LOOKING FOR CAUSE IN JUSTICE SYSTEM

Justice System Examined in Oklahoma's Top-Rank for Female Incarcerations

Editor's Note-Oklahoma Watch is an independent investigative and
in-depth reporting team that partners with news organizations and
higher education to produce impact journalism in the public interest.
This is the first installment in a series of stories in which
Oklahoma Watch, the Tulsa World and The Oklahoman are examining the
issue of Oklahoma's female incarceration rate. For more, visit
tulsaworld.com/okwatch.

In 1908, Kate Barnard, Oklahoma's feisty first commissioner of
charities and corrections, traveled to Kansas to investigate the
alleged torture and mistreatment of Oklahoma prisoners. Oklahoma
federal prisoners - and Oklahoma Territory's felons before them -
were incarcerated in the state penitentiary in Lansing, Kan., because
the new state had no prison. Barnard, elected to her state post
before women had the right to vote, had been instrumental in lobbying
the first Legislature to adopt prison laws that were then among the
most progressive in the nation. "In Oklahoma," she had said, "we
would do differently."

When Barnard eventually had the Lansing prisoners brought back to
Oklahoma in 1909, 16 women were among them.

It's ironic that the state history of Oklahoma's female prisoners
begins with a reproach to the Kansas penal system. Although
corrections officials say that rates of crimes by women and
convictions in both states are comparable, today Oklahoma women end
up in prison approximately three times as often as women in Kansas.

And while Kansas lawmakers are earning accolades for prison reforms
that have reduced prison populations by creating alternatives for
some offenders, in Oklahoma, the number of incarcerated women is at a
historic high.

The 'Hockey Stick'

Mike Connelly, head of the evaluation and analysis unit at the
Oklahoma Department of Corrections, calls it "the hockey-stick look."
That's the shape of a graph charting the number of women in the
state's prison over the decades, with a long, stable line that
suddenly takes a swooping upward turn in the early 1980s.

How sharp? From 1910 to 1980, women made up an average of 3.5 percent
of the state's prison population. By 2010, that percentage was nearly
11 percent, and the population had climbed to 2,760.

The "hockey-stick" pattern is not unique to Oklahoma's female prison
population, or to the state. Between 1987 and 2007, the number of
prisoners in the U.S. nearly tripled; in 2008, there were more than
2.3 million adults in prison, more by sheer number, as well as per
capita rate, than any other country in the world.

The same factors that criminologists point to as having contributed
to the growth in prison populations are present in Oklahoma: decades
of "tough on crime" politics, the deinstitutionalization of the
mentally ill, the war on drugs and a federally financed prison
construction boom.

What the graphs don't explain, however, is why those factors have
operated so severely on women. The nation's female prison population
grew by 832 percent between 1997 and 2007, while the male population
grew only half as much. Nor do they explain why Oklahoma women, in
particular, are so much more likely to go to prison. In 2004, the
state imprisoned more than 10 times as many women per capita as
Massachusetts or Rhode Island.

Women's Prison Capital

That Oklahoma puts more women in prison than any other place on the
globe may shock some, but isn't new, said Susan Sharp, a professor of
sociology and women's studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Nationally, Oklahoma has held that top ranking for 14 of the last 15 years.

Sharp says the imprisonment of women is due in part to the state's
culture and history, including a wide conservative streak that favors
retributive justice.

"We are just harsher," she said.

Others contend that Oklahoma doesn't have the penal system that it
wants but has been stuck with one that has proved, for reasons of
politics, to be nearly impervious to meaningful reform. In their
view, the root cause for the high rate of female incarceration can be
found in the criminal code, particularly its severity toward drug offenders.

Laura Pitman, the DOC's deputy director of female offender
operations, considers the high incarceration rate a public health
problem masquerading solely as a crime problem because about 40
percent of Oklahoma's female prison population have been charged with
drug offenses.

Improving access to drug treatment and creating more alternatives to
prison for offenders with substance abuse problems, advocates argue,
would not only reduce recidivism rates for offenders, but would
better serve the community now and in the future.

Hard Time in Oklahoma

Although Kate Barnard fought to create prisons that were more about
reforming than punishing prisoners - including establishing a
reformatory in Granite - civic zeal for rehabilitation began to cool
after 1914, when Barnard left office.

By the late 1930s, Oklahoma already stood out among states as a place
where lawbreakers, both men and women, were likely to go to jail and
stay for a long time.

In 1939, a state panel funded by New Deal-era federal legislation
reported Oklahoma's incarceration rate had doubled since 1920. In
addition to overcrowding, "Oklahoma's prison methods are antiquated,"
the panel charged.

