...whether or not I agree with "should women who are pregnant be incarcerated?" And "should mothers in prison be allowed to keep their babies with them?". Also my I will talk about who takes care of the children of the incarcerated women, and when the mothers go to prison who is responsible for the children left behind. Mothers being allowed bring their babies into prison while they are incarcerated can go two ways, there are pros and cons to having the babies in prison. I think that if this was allowed, other inmates that have a problem with that mother have an opportunity to hurt that mothers child. If they get into a heated argument the other inmates could try to seriously injure the baby or even try to kill the baby. Also if mothers were allowed to have their babies in prison, the prison system would have to spend money on a separate facility for the babies to stay, something like a day care so that the mothers can always come visit their children when they are allowed to. Another thing with women being allowed to have their babies in prison is the humiliation that child would have to live through growing up when they no longer live in the prison. They would have to deal with people calling them a prison baby thinking that they have no outside skills like they were the ones who were serving the time in prison. Also the children would miss out on a normal life because of all the strict rules that they would have to go by in prison even though they are not the criminals...
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...CJ 513 Women in the Justice System Spring 2013 Pregnancy and childbirth in Prison Annotated Citation #1 (2011), Shackling Incarcerated Pregnant Women. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 40: 817–818. doi: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.2011.01300.x An official postion statement of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric & Neonatal Nursing, Retrieved February 15, 2013 at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1552-6909.2011.01300.x/abstract The article deals with the incarceration and shackling of pregnant women. The majority of time pregnant women aren’t shackled down unless the prison officials feel that they will harm themselves, or present themselves as a legitimate flight risk. Nine times out of ten when pregnant women enter the criminal justice system they are less likely to receive prenatal care, and are more likely to experience intimate partner violence, poor nutrition, chronic disease, infectious diseases, mental illness, and drug and alcohol abuse. These are all things that could put the fetus at risk when it comes to birth defects and many other potential damages to the child. The reason for shackling incarcerated pregnant women is to prevent them from harming correctional officers, and/or harming themselves. In the event there is an emergency, shackles may cause unnecessary delays in the administration of potentially lifesaving measures. In conclusion, it’s best that pregnant women are on their best behavior while incarcerated, because...
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...CJ 513 Women in the Justice System Spring 2013 Pregnancy and childbirth in Prison Annotated Citation #1 (2011), Shackling Incarcerated Pregnant Women. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 40: 817–818. doi: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.2011.01300.x An official postion statement of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric & Neonatal Nursing, Retrieved February 15, 2013 at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1552-6909.2011.01300.x/abstract The article deals with the incarceration and shackling of pregnant women. The majority of time pregnant women aren’t shackled down unless the prison officials feel that they will harm themselves, or present themselves as a legitimate flight risk. Nine times out of ten when pregnant women enter the criminal justice system they are less likely to receive prenatal care, and are more likely to experience intimate partner violence, poor nutrition, chronic disease, infectious diseases, mental illness, and drug and alcohol abuse. These are all things that could put the fetus at risk when it comes to birth defects and many other potential damages to the child. The reason for shackling incarcerated pregnant women is to prevent them from harming correctional officers, and/or harming themselves. In the event there is an emergency, shackles may cause unnecessary delays in the administration of potentially lifesaving measures. In conclusion, it’s best that pregnant women are on their best behavior while incarcerated, because...
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...the 1800’s, women were treated like their male counterparts and were also put into the same cells as males and supervised by males. This in turn would cause the women to be doubly abused and exploited (Foster, 2006). Women would get punished just as the men, with the exception of the women prisoners that were pregnant. If a woman was pregnant they would not be subjected to any type of punishment until after they gave birth. Women’s prisons were changed by Elizabeth Gurney Fry that was an English Quaker and would visit prisons to read the bible to the inmates. She was the organizer of the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate in 1817 (Foster, 2006). Fry argued that women prisoners needed separate facilities than men and that women should run women’s prisons as well. The three basic arguments established in the 1800’s that supported the separation of juvenile prisoners from adult prisoners is that “the penitentiary regimen was too hard on tender youth; juveniles would learn bad habits from older criminals and be embittered by the experience of confinement; and adolescents could be reformed if they were diverted early enough into institutions designed specifically for people their age” (Foster, 2006, pg. 34). If there were no distinction between prisons for juveniles and adults the juveniles would be subject to the same punishments as the adult prisoners. The purpose of prison labor was to lower the costs to house prisoners. Prison labor was also...
