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Photo by Jeff Fusco |
The scars that circle Tina Torres’ ankle are a permanent reminder of giving birth behind bars, legs shackled together and left wrist handcuffed to the gurney. “Sometimes when I’m putting my lotion on, I look at the scars on my legs, and I’m reminded of it every time,” says the 29-year old Hunting Park resident, recounting her incarceration at the Riverside Correctional Facility for women. “I could have never prepared myself for that. Even animals in captivity don’t have to give birth in chains.”
Torres spent over 17 hours shackled during labor—five months after Philadelphia prisons had ostensibly banned the practice. Advocates hope that new legislation introduced by State Senator Daylin Leach (D-Montgomery/Delaware) to enact a statewide ban on shackling will put a definitive end to a practice that is both unnecessary and inhumane. “We felt that it was a barbaric relic of the past,” says Leach. “Being a man, I can’t completely understand, but I’m told that women in labor are not likely to leap over walls.”
Danyell Williams, program manager for the Maternity Care Coalition’s MOMobile at Riverside, says changes in prison policy are often implemented in a slow and uneven manner. MOMobile runs an innovative program that provides prenatal and postpartum doulas (birth assistants) to care for pregnant women at Riverside.
“If we weren’t there, I’m not sure how often that policy would be implemented,” says Williams. “That’s why this bill being passed is so important. Then it will be in black and white—no question. Breaking the policy and breaking the law are two different things.”
In June 2008, newly appointed Philadelphia Prisons Commissioner Louis Giorla prohibited the shackling of women during labor, a widespread practice condemned by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for being medically risky as well as “demeaning and unnecessary.” Commissioner Giorla was previously warden at Riverside and took an interest in reform, introducing the MOMobile program in 2006.
Advocates credit Giorla for taking reform seriously—but as Torres’ case demonstrates, the prison system still fails to meet the needs of pregnant inmates.
Torres, who sports a red, white and blue tattoo of the Puerto Rican flag across her left arm with the inscription “Raw and Uncut,” above “100 percent pura caña” (100 percent pure sugar), was arrested on March 6, 2008 when police found her in a house they were raiding for drugs. She was just two months pregnant at the time and spent the next eight months at Riverside waiting to see a judge—the charge was eventually dropped. For the then-mother of three, it was nearly an entire pregnancy in captivity marked by loneliness, discomfort and pain.
Being shackled during labor was just one of many dehumanizing moments Torres says she endured: When she was transported outside of the prison, a chain was wrapped two times around her body, just below her breasts and above her stomach, and then placed into a lockbox where her wrists were secured with handcuffs. A confident and careful speaker, Torres intermittently pauses to reflect on her story’s implications. “The squatting and the coughing [to search for hidden drugs and weapons]… I did even at nine months pregnant.”
Seven months into her prison stint, Torres felt nervous. She was two weeks past her due date and had spent her entire incarceration eating starchy prison food, decorating envelopes to trade for commissary privileges and sleeping on a hard prison bunk.
One night in October, she thought her water had broken. Torres says the prison nurse made a cursory visual examination and declared that everything was normal. “She sent me downstairs, and I was just like, ‘How can you determine that I haven’t leaked any amniotic fluid? You didn’t test-strip me or anything?’”
A week later, when the mother-to-be was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital for her monthly checkup—she received outside care because of a previous complication—Torres says that doctors found that she had little amniotic fluid left. “I went there for a [contraction] stress test,” recalls Torres. “She [the doctor] didn’t get any movement [from the baby], so of course I’m all upset. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re in prison. You know you haven’t been given the proper care.”
Thomas Jefferson did not have a contract with the Prisons Bureau, so they transferred Torres to Northeastern Hospital to induce labor. Accompanied by two armed guards, she was shackled for the drive to Northeastern and remained so as she went into labor.
Two hours later, a doula met Torres at the hospital and told the correctional officer that she was not supposed to be shackled, but the guard refused to remove the restraints. Throughout the next 17 hours and 20 minutes of labor, multiple COs on different shifts allowed her shackling to continue.
Philadelphia Prisons spokesperson Robert Eskind declined to comment on Torres’ case in particular, but wrote, “With pregnant inmates, we use handcuffs in transit, and handcuffs to the hospital bed when not in labor.” MOMobile staff confirmed Torres’ account, however, saying that shackling caused the scars around her ankles.
