A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

as in the past, female criminality is much
lower than delinquency among males.
While 58 women out of 100 thousand are
doing time, the figure for men is 896 out
of 100 thousand. Therefore, fewer prisons
are built to house females, and there is
much less likelihood that an inmate will be
incarcerated close to home.
New York was the first state to open a
prison nursery for the inmates’ children in
1902. It would take nearly a century for the
other states to follow suit. Repeating New
York’s former groundbreaking initiative –
but in 1994 – Nebraska opened its first
prison nursery. Since the late 90s, an additional
seven child-care facilities have opened
throughout America’s correctional system.
The Tires correctional establishment for
women in Portugal, inaugurated in 1953,
has always allowed children on the premises.
However, though the country has
considerable experience with children
being raised inside the penitentiary, no
studies have been done to assess the effectiveness
of the measure.
The National Women’s Law Center in
Washington DC notes that between 1980
and 1993 women made up the fastest
growing prison population with a 313%,
growth rate as opposed to the 182%
growth rate for men during the same
period. If we go as far back as the 70s,
we see that the growth rate for female
inmates has ballooned 800 percent.
Besides all the other social constraints
linked to motherhood behind bars, the
American inmates must grapple with another
issue that has been widely overlooked
by the US correctional system which is predominantly
male-directed – distance. Sandra
Enos cites research from 1993 stating that
“more than half the women in prison have
never been visited by their children while
incarcerated.” The distance between their
homes and where they are detained weighs
heavily in the visitation issue: “over 60 percent
of female inmates are over 150 kilometers
away from their families.”
Augustine is another among the countless
women who have forfeited their lives to the
justice system. With a tight black braid
wound as a hairband across her head and a
smoldering look of anger from having spent
the lion’s share of her life in and out of
prison, the 54-year-old is in jail because of
“an accident with drugs.” Her checkered
past includes a 12-year-old son who has
been in and out of foster care since he was
18 months old – all because of cocaine.
They deal to feed their own habits, to
support their families, or cater to their
partner’s addiction. Drug dealing is the
socieTy
“more than half the inmates have never been visited by their children,”
sandra enos states in her study.
common thread that runs through these
women’s lives both in Portugal and in the
United States – in one of the poorest countries
of the European Union and one of
the richest nations in the world.
Augustine is getting out again in four
months. Waiting for her on the outside are
five children and twelve grandchildren. One
of the girls already has a rap sheet; one of
the boys received two death sentences.
After so many years of cumulative prison
time, she knows her script and has her lines
down pat: “I raised my kids the best I
could. If they do what they do, that’s their
responsibility. I only ask the Lord to forgive
me while I try to move forward. But I’ve
been in and out of jail since I was a kid.”
Her narrative is so stark that it reminds
me of one of the ironies that goes along
with this type of life: the more brutal the
memories, the more urgent it is to summarize
them. Most of the women sitting
around me in this room in a Rhode Island
prison portray their pasts as Augustine
does – spewing out their life stories with
such jarring harshness that it seems they
want to stun the listener and divest him
of the urge to judge.
When they open the huge front gate for
me to leave I almost run into a large, smiling
black woman. She reminds me of Adilia,
the Portuguese inmate I spoke to when she
went into labor in the Tires women’s facility
before I left for the States. I can see her
panting with pain in an unbreathably hot
cell. That’s when I decided to learn more
about giving birth in prison.
In Rhode Island the women get their handcuffs
taken off during labor, but are chained
to the bed by the ankle as soon as the baby
is born. That’s the way it’s done in this
prison. In other states, female convicts still
have to give birth with their handcuffs on.
It was as late as 2008 when the Federal
Bureau of Prisons ruled that the shackles
could be removed during labor in state
prisons. According to the National Women’s
Law Center, there is now a more widespread
consensus on the issue, since shackling
made it harder for the obstetrician to
get to the mother and the newborn. But
there is still no national legislation on the
issue, which means that each district can
basically make up its own rules.
The United States and Russia are the counties
with the world’s largest female prisons.
In this Rhode Island correctional facility
there are 6 to 8 women per cell. They are
cramped together in the same space 17
hours a day. Each minute is monitored by
the authorities. They cannot touch each
other or have a cigarette or put on a speck
of make-up. The heat is suffocating. It’s easy
to go crazy in a place like this.
1. To safeguard their privacy, the names of the inmates and
prison guards have been changed.
2. This article has been excerpted from a book on mothers
in the prison system, to be published by Livros de Seda,
Plátano Editora publishers, and a feature article to be published
in the weekly magazine Visão.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011 63
DR