The View from Behind Bars

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"In a small cramped room we would hold each other close, and he would say, 'Home, Mommy, home.' When our time was over, ((guards)) would literally have to pull him from my arms screaming, crying, kicking and shouting, 'Mommy, I want my mommy!' "

-- Terri E. Rachals, a prisoner at the Georgia Women's Correctional Institution, recalling a visit with her son, now seven

What is the fastest-growing group of women in the U.S.? Sadly, it may be women behind bars. The female population of American jails and prisons roughly tripled during the 1980s; in 1989 alone the number of women in lockups rose nearly 22%. And while there are still almost 17 men doing time for every female prisoner -- 663,998 men and 39,689 women in federal and state lockups at last count on Dec. 31, 1989 -- the women have been gaining (if that is the word) in that respect too. Their share of the total prison population rose from 4.2% in 1981 to 5.6% in 1989.

The reason for this explosive increase can be put in a single word: drugs. As city, state and federal governments have cracked down on the sale and use of narcotics, ever growing numbers of women have been caught in the dragnet. About 60% of all women in federal prisons have been convicted of drug-related offenses, but that tells only part of the story. Many other crimes -- theft, prostitution, armed robbery -- are also drug related. At the Rose M. Singer jail for women on New York City's Rikers Island, warden Robert Brennan estimates that drugs underlie the incarceration of 95% of his inmates.

More ironic, in the field of crime, women are achieving a dubious sort of equality with men. Mandatory minimum-sentencing laws passed in the late 1970s and early '80s have forced judges to hand out long sentences to women. Says Carole Laughton, an inmate of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, N.J.: "With equal opportunity and all that,we're getting longer time. It has hurt us."

Once women are locked up, however, they swiftly find they are no longer equal. Until recently, there were so few women in prison that little attention was paid to their special needs. Even now, prison authorities argue that the number of females is so small, relative to males, that there are no "economies of scale" in designing special programs for them. Female prisoners are thus confined in a system primarily designed, built and run by men for men.

Women, to be sure, share many of the problems of male prisoners, notably overcrowding. The California Institution for Women at Frontera currently bulges with 2,500-odd inmates, instead of the 1,011 it was built to hold. At the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., many inmates are double bunked; a visitor can easily see beds sticking up over the half walls that separate individual cubicles. With two lockers and two small metal closets filling up the narrow confines of each space, prisoners barely have room to turn around.

But many difficulties faced by women prisoners have no parallels among men. While male lockups may train inmates for such high-paying trades as welding and mechanics, courses in women's facilities still concentrate on homemaking or low-paid skills like beautician and launderer. The pity is that women inmates, often the sole support of their families, are "more motivated career-wise than the men," says Paul Bestolarides, who directs a program at the Northern California Women's Facility in Stockton that includes training in landscaping and electrical work. Too often a woman leaves prison even less equipped to earn an honest living than her male counterpart.

Health care, or the lack of it, is a crisis in some women's prisons. The federal system's only hospital for women, in Lexington, Ky., has not consistently employed a full-time obstetrician-gynecologist -- a shocking deficiency given that Justice Department figures show that 1 in 4 women entering prison is pregnant or has recently given birth. Pregnant inmates typically get little or no prenatal care, though many are drug abusers with a high risk of medical complications.

About 80% of women entering state prisons are mothers, 85% with custody of their children. By contrast, 60% of male state prisoners are fathers, and less than half have custodial responsibility. Though a convicted drug dealer hardly fits the stereotype of a good mother, jailed mothers say separation from their offspring is the harshest punishment. Their alternatives are grim: put the children up for adoption, release them for foster care or, most often, leave them with relatives.

