New York state prison authorities have continued the illegal practice of shackling pregnant inmates during labor, fail to provide most female prisoners with enough sanitary napkins and toilet paper, and do not train medical staff to work with trauma survivors — a crucial oversight, since the majority of incarcerated women have histories of abuse and sexual violence.
These are among the findings of a scathing report released Thursday by a nonprofit group that monitors prison conditions.
Reproductive health care for women in state prisons is “woefully substandard,” according to the Correctional Association of New York report. Drawn from interviews with almost 1,000 incarcerated women over a five-year period, the result is a comprehensive and critical look at inmates’ experiences with women-specific health care.
“We looked at reproductive health because it’s one lens that you can really see the specific experience of women in prison — not just the dehumanization that defines life in prison in general, but the specific dehumanization that women go through,” said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, author of the report and director of the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association.
The report concludes that incarcerated women in New York frequently face poor-quality care and “assaults on their basic human dignity and reproductive rights.”
A spokesperson for the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
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“The ‘no birth control’ policy seems to extend even when it has nothing to do with pregnancy prevention, and that is to the serious detriment to women’s health,” Kraft-Stolar said. “These are things that we take for granted on the outside, basic access to things like contraception that are so important for women’s health and women’s overall agency and even economic security.”
She said the best way to protect women from the harms outlined in the report is not to incarcerate them to begin with.
“We should be looking at alternatives to incarceration and community-based approaches that are more holistic,” Kraft-Stolar said. “This is a real signal that we need to look at over-incarceration and figure out better solutions than just locking people up for issues that are largely social and economic and not really criminal at their core.”
The rate of women incarcerated in the U.S. has shot up over the past four decades. Approximately 111,300 women were in American prisons in 2013 — a 900 percent increase since 1977. According to the Sentencing Project, the number of women in prison is increasing at nearly double the rate for men.
More than 60 percent of women in New York state prisons are women of color, even though they represent only 35 percent of the state’s female population.
