BABIES BEHIND BARS
With California inmates expected to give birth to more than 300
babies this year, officials are preparing to open the state's first
prison nursery
Vicki Haddock, Insight
Staff Writer
Sunday, May 14, 2006
 Juanita
Massie can recall her baby's kicks inside her belly, how her water
broke, how hard she strained in labor as the contractions
intensified. But her most vivid memory is humiliation -- she was
shackled to a bedrail. And the sensation of cuddling her newborn was
fleeting, because the baby was whisked away by a social worker --
and Massie was transported back to her 8-foot-by-12-foot prison
cell.
"I couldn't show anybody the baby pictures. I cried every single
day for a month," she said. "I couldn't stop thinking about missing
the first time my baby smiled, or threw up on me, or took that first
step. ..." Her hormones ricocheted wildly, she ached from the milk
that would not be nursed out of her swollen breasts, and she says
she used heroin smuggled into the prison to deaden the shame and
loneliness.
"When you're a mother, the first place you want to be is with
your baby," she said. "And the last place you want to be is in
prison."
An inmate giving birth is almost an everyday occurrence in
California. This year more than 300 babies are expected to be born
to women incarcerated by the state, and at any given time, about 1
in 10 of the state's female inmates is pregnant. That population has
exploded by fivefold since the 1980s, almost entirely because of
tougher sentencing for nonviolent drug crimes. Most of these prison
mothers are destined to see their sons and daughters rarely if ever
until parole, when they can only hope, often in vain, that their
young children won't shun them as strangers.
"Today is Mother's Day in Mexico, so I'm anxious to see if my
kids send me a card," said Lucinda Hernandez, who was a struggling
single mother of five when she first entered prison for creating
phony payroll checks to herself. Now she is almost eight months
pregnant and plans to make the most of the two days she'll be able
to spend with her newborn before an aunt takes her away.
 She's
scheduled to be paroled a month after giving birth, and plans to
reunite with the newborn and eventually try to regain her other
children, now living with her cousin's mother-in-law. It's not her
first parole, but she swears it will be her last.
Prison pregnancy is a bleak situation. One of the state's three
big lockups for women is trying to make it less so with something
radically different for California: a prison nursery where babies
live with their incarcerated mothers. That's the latest in a series
of changes on the drawing board as a state corrections commission
struggles to revamp the old male military model of a boot
camp-lockdown prison into a system better suited for female inmates.
Women prisoners are statistically much less prone to violence, more
likely to have been victims of sexual abuse, and much more likely to
be the sole parent to their children.
Already reforms have stopped male guards from pat-searching
female inmates or shackling them during labor and delivery.
The most ambitious goal is tucked inside Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger's budget plan: to move some 4,500 female inmates out
of big remote mega-institutions and into small community-based
correctional centers -- homier, but still locked down. The biggest
counterveiling force may be the prison guard's union, which opposes
the notion of private contractors running the community units.
"Right now the system works to break families apart. More than
half of female prisoners never receive visits from their children,
because they're located in remote parts of the state often hundreds
of miles away," said Sonoma State criminal justice professor Barbara
Bloom. The coauthor of a groundbreaking study for the U.S. Justice
Department on why gender matters in prison, she's been hired to
consult with the state.
"The sheer numbers are going to make our case for change," said
Wendy Still, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
official who heads the commission. "My lord, we're at 11,600 and
climbing, and we can't just build our way out of this problem. This
is the right thing to do."
The prison nursery concept may be jarring -- babies behind bars?
-- but it has quietly generated the endorsement of many experts in
and out of the criminal justice system.
Work has begun to renovate an unused wing of the California
Institution for Women in Corona, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles,
into a 20-bed unit for expectant and new mothers and their babies.
Warden Dawn Davison, who conceived the idea, has challenged
supporters to get supply cribs, breast pumps, lullaby mobiles,
onesies. By January, qualifying inmates -- those set to go on parole
in 12 to 18 months and deemed no risk to children -- will share a
private room with their newborns and participate in parenting
classes and rehabilitation before both leave together.