With any of these options, there is no guarantee that the mother will not lose touch with her kids. Often she will not understand the child-welfare system, says Brenda Smith of the National Women's Law Center in Washington; she will not, for instance, know the name of the social worker or judge who oversees her child's case. Begi Ahmetovic, 30, who is serving 4 to 12 years for shooting her husband, left her two sons, now 10 and 12, in the care of their paternal aunt. "She doesn't let my kids come to see me," Ahmetovic laments, and she wonders whether they see the frequent letters she writes. - Ahmetovic saves copies to show them someday "that I didn't forget them, and that I love them." The aunt says she is trying to protect the children from further trauma.

Visits from children are rare in any case, because women's prisons, like those for men, are often all but inaccessible by public transportation. When children do manage to get there, the sessions can be heartrending. Some facilities, including the Georgia Women's Correctional Institution at Hardwick, where Rachals is housed, have created bright, toy-filled visiting rooms, but more often the quarters are grim and frightening. In Chicago's Cook County jail, a thick glass pane separates family visitors from prisoners. "It's a terrifying thing for a child to reach out and try to touch his mother, and find out he can't," says Gail Smith, who heads Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers.

Rarely, if ever, do the female prisoners get any help from the fathers of their children. In fact, says Allyn Sielaff, New York City's correction commissioner, husbands, boyfriends and brothers usually drop a woman convict "like a hot potato." While wives and girlfriends line up to visit male inmates, visiting days at women's prisons are virtually all-female affairs.

Forgotten by their men, women prisoners turn to one another for solace. Like jailed men, some form homosexual relationships; some authorities believe the number to be as high as 40%. More striking, the females often form surrogate "families" behind bars, with women of different ages playing the roles of mothers, daughters and aunts. "There's an older lady that lived in my room with me. She was just like my mother," says Susie Ruales, 27, who is serving 12 years for cocaine possession in the Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna, Fla.

Ruales and her "mother" both happen to be Hispanic. But other such families are interethnic. That would be highly unlikely in a men's prison, where blacks, Hispanics and whites often segregate themselves and interact only violently. Warders who have worked with inmates of both sexes unanimously testify that the women are far less violent. In California there has been no riot among women prisoners in the past dozen years.

There is, however, one big exception to the camaraderie in women's prisons: older inmates cannot abide the "crack kids," brassy, street-smart young women in their late teens and early 20s. Dolores Barnes, 52, a three-time inmate in New Jersey's Clinton prison, launches into a classic what's-the-matter-with-kids-today tirade: "They can't cook, clean, wash clothes or take care of themselves. They have no respect for their elders and no obligation to their kids." These "animalescents," as other prisoners sometimes call them, often squabble among themselves. "There are a lot of fights," says Rikers inmate Arlethea M., 18. "They throw the phone at each other and hit people on the head with an iron."

Unfortunately, as long as the public's get-tough-on-crime mood lasts -- and it has endured for the better part of a decade -- the number of crack kids and women prisoners seems bound to keep soaring. Which means that their particular needs can no longer be ignored. Some steps have been taken. Rikers Island, for example, maintains a nursery for babies born to prisoners, allowing the babies to stay with their mothers for up to a year. Hardwick and other institutions have parenting and outreach programs for inmates' children. Federal legislation enacted last year makes pregnant prisoners and their newborns eligible for special food supplements. And more prisons are expanding drug- and alcohol-treatment programs.

Those who work with female inmates are happy to see the changes but wonder why more isn't being done in the first place to prevent women from falling into the ruts that lead to prison. "Is incarceration the most rational way to deal with a woman who is a drug addict?" asks commissioner Sielaff. The country would do well to invest in programs for drug abusers, for battered women, for incest survivors and for the children of inmates, says Elaine Lord, superintendent at Bedford. But instead, the nation's prison systems, much like the overburdened school systems, have become the social program of last resort, a catchall for society's neglected troubles. "It's a very expensive way to deal with social problems," notes Lord. And an ineffective one that breeds recidivism and new generations of jailbirds. It is useless to go on endlessly building new prisons, says Sielaff. "We can't build our way out of the problem."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles, Julie Johnson/Washington and Naushad S. Mehta/New York