WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR SPACE IN JAILS

Some Counties Slow To Make Room For Female Inmates

MOCKSVILLE - As a detention officer announced from behind a slit in the
jail wall that lunch was being served, Melissa Gordon grabbed the hand of a
fellow inmate and held an empty hand out for another woman to hold.

Like a chain of paper dolls cut out of a single orange sheet, six women in
prison-issue jumpsuits formed a circle and bowed their heads. Gordon
recited thanks for the meal of beans and hot dogs.

"I love to see that. They do that every day," said Terry Prevette, one of
eight female detention officers assigned to women inmates in the Davie
County Detention Center.

Until Davie began housing females at its new jail earlier this year,
Prevette worked with male inmates.

Female inmates are far different from men, law-enforcement officials say,
in terms of how much more privacy women are afforded, how they interact
with each other, their health-care needs and the length of time that most
spend in jail before being bailed out.

And, until recent years, women were also different from men in that they
rarely landed in jail. For that reason, some jails - such as the one in
Yadkin County - aren't set up to hold women. Women arrested in Yadkin
County are housed in neighboring counties.

Last year, law-enforcement made about 1,400 arrests in Yadkin County and 18
percent of those arrested were women. In the mid-1980s, deputies might have
arrested one woman a month, said Captain Danny Widener of the Yadkin County
Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff Michael Cain has a simple explanation for the increase. "There used
to be a day when a girl was a girl. Now they'll fight, shoot and carry on
like anybody else will. Maybe they're not teaching about being a lady no
more," he said.

Officials also attribute the increase to the simple fact that suburban
counties are growing. As the number of male prisoners increased, so did the
number of women in jail.

According to the N.C. Sentencing Commission, jails in Davidson, Davie,
Forsyth, Yadkin, Wilkes, Surry and Stokes held 1,639 men and 319 women in
1995 - a ratio of about five to one. By 2000, the ratio was essentially the
same, 2,075 men and 420 women.

Gordon, 21, is among the new class of women who have found themselves
behind bars. She was locked up for violating the conditions of her
pre-trial release by smoking marijuana. Her bond had been set at $10,000.

"My grandmother is trying to get me out," said Gordon from jail in June.
"If she does, she does. If she doesn't, she doesn't. I try to keep my head up."

Rough Road

When Gordon went to jail the first time in September 2001, her abuse of
crack cocaine had caused her weight to drop to 92 pounds.

Just days before, she had given birth to an underweight baby whose blood
contained traces of cocaine, she said.

Gordon went to jail to await trial for charges of forgery and uttering,
felony possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia.

Her arrest was fairly typical of those involving women, Cain said. Women
are mostly arrested for nonviolent crimes such as forgery and narcotics use.

In the past 10 years, though, local jails have started housing a larger and
"harder-core female population," said Bob Lewis, the chief of the state's
jails and detention section.

"One of the things that promoted that is the infiltration and the extensive
use of drugs," he said.

Gordon agrees. She blames crack for the trouble in her life and said she
has her crack problem under control. "I despise that drug so much," she said.

Gordon grew up in Yadkinville, at first under the eye of her mother and
stepfather. During her first years at Forbush High School, she started down
a path that would lead her to jail.

"That's where I started smoking pot. Either after school or we would skip
and go get high," she said. "It got to the point that I would come to
school so stoned I didn't understand my lesson."

Gordon moved in with her grandmother, Minnie Pearl Gordon, when she was 16.
She dropped out of school soon after and started to use cocaine. On her
18th birthday, she said, she tried crack for the first time.

"I seen the devil when I did that drug," Gordon said.

To Jail

In June 2001, Gordon borrowed the keys to her grandmother's purple Chrysler
and told her grandmother that she would be back in a few minutes.

"I didn't see 'em for a month," Minnie Pearl Gordon said.

Gordon said that she traveled through several counties buying drugs with
her grandmother's checkbook. She was six months pregnant.

"I'd take the drug dealers shopping and I'd get them what they want," she said.

She said they would spend as much as $500 a day on drug binges. A $20 rock
of crack lasts only about five seconds, she said. "You could spend $1,000
in three hours."

The binge stopped with an arrest in Rowan County. Though she had several
charges pending, she wound up in Davie County facing forgery and uttering
charges for writing bad checks from her grandmother's bank account.

Gordon was jailed in September after her daughter, Destiny Pearl, was born.

Destiny Pearl, now 1, weighed less than 4 pounds when she was born, Gordon
said. Test results showed trace amounts of cocaine in the newborn's system.
Authorities took custody of Destiny and Gordon said she is still trying to
the child back.

"How can I live in a world knowing I have a child that I don't have?," she
said.

