The video Prison Moms was eye opening to the plight of women while pregnant as members of a correctional institution. This documentary focused on Pennsylvania based programs at Riverside correctional facility. The 2009 sentencing project study found that one out of every forty-three kids has a parent in prison and that sixty-five thousand and six hundred mothers were incarcerated as of 2007. The program offers a full-time staff Monday through Friday that work specifically with pregnant inmates and mother within the prison population with children under the age of three. This staff also works with the mother and the caregiver of the child outside of the corrections facility to keep the family unit “together”. The video also stated that eighty …show more content…
This mistreatment includes the use of restraints, poor health conditions, sexual abuse by corrections officers and the isolation of women contained in high security units. Perhaps the most alarming part of this report was that the United States agreed to an international treaty that was agreed upon by one hundred and forty-five countries that are currently legally bound by said treaty, but only as far as what was already stated in the Constitution and not anymore than that. Women in American prisons are victims of rape and various forms of sexual abuse by prison staff. Also, as stated in Jill 's story that sick or pregnant women are unduly and unjustly required by law to be bound in chains while giving birth for the sake of safety. This bondage of pregnant women is an utter violation of the basic human rights of women that are incarcerated. The final topic discussed in this report was the fact that most prisons, more specifically, maximum security prisons are developed and cater to men and their gender specific problems. Only recently has this begin to improve but the conditions are still outrageous and some of the high risk units within the prisons violate the basic right to privacy and dignity because they allow male guards to see these females at all times without any privacy. The conditions talked about in Prison Life
In this documentary series, 30 Days: Jail, directed by Morgan Spurlock, Morgan questions whether the system is proper and effective, or whether they need to change and reform the system. The 30 Days: Jail is a true story, therefor the story is nonfiction. The details and events that transpire in this documentary series are facts. The 30 Days documentary film series are short films, which each episode last roughly thirty minutes long. Morgan Spurlock has filmed three seasons of the documentary series 30 Days. The reason why Morgan filmed these series of 30 Days was, because he wanted to put himself in other people’s shoes to show their life experiences and what they go through on a daily routine. Morgan is a writer and director, he has other works such as Supersize Me, Mansome.
A major criminal justice issue that has presented itself in St. Louis, Missouri is inhumane conditions for a medium security prison. These conditions that are brought to attention are infestations, wrongful medical treatment, degrading conditions, and unjust treatment of prisoners. These issues pose a major threat to the criminal justice system because they will bring scrutiny and lawsuits against those who are partaking in them. Also, they do provide unsafe working conditions for both inmates and correctional officers.
writers are ‘doubly marginal’, being female and a writer in prison whereas at the same time black women suffer threefold- as a woman, prisoner, and African American”(Willingham 57). Although both of these women are prisoners, one of them is viewed as prison writer and another women is viewed just as prisoner. Beside they being treated just by their race, even in an African American society, the perception of looking imprisoned men and women are different, African American women are subjected for gender difference. Willingham mentions the thought of a African American woman, “African American men are almost made martyrs and heroes when they come out of prison but when African American women go back to their communities, the are not only unfit people, they are also marked with the title of unfit mother, and it’s hard to trust us”
In 2007 there were approximately 77,200 fathers and 65,600 mothers incarcerated in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). As our society continues to grow, our jail and prison population are growing as well. When a parent or guardian is taken into custody the juvenile (child) is taken and released to a relative or child protective services. The children are either given to a close family member or a surrogate parent, meaning a foster home. This may have an emotional impact on the juvenile involved, which may lead them to committing delinquent acts. The children sometimes feel they are left to fend for themselves emotionally and the stress of these emotions are left upon the guardian at the time. These intense sufferings sometimes leave the juveniles in a harmful mental state resembling depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and feelings of abandonment from their parents/guardians. Children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely than their peers to commit crimes (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2008).
“The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, written by Amanda Coyne depicts the struggles of parents and family members with the emotional trauma children go through due to the absence of their loved one. The story tugs the heart strings of readers with its descriptive account of Mother’s Day in a minimum security federal prison. Coyne describes the human emotions and truly gives an accurate account of what being in a visitation room is like. “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison” makes the reader question the criminal justice system and convinces him or her to adjust their way of thinking towards the definition of criminalization through the logos, pathos, and ethos demonstrated throughout the text.