After initial attempts to induce labor failed, a new doctor arrived and recommended a C-section. At the doctor’s insistence, the CO removed the shackles from around Torres’ swollen ankles just before she was wheeled into the OR. The nurse refused to let the doula into the operating room.
“The whole time, I’m not even thinking about what’s going on,” says Torres, recalling the early morning of October 28. “I just want to see that my baby is fine. So finally she’s out and I cried more than she did, because I just saw that she was OK and that’s all that mattered.”
Officers reapplied the shackles just moments after the crying baby took her first breath. “I just was cut open,” says Torres. “I just had surgery...and I’m shackled to the bottom of the bed. When they took off my stockings, my ankles were bleeding. They were cut through.”
For the remainder of her hospital stay, Torres had to walk to the shower, pushing her IV in one hand, ankles shackled together. She spent two days with her newborn before being taken back to the prison. Her aunt took custody of the baby, who was later sent to stay with Torres’ mother in Georgia.
Torres says that when she returned to Riverside, she and other new mothers were placed in a crowded unit for the mentally ill. “I was a wreck,” she recalls. “I was in prison crying.”
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| “The scars that circle Tina Torres’ ankle are a permanent reminder of giving birth behind bars, legs shackled together with her left wrist handcuffed to the gurney.” |
The experience was a nightmare through and through: pregnancy, delivery and postpartum isolation. “The thing that was crazy to me was when I looked over and the CO was holding my baby, and I was just like, ‘wow.’ These are just things that I will never forget.”
Attempts to humanize the prison-industrial complex are often stymied by politicians and judges eager to look tough on crime.
“I think it’s under the radar because we as a society don’t care how we treat prisoners,” says state Sen. Leach. But so far, there’s been no sign of overt opposition to the anti-shackling legislation. Advocates credit Senator Leach, who hopes the legislation will pass the Judiciary Committee by late January, for reaching out to potential opponents, including the prison-guard and warden associations. “We’re really happy with the Pennsylvania
legislation,” says Kathleen Creamer, a staff attorney in the family advocacy unit at Community Legal Services.
“It’s actually more comprehensive than the Philly policy,” since it would also bar shackling during transport to the hospital.
The persistence of shackling owes less to active political support for the policy than to our society’s general impassivity when it comes to recognizing prisoners’ humanity. But reformers have captured the momentum, and the status quo is showing signs of strain. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service banned shackling in October 2008, and New York followed suit in August 2009. And in October 2009, the conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals declared the shackling of women during labor to be, under most circumstances, a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
“There are so many mothers out there,” says Creamer. “It’s something that’s inherently relatable.”
Reform couldn’t come at a better time. Across the country, the number of women (114,852) in jail has exploded, even outpacing the still-prodigious growth in the number of male inmates (1,495,594). According to Bureau of Justice statistics, the female prison population has grown at an average rate of 3 percent per year, compared to 1.9 percent for men. While the one-size-fits-all correctional model is a demonstrable failure across the board, it clearly impacts pregnant women in a particularly grave manner. Before MOMobile set up shop, pregnant women fell through the system’s cracks. “The social workers were doing the best they could,” says Williams, “but these women’s needs weren’t being met.” Pregnancy was treated like any other medical emergency, and a single social worker could have a caseload of over 100 prisoners.
Torres says pregnant women receive little special treatment in prison. If anything, they are vilified as drug addicts who callously put their own children at risk. “They come in pregnant off the street, they’re abusing drugs and are prostitutes a lot of the time,” says Torres, who asserts that she did not use drugs while pregnant. Doctors and nurses looked down on her, assuming the worst. “Another woman sees that and she’s, like, ‘You’re not an individual, you’re just some basehead, dopehead pregnant girl that was prostituting herself, got locked up, and you don’t care about your baby, so why should we?’ That’s how it is.”
Behind bars, Torres had to figure out how to stick up for her unborn child, and apparently made a name for herself reminding guards about her special needs.
“I’m sure the women from MOMobile told you I always started a little trouble in there,” she says, allowing a mischievous smile.
