no image, no tekno beat -- just Text. Please read. Vleeptron thinks it's Important
Women have become the fastest-growing identifiable group of prisoners in Gulag America --
The Land of the Free has more prisoners than China! USA! More prisoners than Russia!
I'm going to refrain from posting an image. This is an important set of Ideas -- Memes -- and a photograph of a woman and her newborn baby in a prison isn't going to clarify or contribute to anyone's understanding of these ideas.
In lieu of a visual assault on your heartstrings, suffice to say that this story ran on Mothers Day -- I don't know about its appearance on every calendar around the world, but in the USA and Mexico, yesterday was Mothers Day.
I'm also going to refrain from posting a Click Here For Musical Theme.
Check out the first three minutes of CNN on the hour and on the half-hour. As the pretty or handsome Talking Head gives brief teases to their top "news" stories, there's a thumping, driving percussion track in the background. I guess CNN puts it there to make its target audience of hypnotized illiterate dropouts think the stories are more important or more exciting than they would be without the tekno-drumbeat.
Fox and CNN have reduced "news" to a brightly colored video game. And each election day, more and more Americans make their election choices as the output of the colorful, exciting drum-beating video game.
Vleeptron apologizes that some Very Important Ideas and Controversies can't be compressed into 30 seconds or less of cartoon images with a tekno beat.
Women are not more important than Men, and what happens to Women in prison is not inherently more important than what happens to Men in prison. (Although historically, Hollywood loves Women In Prison movies in a very special, lurid way.)
But men and women still have lots of sex, and women get pregnant and become the mothers of children.
This story -- or rather Vleeptron's posting of it -- asks you to spend a little time thinking not so much about the women prisoners, but about the likely lifetimes of their children after infancies and early childhoods under these conditions.
If you read this story in its entirety and spend some time thinking about its consequences and implications -- oh please please Leave Comments -- please feel free to drag John Calvin/Jean Chauvin or John Knox or any of the Great Sunday School Moral Thinkers into it.
Their modern Foxic descendants like the USA's first Drug Czar William Bennett (I don't know how he's coming along with his casino slot machine addiction) have been hammering and shrieking this issue of Personal Responsibility, and coming out its rectum is the clear message:
Every one of these women prisoners made an individual choice to break the law, and then made individual choices to have unprotected sex without first providing a stable family platform in which to raise their children. So they deserve everything that's happening to them, including delivering their babies while handcuffed to the hospital bed. They should have all finished high school, gotten good jobs, and used much better judgment in choosing a husband who would have made a good father.
So we should continue Punishing Them, and we should Punish Them Worse in the future.
But what, exactly, did their children do to deserve their punishments?
And what will their children do to Us fifteen years down the road? (Bennett also coined the Meme "superpredators" and pioneered the political push to try children as adult felons and incarcerate them as adult prisoners.)
Voters who don't read much -- people who get most of their "news" from the television channels CNN and Fox -- got us into this neo-Gulag human rights catastrophe.
People who are willing to commit to the educated habits of citizenship, and spend ten minutes a few times a week reading words, sentences and paragraphs are our only hope to get us out of this mess.
When you read this, regardless of your initial feelings about it, don't think about what it means now.
Think about what it will mean just five years into the future, if the trends and rates of women being incarcerated in America continue.
Because we'll all still be here five years down the road.
Please read, please Leave A Comment.
============
The San Francisco Chronicle (California USA)
Sunday 14 May 2006
Babies behind bars
by Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
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
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."
Copyright (c) 2006 Hearst Communications Inc.
Write a Letter to the Editor: letters@sfchronicle.com
We're Number One!
The Land of the Free has more prisoners than China! USA! More prisoners than Russia!
I'm going to refrain from posting an image. This is an important set of Ideas -- Memes -- and a photograph of a woman and her newborn baby in a prison isn't going to clarify or contribute to anyone's understanding of these ideas.
In lieu of a visual assault on your heartstrings, suffice to say that this story ran on Mothers Day -- I don't know about its appearance on every calendar around the world, but in the USA and Mexico, yesterday was Mothers Day.
I'm also going to refrain from posting a Click Here For Musical Theme.
Check out the first three minutes of CNN on the hour and on the half-hour. As the pretty or handsome Talking Head gives brief teases to their top "news" stories, there's a thumping, driving percussion track in the background. I guess CNN puts it there to make its target audience of hypnotized illiterate dropouts think the stories are more important or more exciting than they would be without the tekno-drumbeat.
Fox and CNN have reduced "news" to a brightly colored video game. And each election day, more and more Americans make their election choices as the output of the colorful, exciting drum-beating video game.
Vleeptron apologizes that some Very Important Ideas and Controversies can't be compressed into 30 seconds or less of cartoon images with a tekno beat.
Women are not more important than Men, and what happens to Women in prison is not inherently more important than what happens to Men in prison. (Although historically, Hollywood loves Women In Prison movies in a very special, lurid way.)
But men and women still have lots of sex, and women get pregnant and become the mothers of children.
This story -- or rather Vleeptron's posting of it -- asks you to spend a little time thinking not so much about the women prisoners, but about the likely lifetimes of their children after infancies and early childhoods under these conditions.
