A new report sheds light on what happens to pregnant individuals in America’s jails. As 1.5 million women cycle through U.S. jails each year, those who give birth while in custody face horrific physical and psychological conditions, resulting in devastating outcomes.
To make matters worse, there is very little transparency about this crisis, so a student group investigated press coverage of 35 jail births reported in the media to learn more. They discovered that 9 of the 35 births that occurred in jail cells were stillborn or the infant died shortly thereafter, for a mortality rate of more than 25 percent.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Wanda Bertram, communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative, which is focusing attention on this important study from the Birth in Jails Media Project. Here, she summarizes the report, where the U.S. is now home to 4 percent of the world’s population of women, but holds 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated women.
WANDA BERTRAM: This is happening in the context of a very large increase in women’s incarceration that’s taken place over the last few decades. We now have unparalleled women’s incarceration rates. The U.S. holds only, I think, 4 percent of the world’s women, but it has 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated women. Jails mostly hold people who are awaiting trial or who are serving short sentences for things like misdemeanors.
The reason that women’s incarceration and the growth of women’s incarceration has happened largely in local jails is because women who are in the justice system are more likely to be there for lower level charges. Those are short sentences that are more likely to be served in a jail. Women are also more likely than men to not be able to afford bail.
MELINDA TUHUS: Partly the thing that I came away with from reading this is that they’re often just completely alone. So that in itself is pretty horrific.
WANDA BERTRAM: In several of these documented childbirths, I mean, typically the jail staff would do everything that they could to deny any wrongdoing. One of the things that they often say is, “Well, we’re not liable for what happened to this person because we don’t have any expertise in how to deal with childbirth. We’re not obstetricians.”
Jails are not places that are designed to provide any kind of, like I said, long-term or chronic care or any kind of serious healthcare. The healthcare that exists in jails is largely for triaging emergency situations, right? Suicide attempts, overdoses, fights, that kind of thing. When it comes to childbirth, what you see is: Without the capacity really or the interest in taking care of women who are giving birth, the jail just ignores them.
And so that’s why you see that of the 35 births that this project analyzed, about two-thirds of them happened inside someone’s jail cell. Sometimes in a solitary confinement cell, so not in a medical wing at all. And in at least 24 cases, they found that jail staff had ignored people’s repeated requests for help or for medical assistance. There are a lot of horrific details from these stories that you read, like correction staff actually putting someone in solitary to muffle their labor pains or laughing at people who are going into labor and who are in serious distress. Those are horrible things that happen. But I think the basic thing that I would like people to take away from this is that jails are not places where anyone should have to give birth ever.
MELINDA TUHUS: I know that the data is very lacking, but there was some stuff in that report about maternal mortality and infant mortality and I’ll preface this by saying that the U.S. overall has a terrible record on both, especially maternal mortality and especially among African-American women.
But in terms of what goes on in jails and prisons, whatever race one is, what can you say about that?
WANDA BERTRAM: The statistic that came out of the research was that in one-third of the births that were analyzed, the baby was born preterm. And then in a quarter of the cases, the baby was stillborn or died within a couple of weeks of being born. It’s really hard to parse out to what extent these are the result of the jail environment or conditions or someone’s treatment that they got — you know, to what extent it’s due to other factors.
The outcome of a birth has to do largely with someone’s care leading up to delivery. We know that jails are environments that engender trauma and can aggravate people’s mental illness, that create a lot of anxiety and stress where people are not getting adequate care for substance use disorders that they might already come in with. And there are drugs inside jails that percolate through the population and are sometimes very harmful.
All of these things can contribute to negative outcomes before or during delivery and could contribute also to babies being born preterm. I think we can assume that having access to public healthcare on the outside would be radically, radically better than anything people have to experience in giving birth in jails.
And so I want to highlight also programs or laws that states can adopt that require that people who are shortly to give birth cannot be incarcerated until several weeks after the birth.
For more information, visit the Prison Policy Initiative website at prisonpolicy.org.
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