Fighting for Dignity.
Last year I attended a criminal justice reform conference in Atlanta, Georgia where I listened to a woman named Pamela Winn tell her story of going to prison while pregnant. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
While being transported with shackles around her legs and belly, a practice banned in some states, Pamela fell. She knew something wasn’t right but it took weeks for her to get proper medical attention and she suffered a miscarriage in her bed in solitary confinement. When a nurse at the hospital asked the prison guards what happened to the sheets, they told her they had thrown them in the trash.
The Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act is a bill introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren that would ban the shackling of pregnant women, ban placing pregnant women in solitary confinement, and provide mothers with parenting classes so they can maintain and rebuild their families after leaving prison.
I think Pamela is very brave for talking about what happened to her and so do many others: over 100,000 people have now signed her petition on Change.org. It’s not easy to talk about going to prison or to share an experience as tragic as hers. But she wants to prevent this from happening to other women in federal prison.
Please watch the video above and learn more about the Dignity Act by visiting our partners at #cut50 at DignityAct.org.
