AAUW Dialog

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
—   Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Clearinghouse for Women’s Issues held a program on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., highlighting inequities and injustices that affect women throughout the criminal justice system. The panelists touched on a variety of current issues, including inequitable treatment of individuals who are convicted of crimes, women who are wrongly convicted, the legal rights of women in prison, and research findings on women’s post-release reintegration into society. The discussion significantly changed my perspective on the treatment of women in prison and helped me conceptualize the serious problems associated with those injustices.

Fran Buntman, a researcher and assistant professor of sociology at George Washington University, noted that perceptions of inequities in the criminal justice system often focus on individuals who have been wrongly convicted. She encouraged us to think critically about whether some crimes are caused by societal problems of poverty and public health or are purely criminal acts. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of women in prison climbed from 142,000 in 1974 to 581,000 in 2001. The United States imprisons more women than any other nation in the world.

Deborah Golden, staff attorney for the D.C. Prisoners’ Project of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, stated that our prison system continues to reinforce a gender hierarchy among men and women. Reproductive rights do not end at the jailhouse door, yet women are denied sufficient gynecological care and access to birth control. Women who are raped or sexually abused within prison walls are informed that these are “emotional injuries,” and their complaints are often overlooked unless they have physical proof of their pain.

Women in the workplace who are victims of verbal, sexual, or racial harassment are entitled to compensation for emotional distress, but this rule is abolished for prisoners. Individuals who have acquired physical injuries during their time in prison are also denied support. Conditions including facial burns, sexual touching, and sexual assault are insufficient to satisfy the physical injury requirement, according to research on the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

In addition to the unimaginable experience women endure during their time in prison, they receive little or no support once they return to their lives. Nancy G. La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, shared her research findings on the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative. Continued support and services are imperative to ensure that past prisoners reintegrate and do not end up behind bars again. In her findings, prisoners from a subsample of women in Texas indicated that they had long histories of mental health issues and drug abuse, were poorly educated, and had a serious number of prior convictions. Women with these co-occurring disorders are twice as likely to end up in prison as men are. As a result, we must revisit the policy implications to ensure a continuum of care that is tailored to each individual.

One woman who attended the session informed us that her job entails responding to letters from women who are in prison. Unfortunately, when they ask about training and resources available to them after completion of their time in prison, she has very little information to share. This may change, however, with the newly created National Reentry Resource Center, which is funded by the Council of State Governments to serve people from “arrest to reintegration.”

This discussion was both enlightening and informative, and I learned a harsh reality: being entitled to rights is different from actually having them.