Women in Prison
Categories: Nonfiction
I spent the morning wondering if I should bail an acquaintance out of jail. I haven't seen her in a few years, and if jails do provide rehabilitation of any kind, she would certainly benefit. Still, I was dressed neatly in time to drive to her arraignment. Then I checked the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts site again: her case had been put on hold, and she'd been released on her own recognizance.
Why the obsession with somone I barely know? Partly because of my obsession with the British TV series Bad Girls, a jail drama that ran for 8 years that I just found out about. You can watch YouTube clips and see if it's for you. Only the first season is available on DVDs playable by regular U.S. DVD players. There are Alternate Ways of getting hold of the other 100+ episodes, but they could land you in prison.
The Education and Religion Department is the place to go for serious information on incarcerated women. The first book I chose was 13 Women: Parables From Prison, edited by Karlene Faith, a prisoners' rights advocate for 40 years.
In each chapter, the imprisoned woman and Karlene Faith's voices alternate: the imprisoned woman talks about her crime; then Faith offers her impressions of the woman and the circumstances that led to her incarceration. Nearly half of the women are political prisoners; other crimes include child abuse and check fraud. The women are articulate and include passages from their poetry and other writings. Faith points out that most of the women, like my acquaintance, are poor--and if they weren't before they went to prison, they're likely to be when they get out. Middle-class women are most likely to go to prison for fraud or for murdering a spouse.
Life on the Outside, by Jennifer Gonnerman, is the story of Elaine Bartlett after the end of her 16-year term for her first (and last) attempt at drug dealing. The book is a lot like Susan Sheehan's Is There No Place on Earth for Me: Small triumphs are followed by large set-backs.
Although Elaine realizes her dream of living, much of the time, with her four adult children and two grandchildren; and Gonnerman describes Elaine's 21-year-old boyfriend as "not quite as stunning as Taye Diggs in How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but ... pretty close," three years after her release, Elaine is working at a low-paying job she dislikes and, because of her parole, has a 9:30 p.m. curfew. Finally, the book argues passionately and convincingly that long jail terms for drug offenders are not an effective way of dealing with trafficking or with addiction.
Female Offenders: Meeting the Needs of a Neglected Population, published and edited by the American Correctional Association, discusses the different needs of incarcerated men and women. Being separated from their children is the big one (although presumably incarcerated men also have children). Women remain a small percentage of the incarcerated population--about 6 percent in State and Federal prisons.
Interestingly, the consensus is that women are less adept at using prison law libraries and that law libraries in women's prisons are often less extensive than they are in men's. "Separate does not mean equal," even in the prison world, the writer notes. Women are more likely to form bonds with prison staff members (usually but not always a good thing), but are also more likely to be treated by the staff as children, which makes it more difficult for them to make the transition to independent living after their release.
My acquaintance's trial is set for the end of the month, and I'm assuming the case will be dismissed, as most of her others have been. If not--well, I'll think about that next week.