While things have improved for pregnant inmates, doulas are often the only advocates these women have.
Danyell Williams sleeps with her cell phone like a doctor with her omnipresent pager. The 37-year-old Philadelphia native and her three staff members—all trained doulas—are each on call for two weeks every other month, rushing to the hospital when they get word of an impending birth. Over last year’s Fourth of July weekend, Williams worked through 23 sleepless hours of labor.
MOMobile’s program at Riverside is groundbreaking. “We’re one of the only ones in the country,” says Williams. Since the beginning of the doula program in November 2006, MOMobile has attended 42 births.
The doulas are the only intimate human contact that jailed women have while giving birth. “When you’re incarcerated, the only people allowed in are security staff and MOMobile,” says Williams. “We had a woman whose child died during birth. She couldn’t call her husband. He couldn’t talk to his wife.”
The Maternity Care Coalition is well known throughout Philadelphia thanks to the ubiquitous MOMobile vans that criss-cross city streets, bringing prenatal care and parenting support to poor neighborhoods.
“They’re pretty colorful now,” says Williams. “They look like Scooby-Doo vans.”
The Philadelphia region has lost 15 labor and delivery units since 1999, so pregnant women at Riverside are just one link in a beleaguered maternity-care system that MOMobile scrambles to care for. They offer prisoners nine prenatal and seven postpartum classes—Williams dubs the former “What to expect when expecting when incarcerated.”
“Like nutrition: what do you do when you’re not in control of what you eat? You just have the cafeteria and commissary, which is like prison 7-Eleven.” Williams says that “Chi-Chis,” a prison delicacy comprised of ramen noodles cooked with boiling water in a bag of cheese curls with Slim Jims, are a particularly malign influence. “We found our clients were eating four or five bowls of this a day—and they were just blowing up.”
It’s no surprise that Torres is a rabble-rouser: the system needs to be humanized, and far fewer people should be locked up to begin with. Kathleen Creamer of Community Legal Services says her priority is to reduce the number of pregnant women in prison, since most prisoners at Riverside are either being held in pretrial detention or serving short sentences for minor crimes. Keeping pregnant women out of prison is in the city’s economic interest, too. If a poor woman gives birth in custody, the city covers the medical bills. If she gives birth on the outside, Medicaid picks up the tab. According to Philadelphia Prison System spokesperson Robert Eskind, Commissioner Giorla is exploring ways to help pregnant offenders stay in the community.
And for many prisoners, pregnancy is just the beginning of a long struggle to be mom from behind bars. Of the more than 65,000 incarcerated women who are mothers, many are the primary caregiver for their children. These millions of children with incarcerated parents are more likely to suffer physical and emotional health problems, struggle in school and, one day, end up in prison themselves. Some children disappear into DHS’ bureaucratic maw, a notoriously difficult situation to extricate a family from. Danyell Williams of MOMobile is particularly exasperated with Temple University Hospital, which insists on contacting DHS every time a prisoner gives birth, even though there is no law requiring they do so.
Creamer says women need more access to their children. “Nurseries would be amazing,” she says, although conceding that the city is wary of spending money on prisoners in the midst of a budget crisis. “What I’m hearing from everyone is that anything with a dollar sign is not going to happen,” she says. “But we can also increase visitations and make conditions for visiting more family-friendly.” Riverside visiting hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and school-age children can’t visit during school hours, a significant obstacle for working adults and many kids. “I know women who only see their children once a year,” says Creamer. According to Eskind, Commissioner Giorla is also considering a change in visiting hours.
As for Torres, she’s trying to move past the horrific ordeal. The new mother was released one month after giving birth and the charge of crack and marijuana possession with intent to distribute was dropped. While she’s considering filing a lawsuit over being shackled against prison policy, her priority is putting the pieces of her life back together. After caring for a grandfather suffering from Alzheimer’s she enrolled in nursing school and is now a Certified Nursing Assistant. She hopes to become a Registered Nurse by 2012, and then later on a Nurse Practitioner.
And she has her baby back.
“She’s really beautiful,” says Torres, smiling over a cup of coffee. “She’s healthy. She has no idea as to what happened. Maybe one day when she’s old enough I’ll tell her how she came into the world.” ■
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