Seven decades later, when the Women's Prison Association reported on
three decades of growth in the incarceration of women in the U.S., it
cited Oklahoma's high rate of incarceration as a prime example of the
"tremendous" degree of variation among states. "Unless we are to
believe that Oklahoma women are more than 10 times more 'criminal'
than their Massachusetts and Rhode Island counterparts," the report
said, "we have to assume that criminal justice policy and practice
are pivotal."

But, in fact, one argument Sharp has heard over the years is that
Oklahoma's women prisoners are especially hard cases.

In 1996, when Sharp was interviewing at the University of Oklahoma, a
department head - since retired - picked her up at the airport and
drove her by the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, then in Oklahoma
City, on the way to the Norman campus.

"He very proudly told me that Oklahoma had the highest female
incarceration rate in the nation," Sharp recalled. "And when I asked
him why, he said, 'Oklahoma has mean women.' "

Since then, Sharp said she has thought a lot about the relationship
between Oklahoma's culture and its approach to crime and punishment.

Her theory is that instead of just one type of conservatism, here
there are three.

"You have the Deep South, Bible-belt fundamentalist, Old Testament
harshness," she said. "You also have the Wild West hang-them-high
mentality. And then there's the traditional Midwest conservatism. I
think it just kind of coalesces into something unique in this state."

Jessica Carriger, an assistant district attorney in District 12,
based in Mayes County, has seen firsthand how women, specifically
mothers, are judged more harshly than men for the same crimes.

"If a husband and wife are both arrested on charges of manufacturing
methamphetamine in a home where there is a child present, the general
reaction of juries is, 'How could the mother do that?' " said
Carriger. "Not to say that they don't hold the fathers accountable,
but it seems more reprehensible in the minds for jurors" in the case
of the female defendant.

However, Carriger asserts, the law - as practiced in Mayes County
courtrooms - is gender-blind. A criminal charge is a criminal charge,
whether a woman is reviled as a drug addict or evokes sympathy
because she is the mother of small children, she said.

Cracking the Code

Some charge that it is the criminal code - including changes made
over the past two decades as a result of the national War on Drugs -
that ultimately is driving the female incarceration rate.

"Most of what has happened in the growth of women's imprisonment
(nationally) is around the drug war," said Woodward native Meda
Chesney-Lind, a professor of women's studies at the University of
Hawaii and one of the nation's foremost experts on women and crime.
"When you start rewriting your laws so that you criminalize women who
have relationships with people who are drug dealers, or when you just
ratchet up sentences dramatically for very small amounts of illicit
substances," huge increases in prison populations are the result.

Oklahoma's lawmakers worked to change the state's criminal code in
the '90s, with "Truth in Sentencing" legislation that created a
matrix of four categories of crimes - violent, sex, drugs, and other.
For some offenses, such as nonviolent drug offenses, sentences could
be shorter. But those convicted of 11 types of crimes - termed
"deadly sins," and including rape, murder and drug trafficking -
would serve out 85 percent of their sentences.

The legislation was repealed after Lamonte Fields, a first-time,
nonviolent adult offender, killed three people while in an early
release program for nonviolent offenders. Fields' extensive juvenile
record included violence, Connelly, of the DOC, said.

After that, few policymakers were willing to endorse shorter
sentences for some offenders, he said.

Prosecutors, however, disagree that it is easy to go to prison in Oklahoma.

Many defendants work hard to get there, said Ray Don Jackson, a
former district attorney and former district judge in Woodward
County. Crime statistics often don't tell the whole story of why
inmates are doing time, because an inmate may have committed violent
crimes but could be serving a sentence for a nonviolent charge, he said.

Jackson also disputes that drug-related crimes most often only affect
the offender, because some are associated with violent crimes and
property crimes.

"Life brings us circumstances," Carriger said. "At some point, we
make choices."

According to the 2010 report from Pitman's female offender division,
nearly half of the women incarcerated in Oklahoma's prisons report
they grew up with mental illness in the home, and 66 percent report
childhood physical and/or sexual abuse. More than half of the women
ran away from home before age 18.

"These aren't women who would scare you," said Chesney-Lind about
female offenders. In most cases, "they have very, very sad stories."

[sidebar]

WHAT'S NEXT

Here are some of the stories planned in coming weeks as part of the
World's women in prison project with Oklahoma Watch and The Oklahoman.

Monday: When women are locked up, their children suffer in a variety
of ways, experts say.

Feb. 6: Oklahoma's high female incarceration rate comes as arrests
continue to rise.

Feb. 13: Do drug courts and other special programs help keep women
out of prison?

Feb. 20: We follow a woman through her first day in prison and
examine issues related to incarceration.

Feb. 27: Women in a halfway house prepare to leave custody and get
back on their feet.

March 6: After release from prison, some women have a hard time
finding work and starting a new life.