10 Years in a Women's Prison

During her first year in prison, Aisha watched her childhood friend die. The friend had congestive heart failure, and to reduce costs, the prison took away five of her medications. This caused fluids to build up from her extremities into her torso, effectively drowning her. On the night she died, Aisha was a couple feet away as her friend lay on her cot choking and screaming for help. She needed an ambulance, which Aisha was powerless to call and which the guards deemed unnecessary. Aisha’s friend was but one of the 111,000 women prisoners struggling in a system littered with injustices built by white men for white men. Not only do women suffer from the poor health services inflicting most U.S prisons, they also endure sex-based injustices. For example, women and men are allocated the same number of hygiene products despite the biological differences between men and menstruating women. These policies were designed by men and for men, leaving women trapped in the middle.

These patriarchal policies have a dire impact on the health and welfare of women in prison. Many women are denied access to a sufficient number of menstrual products, which can lead to serious health risks such as toxic shock syndrome which results from overusing a tampon. They are forced into solitary confinement solely for being pregnant and when they do give birth – as 2,000 of them do a year – they are shackled in accordance with a draconian law that endangers both the woman and the baby. Even when the babies are born, mothers are placed in prisons thousands of miles away from their children, making precious visitation all but impossible. Even phone calls home are handled by prison contractors that charge exorbitant rates and put profit over people. These women are not being treated as human beings and this needs to change.

One survivor of this experience, Aisha, recounted the daily struggle for humanity while in prison. She and the other women, were forced to walk on concrete and asphalt all day, everyday. There was a grass field, but they weren’t allowed on it. This pounding of their bodies affected their health. Their periods, already painful affairs become tortuous. Aisha saw women “bleed profusely” from clots in their menstrual fluid. Nearly every woman had cramps and bled more heavily than before. The horrible periods were caused by the high stress environment of prison. On top of painful periods, the unsanitary conditions put women at a high risk of infection from tampons.

At one point the prison provided tampons, but when Aisha was there “it was a constant battle to get pads and toilet paper.” The battle was waged between the administration and the women, and also among the women themselves. This stemmed from a policy decision to not increase the number of supplies given to the women despite the drastic increase in prisoners. At one point the prison became so overpopulated they housed some women in the waiting areas for visitors.

Reproductive health concerns were not the only issue in women's prisons. Aisha saw countless women harmed by the so-called health care offered in the prison. People with mental health concerns were thrown on medication and left without any human support. Without psychiatric care, mentally ill prisoners either fell victim to other inmates’ torture or had an episode and ended up in solitary confinement where their conditions worsened. Aisha recalled how she “saw people come in sane and I [didn’t] know if they [would] ever be stable again.” The high stress prison environment can not only trigger mental illnesses but also cause a wide range of disorders such as depression and isolation. Despite the burning need for proper psychiatric and health services, everyone was treated with the same disregard. It didn’t matter how serious the concern was because, “Whatever was wrong with us, it didn’t matter, they didn’t care.”

Active indifference by medical staff wasn’t the end of it. For a period of ten years while Aisha was imprisoned, guards routinely had sex with the women. Through a system of lies and cover-ups, the guards were able to keep their abuses a secret, until they were caught and indicted in the early 2010’s. Aisha explains how these abuses continue to occur: “Prison is a whole world removed from society. It is as if the prisoners don’t exist.” This statement is all too true as laws like the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act prevent inmates from filing lawsuits against their prison for major injustices committed against them while serving their time.

The Bureau of Prisons is in a crisis of how to accommodate women, which has been exacerbated by the extreme rise of female incarceration. Aisha was in prison for ten years before receiving clemency from President Obama. During this time, she saw the female prison population skyrocket – over 700% between 1980 and 2014. The quantity of hygiene products – pads, tampons, and toilet paper – did not increase in proportion to this rise, and the quality decreased. Health care worsened as fewer doctors were expected to handle more patients. Fights broke out over basic human needs. Today, it is common for prisons to limit women to a single pad a day, and require them to present the used pad to a guard to receive another one. This is a humiliating and dehumanizing process that must be addressed.

Although radical differences across jurisdictions and limited governmental insight of prisons makes reform very difficult, there is still hope. Some progress has been made on the state level to ban shackling and increase access to hygiene products. The majority of states now have laws that limit or regulate the use of shackles on pregnant women in labor, but enforcing state policy at prisons is proving difficult. With states like Massachusetts unable to translate their legislation to policy change in the actual prisons. In the past year, localities including New York City and Los Angeles County have made promising steps to provide hygiene products. The U.S Senate is currently considering the Dignity for Incarcerated Women’s Act, which has provisions to improve the mental health care in women's prisons. These efforts are commendable and should be replicated throughout the county, but remain piecemeal to a problem faced by over a hundred thousand women.