...ed girls, in a written message that was smuggled out of the prison during a visit with her mother, wrote,None of the human rights organizations have visited us, and the prison administration did not sign off on a medical examination for us, following repeated attacks on us. They only conducted pregnancy tests." The women in these prisons are being attacked sexually, physically, and mentally. They are not getting any help from any doctors, they are being dehumanized. Yet the justice system which is supposed to protect them from these exact attacks is doing nothing. They are allowing these women to be attacked and not punishing the people who are supposed to keep them safe while they are serving their sentences. Instead of helping the women the justice system is blatantly ignoring the infections and injuries that are deadly that the women sustained from the attacks.
This United States of America is not fond of undocumented immigrants, especially women. Cruel anti-immigrant laws, policies, and practices have had especially dramatic impact on immigrant women and their families. These measures force immigrant women to choose between the threat of an abusive husband and the threat of deportation if they call the police. Immigration policies can also make women sit in detention, thus leaving their children. During this time, some of the women might be raped by officers. This is because detention lacks sexual abuse prevention policies. These women who are in the detention centers are not dangerous, instead they are placed behind bars because of small crimes such as driving without a license or they are charged the civil crime for violating immigration laws.Women are faced with the emotional burden of separation from their families.
Hairston, C., & Lockett, P. (1987). Parents in Prison: New Directions for Social Services. Social Work , 162-164.
This article describes the similarities and parallelism of the foster system to the prison systems and how they perpetuate and are influenced by each other. It describes how these systems commodify and dehumanize these human beings, especially women who receive long, severe sentences for minor offenses and are thus denied ability to parent their child from behind bars. This, thus, affects the child in the short and long term because these children are taken from their mothers by the state, often put into foster care, in which the state then refuses to take care of these motherless children. This then leads to social workers developing more aggressive and hostile tactics when dealing with these types of cases, because often the children must scavenge the streets in order to survive and become troubled by the social realities they face. The author then begins to discuss how the welfare system becomes heavily involved with these families, along with the stigmatizations government assistance is attached with. . It is unfortunate that this article only very briefly discusses pregnant, black incarcerated women, and the lack of prenatal care they are provided with during
Women in Prison. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics Varnam, Steve. Our prisons are a crime (reforming the prison system). Editorial. Christianity Today 21 June 1993
While most expectant mothers are planning for baby showers, shopping for maternity clothes and preparing the baby’s nursery, the incarcerated mother-to-be has to remain in a constant state of alertness and preparedness for situations that can put her and her unborn baby at risk, in an environment that is both intimidating and routinely violent. (Hutchinson et. al., 2008)
In order to answer these two research questions, the following factors will be discussed: relational violence in women’s prison, a comparison of sexual coercion experiences reported by men and women in prison, prisoner confrontations and the search for respect, and the rates of victimization.
There have been many questions raised if the nurseries programs were fair but “the number of women incarcerated in state prisons in the United States (US) has dramatically increased in the past 20 years, and 70% of these women are the mothers of minor children, as of the last Bureau of Justice estimates” (Mumola, 2000). “Allowing women to parent their children within correctional facilities in the US may be “one of the most controversial debates surrounding the imprisonment of women” (Bel...
Prisons serve the same reason for women and men, they are also tools of social control. The imprisonment of women in the U.S. has always been a different experience then what men go through. The proportion of women in prison has always differed from that of men by a large amount. Women have traditionally been sent to prison for different reasons, and once in prison they endure different conditions of incarceration. Women incarcerated tend to need different needs for physical and mental health issues. When a mother is incarcerated it tends to play an impact on the children also. Over time the prison system has created different gender responsive programs to help with the different needs of female offenders. After being released from prison
The article, “What’s Going On in Our Prisons?”, was written by Michele Deitch and Michael B. Mushlin. Michele Deitch has a juris doctorate’s degree from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in psychology from Oxford University, and a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College (lbj.utexas.edu). She is an attorney and a teacher at the University of Texas. Her work experience has been, “30 years of experience working on criminal justice and juvenile justice policy issues with state and local government official’s corrections administrators, judges and advocates” (lbj.utexas.edu). She has written about the topic of juvenile justice. Michael B. Mushlin