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...SENSITIZATION OF PRISONS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WOMEN Prisons are less sensitive to the psychological needs of women. There is a growing need for gender sensitization of the prison system. This paper essentially deals with the dilemmas faced by women prisoners in India due to the lack of gender sensitization in Indian jails. Any major program related to well-being of prisoners is focused on men, ignoring the women inmates in prisons all over the nation. The main areas of problems include the lack of provisions for inmates who have infants to take care of, social stigma during and after the prison term, and economic pressures mainly flowing from the traditional economic dependence of women on their male counterparts.. Therefore, this paper argues that there is a need for amendments at a series of levels, from Jail Manuals and prison rules to the technicalities of the prison system in the country apart from the, due care that is required to ensure that the medical, psychiatric, economic and social needs of women inmates are met. Women form a small portion of the total prison population in India. As per the World Female Imprisonment List, more than half a million women and girls are detained in penal institutions all over the world. As far as the Indian scenario is concerned, the statistics of the National Human Rights Commission till 2004 revealed that there are about 13, 355 women and girls in penal institutions all over the country, forming 4 per cent of the total prison population...
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...Development of Corrections Candice Rogers Axia College of University of Phoenix CJS/230 Feb. 27, 2012 Before the 1800s, women in prison were treated just as the men were treated; they were also punished just as men were. The only woman that was treated differently was pregnant women. The pregnant women were spared punishment until after they had given birth. The labor they had to endure was a little different than what the men had to endure, but they were all required to work just as hard. The hard work the women had to endure was things such as sewing, cleaning, laundry, and cooking. The women felt liked they were over worked; they were expected to act like women but were treated like men. Nowadays, I believe women’s prisons have changed dramatically. The women don’t have fewer rules than men. However, the women send and receive more calls from children and family, received and sent more mail, had more visits, and participated in more social clubs. I do believe women get treated better than men in prisons today. This does not include how the women are treated by the other inmates. Every prison, women or not, can be very violent. Three basic arguments established in the 1800s that supported the separation of juvenile prisons from adult prisoners were the following: They believe penitentiary life would be too hard on the youth. They believed the juveniles would learn bad habits from the older criminals and the experience would embittered by the confident. And they would...
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...Name Instructors Name Course 1 December 2009 Breaking the Cycle: Calming the Cries through Alternatives An emergency is at hand. The lights are flashing red and blue, the cries ring out, and women are ripped from their homes at alarming rates, leaving children motherless. The statistics are staggering; the Institute on Women & Criminal Justice reports that the past three decades has seen an explosion in female incarceration rates, growing 832% from 1977 to 2007 with an astounding 4% of women in state prisons and 3% of women in federal prisons pregnant at the time of admittance (Women’s Prison Association 4). Lives are at stake. Every court decision, every judgment cast, effects more than just the individual involved. The future is dependent on how society treats the present. In order to combat the crisis, it is vital to understand its origins and its impact; from this understanding, alternatives that consider the health and well being of all involved can be formulated and delivered. The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but boasts the overwhelming figure of almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners (Liptak 1). With nearly 2.3 million bars, one in 100 American adults is locked up. “Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the...
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...HIV Mandatory Testing for Pregnant Women HIV is an important issue among the world, and it has attracted a lot of people’s attention. Besides, it also bring a lot of problems to the society. Nowadays, many people debate that should pregnant women take HIV mandatory testing. It means whether or not every female should take HIV mandatory testing when they are pregnant, and it is forced for them. Many people support that because they think taking HIV mandatory testing can reduce the rate of HIV infection for newborn, and many people disagree that because they think that would be disrespectful behavior for female’s privacy. In the book “HIV Testing and Counselling in Prisons and Other Closed Settings: Technical Paper”, the author stated “WHO [] estimates that only about 10 percent of persons living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries know their HIV status (WHO/UNAIDS, 2007). In many of these countries, access to HIV testing remains limited. Many high-income countries also estimate that a significant number of people living with HIV are not aware of their HIV status (OSI, 2007)”. It means that fewer people know their HIV condition, and they have low recognition to care about HIV. In addition, most people do not pay much attention to HIV problems in the society, and it would be a large risk for newborn HIV transmission. Faced with this condition, people would like to take some actions to release this terrible condition, and they want to find some methods to solve this problem...
