RAISE THE BARS
WOMEN IN PRISON: AN ISSUE OF ACCESS
Women in prison have limited access to hygiene products behind prison walls due to a system that is set up for male inmates. If the standard of care is heightened, women’s behavior and self-esteem will improve, making for a push in the right direction for a healthier prison system overall. Over 40% of female inmates in the United States don’t have the proper access to basic hygiene products that every human should have the right to access. The standard of care in the United States should not lessen when it comes to those who need it the most. Sure, these women may be criminals, but if we treat them as less-than, then they will never be able to rehabilitate properly for when they are released. Although there are countless issues with the United States prison and criminal justice systems, I will mainly be focusing on women’s hygiene and wellness.
Historically, the United States has always had more men admitted to prison than women. Quakers are actually responsible for early crusades established by Elizabeth Fry to institute separate prisons for women. The traditional practice was incarcerating criminalized women in men’s prisons. The request for separate prisons for women was considered radical during this period.
According to a data set published by New York State’s Open Database, there have been 1258% more men than women admitted to prison since 2008 alone. That is 527,446 women admitted to prison compared to well over 7,000,000 men over just a ten-year span. Approximately 49,000 women are in lower level jails awaiting trial, serving misdemeanor sentences, or waiting to be shuffled to a federal prison for higher-level crimes committed. Around 59,000 women are currently residing in Federal and State Prisons in the United States. Because women’s prisons are so sparse in population when compared to men’s, women are treated exactly like the men.
While this may sound evenhanded at first, fact is: women have different needs than men. Not only that, but the men’s systems aren’t up to a basic level of human care to begin with. What is a basic level of human care, you might ask? Well, for starters, I believe that every human has a right to clean water and basic hygiene products (Shampoo, soap, hair combs, dental hygiene products, etc.). Men and women in prison are each given a comb, a bar of low-quality soap (which often leaves the skin needing attention due to rashes), and a toothbrush. Anything additional may be purchased through the prison’s commissary system.
Commissaries house a wide range of items from candies and snacks to toothpaste and dental floss. Items from the commissary under the category of hygiene tend to always run higher in price than a bag of jolly ranchers. A photo by Lisa Iaboni of a crushed up watermelon Jolly Rancher accompanies an article by Simone Weichselbaum, Fakeup. The article is about the different ways that female inmates create their own beauty and hygiene products due to lack of access and availability. The image alone doesn’t say much, but accompanied with the article, it speaks volumes.
You soon learn that Jolly Ranchers can double as a powerful hair gel, or a long-lasting flavored lip-stain. Due to a lack of access and overpriced basic-goods, women concocting their own hygiene and wellness products is commonplace. “M&Ms serve multiple fakeup needs: Mix the sweet candy-coated shells with hot water to make a lip stain. Crush the leftover nut — if using peanut M&Ms — into a spoonful of face cream, creating a protein-packed facial mask.”
Envisioning a woman scrub her face with the peanuts within a cold, concrete structure just to feel clean and good about herself really makes you re-evaluate what it means to be human and what rights we are all entitled to, within the criminal justice system and outside of it. Aside from lotion and hair gel, women in prison are struggling to get full access to tampons and pads.
One woman who was being housed in a Queens, New York police station while awaiting sentencing started her period unexpectedly soon after being changed into one of the jailhouse’s standardized uniforms. Tara Oldfield-Parker, now an inmate in upstate New York, said that when she asked for a sanitary pad at a police station in Queens, she was given a bandage.She bled for hours while requesting a sanitary napkin or tampon, when officers stated that they would then have to call an ambulance to get her one because they did not have any. Temporarily, they provided her with a wad of medical gauze, which is scratchy and meant for sprained ankles, not a menstruating woman. “It turns you on yourself.” “You start to hate your body.” A former inmate said this of the conditions women are forced to face in prison. Some guards even hoard basic hygiene products to punish inmates who are acting out. We are supposed to be helping these people rebuild themselves and become, at a minimum, functioning members of society, not giving them more reasons to be angry at the world and act out. Not providing these women with even the most basic standard of care is just adding fuel to a wildfire that is already blazing out of control.
So, we have established what women are provided with in prison. The list is short.
Women are provided with a single bar of soap each month. Yes, one single bar of cheap, rubbery soap to fulfill ALL hygienic needs. Anything else that they may need, and let’s face it, they need a lot more than that, will cost them and their families. Women must rely on their families or outside sources to donate to their commissary funds in order to purchase better soaps, toothbrushes, deodorant sticks, and tampons. Over 85% of women incarcerated, however, do not have outside support systems that are able to foot the bill. Inmates are then left with no choice but to work in the prison for twenty-five cents per hour, earning just enough to pay for the necessary hygiene products that they should have already been allotted.
