey by the Bureau ofjustice tells a story of delicate family
structures split asunder by crime. According to the report, twothirds of
all female inmates have at least one child younger than eighteen. Black and
Hispanic women were slighily more likely to have minor children than white
women. And those children were being raised on scant resources: 80 percent
of incarcerated women report incomes of less than $2,000 in the year before
their arrest.

Who cares for the children while their mothers are locked up? Typically,
it's not their fathers. The Bureau of Justice survey found that only a
quarter of female inmates (compared to nearly 90 percent of males), said
that their minor children were living with the other parent. A third of
white female inmates reported children to be living with their fathers at
the time of the interview, compared to a quarter of Hispanic women and less
than a fifth of black women. Across racial lines, it was the grandparents
who most often stepped into the breach: 57 percent of black mothers, 55
percent of Hispanic mothers, and 41 percent of white mothers named one of
the children's grandparents as primary caregiver. A smaller percentage of
women had no relative to assume their parenting duties: nearly 10 percent
reported that their children were in a foster home, agency, or institution.

Perhaps the most telling figure of all, and one that makes Nadine seem
especially fortunate as she passes this precious summer week with her son:
only 9 percent of incarcerated women with offspring under eighteen had seen
their children since leaving the outside world behind.

As they bask in the morning sun, Nadine and Nicholas are not alone.
Children swarm around the patio, eating cotton candy and snowcones,
listening to music, playing games. Mothers sit on plastic chairs and brick
retaining walls, chatting and watching the goingson. Their kids, like
Nicholas, are here as participants in the summer program; some 120 children
will have taken part in this unlikely "camp" by season's end. In its
eighteenth year, what began as an adhoc experiment by Sister Elaine
Roulet, the director of the Bedford Hills Children's Center, has garnered
lavish praise from prison reformers and is a pilot program of sorts for
correctional facilities across the nation. Anything that helps cement bonds
between mothers and children needs to be encouraged, says Joy Simpkins of
the Women's Prison Association, a New York organization. "Visitations are
an extraordinarily important part of keeping families together."

Today is carnival day ufo the chiltren of Bedford Hills; the patio outside
the visitor's center has been transformed into a makeshift fairground, and
both "outside staff" (prison employees and volunteers) and "inside staff"
("inmate caregivers" assigned to work in the children's programs) have
tried hard to make the atmosphere festive. Inmate Geraldine Hardwich, who
usually works as a coordinator at the infant day care center, has draped
herself in colored scarves and plastic beads and set up shop as the fortune
teller "Madame Geraldine." Her accurate pronouncements astound the
children, who don't know that she has grilled mothers beforehand about
families, pets, and best friends. Another inmate runs a facepainting
station. The younger children are daubed with spiders or flowers; the older
ones get fake tattoos that read "Love" or "Peace."

The two sons of Evelyn Mateo fall into the older crowd: Christian is
fourteen, and Daniel is eleven. Both boys are stocky, with streetsmart
buzz cuts and baggy shorts. They have had their fill of the morning's games
and are waiting for the program leader to escort the kids to the prison
gymnasium, where they can toss around a basketball. Though they seem a hit
embarrassed to be thrown in with so many smaller children, the boys, who
live with Evelyn's sister in the Bronx, are quick to say that they enjoy
the program. They like to be with their mother"I don't get to see her
every day," says Christian, and they praise their host families, who have
taken them to see Spawn and Contact at the local movie theaters.

Their mother, a softspoken woman of thirtytwo who has been at Bedford
Hills for seven months, will be in for nine more. As her sons drift off
toward the gym, she watches them leave. "They're mad at me because I'm up
here," she says. "Especially the older one. He's the type that don't show
emotion, but I know he's got it inside, and that scares me a little." She
knows her sons are at a critical age, an age at which they are bombarded
with dangerous choices, but she has faith that, in her absence, her sister
will be able to give them the guidance they need. Originally she says, her
family told the boys that she was in rehab, but she has insisted that they
know the truth. "I want them to know that this is jail, so when they grow
up they won't make the same mistake I did."

A correctional officer orders the mothers to queue for the trip to the gym
(they are taken there by a different route than their children, because
inmates must be bodysearched when leaving the visitors' area). "I'm really
upset with myself for being in prison," says Evelyn as she heads for the
line. "Now's the time when they really need me.

The New York state prison system, of which Bedford Hills is a part, ranks
third in female offender populations; it is exceeded only by Texas and
California. Seventyone percent of those prisoners were convicted of
nonviolent crimesprimarily drug offenses. According to the Correctional
Association of New York, 91 percent of women under custody for a drug
offense are there because of mandatory sentencing laws passed in 1972, a
code that punishes the single sale of two ounces of cocaine with the same
sentence as a murder: fifteen years to life.