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...Today, prisons all over the world is overpopulated and most of the expenses are paid in account on the taxpayers’ behalf. Some inmates are not necessarily criminals, but prison seems to be the solution to anybody that slightly troubled the law. In Julia Sudbury’s Maroon Abolitionists, anti-prison groups strongly discouraged the Prison-Industrial Complex and worked against it to prevent private corporations from making profits and focused to imply a correctional facility to better the individual. With significant increases in population of inmates yearly, it is crucial to seek improvement in correcting the system and treated with fair access. Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) is an interaction that shares interest of all who helps expand the prison system for personal profits, from monetary profits, political power, control of resources, ownership of properties, etc… It is a system where the private corporate put their self before others and for personal benefits. Inmates are often discriminated based on their race, gender, or culture so the private prison companies can reach their potential power. In Julia Sudbury, Maroon Abolitionists, she showed that the U.S. currently incarcerates approx. 2.3 million people, similarly 762 per 100,000. There are 167,000 prisoners in all of California. 60% of those incarcerated in prison are an ethnic minority. Statistics showed that three quarters of all inmates for drug related offenses are people of color. 1 in every 8 black males in their...
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...In this paper I will be discussing the women behind bars and their relationships with their children. When these women go to jail or prison what happens to the children? Often the children end up in foster care, with family, or a relative. This type of separation can be damaging to a woman’s family. According to a Department of Justice study, almost 1.5 million minors had a parent in prison during the study year 1999 and it says that today the number is likely even higher, some researchers believe that it’s close to 2 million. Statistics show that many of these children will be incarcerated as juvenile offenders, developing a long cycle of hopelessness and crime. The people who are responsible for the children according to the Department of Justice statistics, are 28 percent fathers, half are grandparents and the last of them are with other relatives and in foster homes. Placing the children with these individuals can be good or bad. For example, a 13 year old boy may be placed with his dad who has never been in his life prior to the mother being incarcerated. They can both bond and make up for lost time or, they cannot have any connection at all and end up hating each other which is never a good environment for a child or minor. Different adult personalities and what a child is used to can definitely impact children’s development and their living situation. I believe that all of those aspects should be assessed before placing a child in another person’s care, so that at least...
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...Corrections Women’s prisons before the 1800’s were just as bad as the men’s prisons. The women were often treated like servants and were abused just as the men prisoners were. The only exception to the abuse was pregnant women, but after the women gave birth, they were abused. The prisons were also monitored and watched over by male wards and the women prisoners were mixed in with the male prisoners. By being mixed with the male prisoners the women not only suffered from verbal abuse from the other prisoners and the wardens in the prison, they suffered from sexual abuse. Women prisons have changed since then. They have been separated from men’s prisons and are monitored by women wardens. These prisons were also changed from the traditional prison look to a look that comforts the women in the prisons. The three basic arguments that supported the separation of juvenile prisoners were “the penitentiary regimen was too hard on tender youth, juveniles would learn bad habits from older criminals and be embittered by the experience of confinement and adolescents could be reformed if they were diverted early enough into institutions designed specifically for people their age” (Foster, 2006). If there were no distinction between adult and juvenile prisons there would be children who would possibly get punished as adults and there could be adults who would receive lighter sentences due to the leniency towards juveniles. The purpose of prison labor was to have the prisoners...