If you read this story in its entirety and spend some time thinking about its consequences and implications -- oh please please Leave Comments -- please feel free to drag John Calvin/Jean Chauvin or John Knox or any of the Great Sunday School Moral Thinkers into it.
Their modern Foxic descendants like the USA's first Drug Czar William Bennett (I don't know how he's coming along with his casino slot machine addiction) have been hammering and shrieking this issue of Personal Responsibility, and coming out its rectum is the clear message:
Every One Of These Scum
Deserves Everything She Or He Gets.
Deserves Everything She Or He Gets.
Every one of these women prisoners made an individual choice to break the law, and then made individual choices to have unprotected sex without first providing a stable family platform in which to raise their children. So they deserve everything that's happening to them, including delivering their babies while handcuffed to the hospital bed. They should have all finished high school, gotten good jobs, and used much better judgment in choosing a husband who would have made a good father.
So we should continue Punishing Them, and we should Punish Them Worse in the future.
But what, exactly, did their children do to deserve their punishments?
And what will their children do to Us fifteen years down the road? (Bennett also coined the Meme "superpredators" and pioneered the political push to try children as adult felons and incarcerate them as adult prisoners.)
Voters who don't read much -- people who get most of their "news" from the television channels CNN and Fox -- got us into this neo-Gulag human rights catastrophe.
People who are willing to commit to the educated habits of citizenship, and spend ten minutes a few times a week reading words, sentences and paragraphs are our only hope to get us out of this mess.
When you read this, regardless of your initial feelings about it, don't think about what it means now.
Think about what it will mean just five years into the future, if the trends and rates of women being incarcerated in America continue.
Because we'll all still be here five years down the road.
Please read, please Leave A Comment.
============
The San Francisco Chronicle (California USA)
Sunday 14 May 2006
Babies behind bars
by Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
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
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."
- 30 -
Copyright (c) 2006 Hearst Communications Inc.
Write a Letter to the Editor: letters@sfchronicle.com
posted by Vleeptron Dude | 12:34
2 Comments:
keep paying those taxes mate.
Hiya Hulleye!
Well, I have to keep paying those taxes, otherwise I go to prison.
Not to scare you, but there is a Canadian spin to this.
The primary cog in the USA's huge and world-record imprisonment machine are our drug laws, and women have become particularly easy fodder because typically they get involved in drug crimes as the romantic partners of men who organize the drug crimes. When the man gets popped and faces huge felony time, his only hope for reduced prison time is to give prosecutors the names of and testimony against as many other people as he can, and the first and easiest gift is his girlfriend. Typically her involvement in the drug activities was minimal and tangential (and non-violent), but having nobody in turn to give up to prosecutors, she typically ends up with a prison sentence considerably longer than her boyfriend's.
This is where America's flood of women prisoners, so many of them the sole parent of young children, is coming from. Right now its obvious disastrous near-future consequences for everyone are exclusively being discussed by advocates (like those mentioned in the story) far outside the political mainstream. As far as Congress and nearly all state legislatures are concerned, everything in the War On Drugs is running fine, smoothly, everything's peachy, and they're merrily passing harsher drug sentences and merrily building more prisons.
During the 30 years of America's War On Drugs, Canada has resisted adopting the USA model of mandatory minimum sentences which remove sentencing disgression from judges. Canada has specifically resisted drifting into the model of massive incarceration -- a prison on every block, with a growing pipeline of new prisons under construction.
But the pressures and temptations for Canada to shift to the USA model have always been strong. The Calvinist "Personal Responsibility" thing actually resonates very strongly with mainstream Canadian voters -- the temptation to turn government into a Spanking Anti-Sin Nanny who will give every naughty person what he and she deserves is huge. i.e., just as in the USA, Lock All The Trash Up & Throw Away The Key is a campaign speech which gets MPs and Provincial MPs re-elected in Ontario, the Prairie Provinces and the Maritimes.
While the RCMP have always lobbied for harsh sentences, political Canada has historically successful in not obeyeing its demands. The shooting deaths of 4 RCMP officers who stumbled on a marijuana barn grow-op last year has significantly changed that; no politician wants to be perceived as thwarting the loud and ceaseless demands of grieving colleagues and widows of Mountie martyrs.
This coupled with the change in federal government from more or less liberal to very stridently conservative -- the sentiments of the Prairie Provinces seem now to prevail in Ottawa. How long these Get Tough sentiments will please the national electorate is a Crystal Ball thang which you are in a better position than I to predict.
Seven years of liberal promises to decriminalize cannabis are now officially down the toilet. They were always insincere promises, but Ottawa isn't even making insincere promises anymore. Pot -- grow-ops, personal possession -- is about to mean prison. And judges are about to start losing their authority to decide sentencing length, just as American judges have lost theirs.
In BC, government has been astonishingly successful in resisting Prison as the primary response to addiction, and advocating a medical "harm reduction" model. Vancouver has become a lot like Planet Vleeptron.
But that's not going to spread over the rest of Canada in these Calvinist Political Shift times.
So get ready to start paying taxes for much the same USA War On Drugs Prison Police Prosecutor crap. It gets scoundrels re-elected everywhere -- these days, even in Amsterdam.
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