For instance, when a woman is menstruating in prison, in most instances, she is given two sanitary napkins. She must dirty the napkins and save them to show a correctional officer in order to be considered for more. Most of the time, women have to resort to paying for tampons and pads through the commissary system, which is the only way for women to access tampons to begin with. In an image by the Washington Post, two formerly incarcerated women, Jennifer Smithmeyer and Ashley Palmer, hold up what appears to be two tampons for the camera to see. Upon closer review, viewers are able to decipher that they are no run-of-the-mill tampons. They are in fact sanitary pads that have been tied and fashioned into make-shift tampons. Sanitary pads are much cheaper than tampons in commissary, so women will either make their own tampons out of pads or use scraps of fabric or napkins that they have rationed.
As it seems, women’s prison hygiene hasn’t been improved much over the course of history. However, federal prisons have announced that they will be providing pads to women, though no real implementation of this change has been made, and it would affect only around 10% of the national female prison population in the U.S since most of the population is from women in State prisons. This change in legislation wouldn’t even include tampons, only sanitary napkins. “I can’t imagine something more uncomfortable than not having the menstrual products you need for your period,” comments Arizona State Representative Athena Salman, which goes to show that this issue is acknowledged by political representatives but nothing gets done about it.
Angela Davis’ book, Are Prisons Obsolete, comments on how gender structures the prison system. “Addressing issues that are specific to women’s prisons is of vital importance, but it is really equally important to shift the way we think about the prison system as a whole.” This is something that I want to make clear, it is not the women’s prison system that is corrupt, it is the United States prison system as a whole. She goes on to say, “Certainly women’s prison practices are gendered, but so, too, are men’s prison practices. To assume that men’s institutions constitute the norm and women’s institutions are marginal, is, in a sense, to participate in the normalization of prisons that an abolitionist approach seeks to contest.” Thus, we mustn’t normalize the men’s prison system in order to juxtapose the corruption of the women’s.
In order to better understand what makes the United States’ prison system so harsh and corrupt, I looked at other, healthier prison systems outside of the United States. What makes the United States system unique in many respects is its focus on correction rather than on rehabilitation. Many might first agree with this methodology, arguing that criminals deserve to be punished for their crimes and the pain that they have caused others. While I agree that punishment is due, I would argue that standardized correctional punishment is only going to make matters worse, and that the crime rate will not only stay the same but it will keep rising. Criminals are already angry, when we put them in the same clothing, strip away their rights to hygienic practices, demean them, and treat them like dogs, versus teaching them how to be functional members of society, they will only repeat their destructive behaviors when they are released.
Imagine a small child acting out, they draw all over their mother’s freshly painted white walls. Now imagine the mother’s reaction, she screams, throws her child into their room, never explaining to the child that they could do better, never encouraging them to change their ways. The child is only going to continue to act out because they have never been taught an alternative.
Over eighty-percent of women in prison are mothers, most of them single mothers.
When a single-mother goes to prison, her children are often left to fend for themselves, and the eldest children are burdened with the stress of providing for their younger siblings financially. Because their mothers are locked away with minimal family contact, the children often resort to illegal behaviors themselves, not having their mother around to teach them any better. This cycle is all too common in the United States, and is one of the reasons why the crime rates aren’t just staying the same, they are rapidly increasing as more women are admitted to prison.
Prison systems in countries like Norway are famous for their rehabilitation approach, rather than the United States correctional approach. Norway’s admissions rate is a mere 75 per 100,000 compared to the 800 per 100,000 in the United States. That statistic alone is astonishing; we are all likely to know someone in this country who has been arrested or sent to prison. On top of that, when prisoners are released in Norway, they stay out of prison for good. Our system is so wrapped up in profit and punishment, that we are indirectly encouraging convicts to fall back into illegal behaviors. With Norway at one of the very lowest recidivism rates in the world, 20%, and the U.S at one of the highest, 80%. Norway’s prisons focus on “restorative justice”, which they claim aims to rehabilitate both male and female inmates by treating them as human beings, providing them with regular counseling, healthy meals, a comfortable bed, and a humane level of access to hygiene products. There is no reason we can’t do better. Doing better doesn’t mean changing the whole system wither. Doing better comes in small, increasingly more effective steps.
Doing better by making small strides toward a healthier prison system in the United States is exactly what I plan to do with my thesis project at Parsons School of Design. My thesis is focused on the hygiene practices of women in prison and aims place value on women who have limited access to hygiene products, while allowing for women in prison to express themselves and just feel like women. Women in prison desire to feel like women, as a counselor at Purdy prison in Washington State puts it, “These people are criminals, but they are also humans and women with a very strong need to feel like women. It can make or break their whole attitude for the rest of their life.” This is exactly why I want to make a small difference in the lives of these women. One person can’t change the system, but one person can certainly make an impact on the lives of some. My plan is to create my own company that partners with outside organizations and the State of New York in order to get products such as face wash, combs, shampoo, and tampons into the hands of every woman while simultaneously involving the women’s families. One thing is for sure, women’s prison systems that are modeled after a male-dominated prison system in the United States need reform. I plan to do my part to make that happen.