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...Introduction There are over 90,000 women in prison in the U.S. today. (WEAP) Between 1980 and 1993, the growth rate for the female prison population increased approximately 313%, compared to 182% for men in the same period. At the end of 1993 women accounted for 5.8% of the total prison population and 9.3% of the jail population nationwide. (NWLC) Although the proportion of prisoners who are women is relatively small, women make up the fastest growing subset of the entire prison population. For this reason, and because male supremacy and sexist justice are so intimately related to this problem, a separate consideration of women in prison is needed. Male privilege and domination, and the protection of that privilege have long been and continue to be central to the criminal prosecution system. In this essay I will consider three main subjects in this regard: Social and economical causes of female violence, what’s the reaction of society and justice system to it, how prison works in this society and what’s its effect on female prisoners? Social and Economical Causes of Female Violence First I will consider social and economical causes of female violence. Who are the women in prison? The profile that emerges in study after study is that of young, single mother with few job skills, a high school dropout whom lives below the poverty level are the most typical women in prison. Seventy-five percent are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, are mothers of dependent children...
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...• What were women’s prisons like before the 1800s? How have they changed? Before the 1800’s women were treated the same as men in prison. Women were punished just like the men were, with the exception that pregnant women were often spared punishment until after they had given birth. Both men and women were mixed together as prisoners and were watched by male jailers, which made the women prisoners subjected to abuse and mistreated. Most female inmates at this time were prostitutes or thieves and because of this no one really worried about what was happening to them. This all began to change in the early 1800’s when Elizabeth Gurney Fry began a ministry for the women in prison. Fry would visit the prisons and read the Bible to the female inmates even though she was advised of the dangers that were possible. Fry created the Association of the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate in 1817. In the U.S., Eliza W.B. Farnham was the head matron of the women’s wing at Sing Sing Prison in New York from 1844-1848. She tried to make the women’s prison more like a home instead of a prison. She was fired for basically being too nice to the inmates. In 1873 the first separate prison for women was built. (Foster, "Women's Prisons," 2006) The prisons have changed because now the male and female prisoners have been separated. • What are the three basic arguments established in the 1800s that supported the separation of juvenile prisoners from adult prisoners? What would happen...
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...institution or at Valley State Prison, the nation's second-largest women's prison, which recently opened across the street. The compounds occupy the tiny farm town of Chowchilla, where almond and alfalfa groves surround the 50,000-volt electrified fence. To the crop dusters above, the flat gray-and-peach buildings must look like a giant corrections butterfly, shielding up to 8,000 women in the 1,340-acre spread of its cinder-block wings. The predominant types of offenses women tend to commit -- petty theft, check forgery, drug possession -- are nonviolent and low-level, yet women's rates of incarceration have steadily gone up, surpassing men's for the past 14 years. The increases are largely due to changes in sentencing and drug laws, and all the trouble that rides the particular poverty track most of these women are on. Many receive state-prison terms for crimes that previously earned probation. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of women in state prisons for drug offenses increased 433 percent (compared with 283 percent for men). Nationally, at the beginning of this year, there were 69,028 women in state prisons -- more than 9,600 in California alone. What this means is that the days of minivans with matrons escorting serious offenders to reformatory-style prisons are receding as more tractor-trailers pull into view. In the world of corrections, an inmate is an inmate is an inmate. In the nation's imagination, too, all inmates are the same. Yet prison administrators, corrections...
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...Mary Montes CJS 230 – Gerry Norris November 27, 2011 University of Phoenix Online – Axia College There was a perplexing problem in the early 1800’s because the rate of women incarcerated was much lower than the rates of women incarcerated today. In reality women’s prisons did not exist, therefore the jails often treated women the same as they did the men, as well the women were punished the same way the men were “with the exception that pregnant women were often spared punishment until after they had given birth” (Foster, 2006, pg. 32). Most women incarcerated were because of prostitution and stealing. Foster also states that women incarcerated were generally mixed with the makes and they were supervised by males. (Foster 2006, pg. 32). According to Foster this began to change when Elizabeth Gurney Fry took a visit to Newgate Prison in 1813. Gurney Fry organized the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners on 1817. In 1863, the Detroit House of Correction was opened. This facility had a unit separated for the women, and there were female guards in this unit. In today’s society, the female prisons are much like the male prisons. They operate with increased security concerns, and there are special housing units for the disorderly. While there was a movement to improve the prisons for women there were also reformers who were working hard to help reform the laws for children. In that era children who committed crimes were treated like the adults who committed...
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