 The
unit is intended to be an oasis within the barbed-wire fenced
perimeter of the prison, a ramshackle brick campus constructed a
half-century ago among smelly cattle yards. Today the institution
houses about 2,300 women, from lifers in for murder to those whose
drug addiction keeps them boomeranging back into prison on parole
violations.
"I saw what was happening to my women, and how they longed for
their babies," Davison said. "I'm a mother. And as a mother it broke
my heart. I thought, what would happen if that bond between mother
and baby didn't have to be broken?"
Although most babies born to inmates end up living with
relatives, particularly grandparents, 1 in 10 goes into the foster
care system. And simply having a parent in prison makes a child four
times more likely to end up in prison someday -- a vicious cycle.
A few states -- including Washington and Nebraska -- already have
prison nurseries and one, at New York's Bedford Hills, has been
around long time. A study by corrections officials in New York found
that inmates who went through the nursery program had half the
recidivism rate of other female parolees. Researchers at Columbia
University say preliminary results of a clinical assessment indicate
all the babies are on-track developmentally.
"In the first year of life, the babies don't know that they are
technically in a prison. What they do perceive is that they are in
their mothers' arms," said Denise Johnson of the Center for Children
of Incarcerated Parents, who has helped plan California's nursery.
 As
word spread inside the prison, several inmates offered suggestions
for how to make the nursery idea work. One such woman was Oleta
Simmons, who is serving her fourth prison sentence and has given
birth to six children -- three while she was incarcerated. She
doesn't even have newborn pictures of all of them because she didn't
have enough money in her prison account to pay for hospital photos.
Simmons, whose convictions were all for using crack and once for
selling it, said that after each parole, "I did what I normally did
on the outside because that's what addicts do. We're selfish." So
her advice was for prison officials to make supervised care after
release mandatory for inmates applying to get into the nursery
program.
"The babies aren't going to get us clean," she said. "I have six
kids and that didn't cure me. A lot of us are kids ourselves, with a
lot of damage inside us. So if our kids have a birthday party, part
of us is really happy for them and part of us is sitting there
saying "Damn, how come I never had a party like this?" We need a
wide support system to get us through parole and life with our kids
after parole.
"Bonding with our babies is important -- but it ain't enough."
Some critics have argued that society's emphasis on family
reunification is overly optimistic, and risks placing the desires
and needs of mothers who don't have it together ahead of their
children. One foster mom who didn't want her name used feared
subjecting children to a yo-yo effect, adding "what's good for
incarcerated moms is not necessarily best for their babies."
There is resistance, too, from some who advocate placing all
nonviolent offenders in halfway houses or on home detention with
ankle bracelets, instead of spending a fortune warehousing them.
"I think we owe it to ourselves to ask the hard questions about
why so many women are being locked up, and ask ourselves if these
policies are making us safer," said Donna Willmont of Legal Services
for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco. "I think we owe it to
ourselves to create community-based alternatives to mass
incarceration so that the idea of babies behind bars will shock us,
not pacify us."
The department of corrections already contracts to transfer
select female inmates -- fewer than 100 -- so they can finish
serving their lockup in halfway houses alongside their young
children. The recidivism rate for graduates of these programs is 22
percent, compared to a 46 percent rate for other female parolees.
One such program, based in Pomona (Los Angeles County), accepted
Juanita Massie, and she was able to finish up her last prison stint
there, where she could feed, bathe and care for her son Louie, now
4, and Evangelina, now 3. On parole, she went straight to Walden
House, where she is completing more intensive drug treatment and
fostering an easy rapport with her youngsters.
A giggling Evangelina takes her mother's face in her tiny hands.
"Love you mommy," she coos. "Love you to death!"
Massie's eyes rim with tears. "People (who) saw me with my kids
would say 'Oh, you're such a good mother.' And I'd say "No, if you
only knew! I haven't been a good mother.
"But I'm learning to be one."
E-mail Vicki Haddock at
vahaddock@sfchronicle.com.
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