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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
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.