Prisoners' advocates and correctional officials alike name the mandatory
drug sentencing laws as the major cause for the skyrocketing rates of
female incarceration. "It has nothing to do with women's liberation as some
scallawags have tried to insinuate," says Robert Gangi, executive director
of the Correctional Association of New York. Instead, he says, police
tactics increasingly focus on drug sweeps that bring in low level users.
Women are at a disadvantage as they move through the justice system, says
Gangi, because they typically are less involved in illegal activities than
men. "They have less savvy in negotiating with the system, and cooperating
with the system. Women may have less information to barter with, or they
may be frightened to talk because they don't feel as protected." The
result, asserts Gangi, is that women often receive harsher sentences than
the men arrested with them. And mandatory sentencing makes sure they stay
locked up.

Despite its stringent laws, New York is one of the most progressive states
when it comes to dealing with the children of inmates. Many women's and
men's facilities have trailer visit programs, which allow families to spend
weekends together on the prison grounds. In addition to the Bedford Hills
summer program, Bedford Hills, Taconic State Prison. and Rikers Island have
nursery programs that allow women to keep children under a year old with
them in prison. "Any program that supports maintaining the maximum level of
contact between parent and child is important, assuming the parent had some
level of contact with the child before incarceration, and that there's
something to build on," says Pamela Katz, a Washington based lawyer who
specializes in issues related to children of incarcerated parents. "It's
just impossible to underestimate the importance of that connection and what
it means to a child."

Tenmonthold Cory Burns has been living at the Bedford Hills Correctional
Facility since his birth, two months into his mother Alice's sentence. "He
doesn't know where he is and he's not going to know" says Alice. "The most
important thing is, he's with his mother." She is wearing standard issue
olivedrab uniform pants, a pink Tshirt of her own choosing, and tennis
shoes. Cory is outfitted in a tiny version of a University of Michigan
basketball uniform, shirt and shorts of shiny nylon goldandblue. Mother
and son could be at a public park, at the beach, instead of locked behind
the tall chainlink fences, topped with fat coils of razor ribbon, that
cut Bedford Hills off from its surroundings.

In a couple of months, when Cory turns one year old, he will leave the
prison, leave the nursery unit where he has lived with his mother, the room
where they have slept sidebyside, he in his crib, she in her narrow bed.
He must rejoin the outside world, according to the rules. He will be taken
in by his grandmother. Alice will stay to serve out the rest of the time
she received for her drugrelated offense. It's just a few months, but the
separation will be excruciating for them both, says Alice.

NadinePecora was also pregnant when she arrived in prison. Her second
child, James, now twentyone months old, spent his first twelve months of
life at Bedford Hills. "It's sort of like not being in jail when you're
around the baby," recalls Nadine wistfully. When he reached his first
birthday, James was sent home to his father in Sheepshead BayNadine
remembers the date and time of the separation down to the minute: Saturday,
September 7, 1996,11:05 A.M.

"It was one of the hardest things," she says. 'And I'm fortunate. With a
lot of the mothers, their kids go into foster homes because there's no one
to take them. I don't know how I would have dealt with that:"

Nadine is housed on a special unit of the prison that offers
substanceabuse rehabilitation. "It's the only drug program they have in
the facility, so I figure, let me take it with my drug history,' says
Nadine. 'And it's working:' She adds with a laugh, "Hopefully I'll be moved
to the honor floor soon, get my own TV."

As mandatory drug sentencing laws come up for review by the State Assembly
next year, a quarter of a century after they were first passed, advocacy
groups are hoping that other alternatives for women like Nadine will be
considered "So many women in prison could be helped through comunity
alternatives to prison and jail," says Simpkins, "either where they report
to centers in the community or live in a supervised safe house." In order
for longterm rehabilitation to work, says Simpkins, "mothers need a mosaic
of services that prisons do not provide: 'A woman's lifr is complicated
because she's often a caregiver."

Alternatives to prison might make budgetary sense as well. Figures provided
by the Correctional Association of New York's Women in Prison project show
that, while it costs about $30,000 a year to keep an inmate in a state
prison, the average annual cost of outpatient drug treatment runs $2,000 to
$3,600, and the cost of residential drug treatment is $17,000 to $20,000
per year. Treatment in the community provides a needed dose of reality, as
well, argues Katz. "When women are locked up, of course they seem
drugfree. What happens when they are thrown back into their neighborhood?
It's just setting them up to fail. They need to be learning how to deal
with their problems in the real world."

The real world seems very far away to Nadine, though For now, she worries
about staying as close to her family as her incarceration allows. "I'm
petrified of being moved she says. She knows that Bedford Hills inmates are
often transferred to Albion Correctional Facility, a minimum security
prison some six hours north of New York City, at some point in their
sentence. "My mother already told me, if they ship me to Albion she'll see
me once a year. And my husband told me he'll see me once every three
months." If her husband and mother can't get to her, neither will her two
sons. But as long as she stays at Bedford Hitls she can see Nicholas and
James often, and they can see her Even a visit every week will never be
enough to make up for lost time, though. When James toddles into the
visiting room now she sighs. All she can think is, "Oh my God, look how big
he's getting already... I won't be home until he's ten years old."