Gordon was released from jail through a pretrial program. She hadn't
planned on returning, but she did.

"I slipped," she said. In June, she told her pretrial officer that she had
smoked marijuana, she said. She went back to jail almost immediately.

Not Designed For Women

There are 114 county and municipal jails in the state, and most hold
females. "There's not five jails in the state that don't hold females,"
said Lewis, of the state jails and detention section.

The Yadkin County Jail is one of them.

Female inmates have increased in both numbers and in proportion to male
inmates.

In 1992, Yadkin County had 468 male inmates and 95 females - a ratio of
about five men to every woman. In 2001, they had 1,005 men held in the
county jail and 243 women - a ratio of about four to one.

"When you don't have room, you take them far away. I have carried them as
far as Caldwell County," Cain said.

On any given day, an average of two Yadkin prisoners are locked in the
female pod at the Davie County Detention Center, Widener said. The
increasing numbers of females being arrested have led some more rural
counties to reconsider whether they should have jail space for women.

"It all boils down to the money. I wish I had a place to house females, so
we didn't have to beg around for a place. But there's no way with the setup
I have now that we could do it," Cain said.

In the nine months that it has housed women, the Davie center has
accumulated three file drawers full of information on female inmates.

"When you see new facilities come on line, you'll see places for females,"
said Sheriff Allen Whitaker of Davie County.

A Different Scene

Sgt. Lindsey Bumgarner watched over the Davie center's pod of women -
including Gordon - from a window in an upstairs watch station in mid-June.

Some women talked and sipped coffee. Others read quietly.

The behavior Bumgarner and other detention officers see from women differs
greatly from that of the men in that there is more camaraderie in the
female pod.

"If we get older women in here, they tend to take on with the younger women
and mother them," she said.

Men fight and want to be king of the pod, jail officials said.

One day earlier this summer, Bumgarner watched as one of the inmates, a
hairdresser, worked with some of the others. She twisted locks of wet hair
and locked them in place with makeshift rollers made from cardboard toilet
paper rolls.

Gordon said that jail wasn't pleasant, but that she had befriended several
women. They would talk as she wrote long letters to her boyfriend in
Winston-Salem.

"When you're in jail, you can be by yourself, or you can make friends.
Well, I'm here. You can talk to me if you want," Gordon said.

But athough women may be less problematic than men, they do require more
privacy and medical attention, said officials at the Davie center. Becky
McMahan, a nurse practitioner at the jail, said that women also require
more medical attention.

"It's just a whole different set of problems when you see females versus
guys - there are a lot of female problems," she said.

She estimates that although the jail population is about 20 percent female,
about a third of the health checks she does are for women.

Women also tend to stay in jail for shorter lengths of time, jail officials
said.

"Women are bailed out," Cain said. He said that families would bail women
out so that they don't lose their child-care provider. They also may feel
women are less likely to run.

"With men, they'll say, 'You got yourself into this. Get yourself out,'"
Cain said.

The Yadkin County Sheriff's Office also tries to reduce the costs of
keeping women in jail, Cain and Widener said.

"We do any effort we can so we don't have to pay $45 a day," Widener said.
He said that includes making sure that women are considered for a pretrial
release program.

"There's such a backlog of cases, it might be three to six months before it
goes to trial," Widener said. Criminal district court is held in Yadkin
County one day a week. Superior Court is held every three months.

Those who are charged with felonies may be in jail awaiting trial for up to
18 months, Cain said.

Release

Gordon expected to go to trial in Davie County in early July. When her
family learned that she would have to wait until mid-September, Minnie
Pearl Gordon decided to bail her granddaughter out.

Melissa Gordon's bond had been set at $10,000, and that meant taking a lien
on the family land.

On the day after her release in mid-July, Melissa Gordon stood in her house
watching a summer thunderstorm roll over Yadkin County.

"I haven't seen any of this stuff since I've been in jail," she said.

Upon being released, she enjoyed a long meal at a seafood restaurant.
Gordon said her primary sustenance in jail was the chips and candy bars
from the canteen.

"The food is nasty. I wouldn't feed it to my dog, except the cornbread.
It's just nasty," Gordon said.

Free to set her own schedule, she watched soap operas, visited with her
boyfriend and shopped with her grandmother for baby clothes for Destiny
Pearl. She also said that she took a job as a hostess at a Winston-Salem
restaurant.

Gordon said she knows that temptation lurks with freedom.

"I promise I'm not going to do anything," she said.

Her grandmother said she's keeping a close eye, but keeping faith.

"I don't expect her to do everything right, but I want a better life for
her than what she's got."

Gordon had a court date Monday to face forgery and uttering charges.
According to court records, she never appeared and a bench warrant for her
arrest was issued.