MOTHERS IN CHAINS

Why Keeping U.S. Women Prisoners in Shackles During Labor and Delivery Is
the Real Crime Against Society.

May 23, 2005 - Anna (not her real name), a prisoner at Valley State Prison
for Women in Chowchilla, Calif., spent the last two weeks of her pregnancy
in preterm labor, shackled to a hospital bed. If she needed to use the
bathroom, or even turn over, she had to beg permission of the officer on
duty. Given these strict security arrangements, you might assume that Anna
was a terrorist, a murderer, some kind of hardened criminal at risk for
escape. No. Anna is a minimum-security prisoner currently serving an
approximately 18-month sentence for drug possession and probation
violation, and according to Karen Shain, administrative director of Legal
Services for Prisoners With Children, the treatment she received was
routine. Whether they are violent offenders or not -- and approximately 66
percent of incarcerated women in the United States are not -- pregnant
prisoners are subject to the same dehumanizing treatment.

On May 16, the California state Assembly passed A.B. 478 (49 to 26 with 5
abstentions), and sent it on to the state Senate. The bill provides that,
unless necessary, prisoners "shall not be shackled by the wrists, ankles,
or both during labor, including during transport to the hospital, during
delivery, and while in recovery after giving birth." It's hard to believe
that this doesn't go without saying.

But according to Robin Levi, human rights director at Justice Now, a women
prisoner's rights organization, California and at least 20 other states
permit the chaining of laboring women to hospital beds, even when their
attending physicians would prefer that they get up and walk around, or just
shift from side to side. She also told me that women who return to prison
from the hospital days after having Caesarean sections are routinely denied
pain medication and even antibiotics.

Another part of A.B. 478 requires that pregnant women receive "necessary
nutrition and vitamins, information and education, and regular dental
cleanings." The necessity of supplying prenatal vitamins is obvious,
although the fact that it needs to be legislated is troubling.

According to a study by the University of Alabama, gum disease can cause
both premature birth and low birth weight, preventable by a simple teeth
cleaning during the second trimester.

Still, providing teeth cleanings to prisoners might strike some as
unnecessary. After all, only 35.2 percent of Americans have dental
insurance; why should a prisoner receive what someone who hasn't committed
a crime does not? Because by incarcerating these mothers, and making it
impossible for them to seek medical care outside the prison system, we have
assumed responsibility for their infants.

We owe them this minimal standard of care.

But what we actually do is far short of that. Take Judith (also not her
real name), another Valley State prisoner, incarcerated on a probation
violation for saying "Fuck you" to a case worker in a drug treatment
program. Desperate to get into California's Community Prisoner Mother
Program, where children can stay with their mothers for up to six years in
a residential facility, she was informed that she would first have to have
an oral exam to prove that she had no dental problems, not even a cavity.
(Karen Shain believes this requirement exists as a filtering mechanism more
than anything else because there are so many women who qualify for the
program.) In a cruel paradox, dental care is not provided to applicants to
the program, other than extractions. No fillings, no cleanings.

Nothing. Judith had myriad dental problems.

According to Shain, in order to be with her baby she had to have 15 teeth
removed.

She had no other choice.

It is hard to figure out the philosophy, either articulated or presumed,
behind treating women and their babies this way. As much as prison
maternity policy can sometimes feel like an especially cruel and
institutionalized form of child abuse, I doubt the individuals running the
prisons of this country are consciously trying to harm the infants born to
prisoners. Cristina Rathbone, an investigative journalist whose book "A
World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars" follows the lives of four
prisoners at MCI-Framingham, a Massachusetts women's prison, attributes the
treatment of women in prison to a kind of unconscious cruelty.

Because women are a minority in prisons, they suffer the rules that have
been invented for violent men. California Department of Correction policies
simply state that all inmates must be shackled when being transported to
and from the hospital and while in their hospital beds. No exceptions have
ever been made, not even for terminally ill or comatose prisoners, so none
are made for pregnant and laboring prisoners. Until Assembly member Sally
Lieber, the author and sponsor of the bill, took an interest, it simply
never occurred to anyone in a position of authority that there was anything
wrong with that.

Lieber's consciousness about the issue was raised when she visited Valley
State, met pregnant women prisoners, and saw that their families had to
bring them bags of food to supplement their inadequate diets.

Lieber says that if other legislators talked to these women and saw the
conditions they lived in, they would vote for the bill. Instead of viewing
corrections as an opportunity to prove how tough they are, they might
realize that, as Lieber says, "there is no excuse for the state of
California to have starving, shackled pregnant women behind bars."

It does seem that the way we treat all prisoners, especially women, speaks
of something more than mere indifference. There seems to be a kind of
retributive force at work that compelled 26 Republicans to oppose this
bill. The bill asks no more, after all, than that pregnant women be treated
with a modicum of decency, and that the state take a nearly token interest
in the well-being of their babies.

Republican opposition was, ostensibly, on fiscal grounds.

This despite the fact that the Assembly appropriations analysis reported
that the costs associated with the bill are "minor" and "absorbable," less
than $50,000 a year. Pending the passage of A.B. 478, a pregnant woman in a
California prison is entitled to no more nutritional supplementation than
one extra carton of milk per day. The new bill seeks to give her a daily
prenatal vitamin, slightly more balanced meals, and a single teeth cleaning
during her pregnancy.

And yet even Republican Assembly member Bill Emmerson, an orthodontist,
begrudged pregnant prisoners and their babies this low-cost protection,
voting against it in committee. (Assembly member Emmerson refused to
comment for this article.)

Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into
the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a
tooth for a tooth?

Now the California Senate must vote on its version of Bill 478, and then it
is up to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to decide whether to sign the bill or
to veto it. Until this happens, women prisoners in the state of California,
like others throughout the country, will labor in shackles, will be fed
substandard diets while pregnant, and will be denied pain medications and
antibiotics after delivery, even if they have C-sections. And their babies
will suffer as a result.

It's possible that the very fact of their mothers' criminal conduct might
make some people lose interest in the suffering of these children.

However, in her book, Cristina Rathbone gives everyone, even a Republican
Assembly member, a reason to care. Denise, one of the incarcerated mothers
at MCI-Framingham whose life Rathbone followed, was convicted of a
nonviolent drug offense.

Denise's son was 9 years old when she was arrested.

By the time she was released, he had spent five years shuttling between
foster homes and his abusive father, and was, finally, in prison himself.

When we visit the sins of the parents upon the children, we reap what we sow.