Being Pregnant in Prison Is a Nightmare That Won’t Be Ended by One Bill Alone

Crystal Muñoz was 4 months pregnant when federal brokers knocked on her door. They assured the Texas mom that she wasn’t in any hassle; they only wished to find out about a map she had drawn for some individuals two years earlier. Little did she know that speaking with them would result in a 20-year jail sentence — and delivering her child along with her wrist and ankle cuffed to a hospital mattress.

Federal brokers arrested Muñoz for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. The courts allowed her to remain at house along with her husband and months-old daughter till the top of her trial. When a jury convicted her in October 2007, she was despatched to the Ector County Detention Heart to await sentencing. By then, she was in her final trimester.

“It was horrible to be in there in any respect,” Muñoz informed Truthout, “however to be pregnant [in that jail] was super-awful.”

She recalled being handcuffed and shackled — with cuffs round her wrists and ankles — when she was delivered to an outdoor hospital for prenatal visits. Relying on the officer, she may also have a steel chain wrapped round her waist.

Every day introduced the identical meal — beans, cornbread and bologna, despite the fact that lunch meats may cause listeria in pregnant people and lead to critical sickness for fetuses. Muñoz requested further vegetables and fruit to no avail. The jail didn’t provide prenatal nutritional vitamins. Her husband tried to navigate the jail paperwork to carry her a bottle, however regardless of his efforts, the nutritional vitamins by no means reached her.

The American Faculty of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that pregnant individuals ought to drink eight to twelve cups of water each day, however Muñoz recalled that meals have been the one instances that the jail offered consuming water. In any other case, ladies must drink water from the lavatory sink, the identical sink the place individuals brushed their tooth, washed their fingers and washed their panties. “And it’s proper by the bathroom,” Muñoz added.

Not desirous to threat micro organism, Muñoz hid empty potato chip and snack luggage, crammed them with ice, then drank the contents.

The day after Christmas, Muñoz went into labor. She was delivered to the hospital, the place officers secured her left wrist and left ankle to the mattress posts. Though the attending physician ordered the officers to take away the restraints, they did so slowly — first liberating Munoz’s ankle and, when she started birthing her child, her wrist.

“I used to be super-healthy, so she got here out super-healthy,” Muñoz mentioned, recalling that her child was the identical dimension as her first daughter. But when she had had a harder being pregnant, or preexisting well being circumstances, her being pregnant and beginning might have been much worse.

Now, federal lawmakers are in search of to enhance being pregnant care within the federal jail system.

In October, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced the Protecting the Health and Wellness of Babies and Pregnant Women in Custody Act. Rep. Karen Bass (D-California) launched a similar House bill in March.

The laws bans restraints throughout being pregnant, a prohibition already enacted by the 2018 First Step Act. It additionally prohibits putting pregnant individuals in solitary confinement throughout their third trimester.

The invoice additionally directs the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees all federal prisons, to supply common entry to water and bogs, nutritionally satisfactory diets, prenatal nutritional vitamins in addition to details about parental rights and lactation. These protections would solely apply to pregnant individuals in federal jails and prisons.

Knowledge Present Hundreds of Pregnant Individuals in Prisons, However Principally in State Prisons

Carolyn Sufrin is a medical anthropologist, OB-GYN and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins College Faculty of Medication. She can be the founding father of the group Advocacy and Analysis on Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated Individuals (AARWIP), which researches reproductive well being care behind bars. Throughout a 12-month interval between 2016 and 2017, ARRWIP discovered that roughly 4 percent of people entering state and federal prisons and 3 percent of people entering jails have been pregnant.

“The overwhelming majority of pregnant people who find themselves incarcerated should not within the federal system,” Sufrin informed Truthout. Throughout ARRWIP’s 12-month knowledge assortment, there have been 172 pregnant individuals in federal women’s prisons, comprising 0.3 % of the federal ladies’s jail inhabitants. Since then, these numbers haven’t elevated considerably.

Along with prohibiting shackling throughout being pregnant, the 2018 First Step Act instituted knowledge assortment on being pregnant and being pregnant outcomes in federal prisons. In 2019, federal authorities reported that 180 pregnant people had been incarcerated in federal amenities that yr. Ninety-four gave beginning whereas incarcerated. Federal authorities reported one occasion of handcuffing a pregnant individual, allegedly for disruptive conduct.

The next yr, as COVID-19 started spreading throughout the nation, 91 pregnant people were incarcerated in federal amenities. Thirty-nine have been launched earlier than giving beginning; of the 52 who remained, 50 had stay births, one had a stillbirth and there was one maternal dying. There have been no studies of restraints of pregnant individuals.

Many states do not collect or report pregnancies or being pregnant outcomes of their prisons or jails. The brand new federal invoice would alleviate that black gap by directing the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which collects and publishes knowledge about incarcerated individuals in the US, to incorporate details about being pregnant, pregnancy-related care and the usage of solitary confinement throughout being pregnant.

Laws Is Not At all times Sufficient to Guarantee Humane Remedy

The invoice comes too late to assist Muñoz, who was granted clemency by then-President Donald Trump and reunited along with her now-teenage daughters in February 2020.

However even for future people who find themselves pregnant behind bars, laws doesn’t essentially be certain that jail or jail officers will observe the brand new measures. In 2009, previously incarcerated moms and their allies succeeded in passing laws in New York to finish shackling throughout labor, supply and postpartum restoration. However regardless of the regulation, as late as 2014, jail officers continued to clap pregnant people in handcuffs, leg irons and belly chains when transporting them to outdoors medical visits — and even restrained them within the hospital hours after they’d given beginning.

In 2018, Maryland handed a regulation requiring jails and prisons not only to have written policies to address pregnancy and child placement, however to supply incarcerated individuals with these insurance policies. In 2019, the state additionally handed a regulation prohibiting jails and prisons from putting pregnant individuals in solitary confinement.

Kimberly Haven, the chief director of Reproductive Justice Inside, helped draft each payments and has been monitoring implementation. She famous that in July 2021, two years after the prohibition of solitary confinement for pregnant individuals, Jazmin Valentine was positioned in solitary after being arrested on an alleged probation violation. She gave beginning alone in her jail cell after jail employees and nurses ignored her pleas for help, telling her over the course of six hours that she was merely withdrawing from medication, not in labor.

“The rationale we wrote this invoice was simply because of this,” Haven informed Truthout. “We got here to them [Maryland’s jails and prisons], supplied our trainings and coaching supplies, and we have been rebuffed.”

Whereas the federal invoice permits for the usage of restraints or solitary confinement below excessive circumstances, it requires federal jails and prisons to assessment their use each few hours and report any such use.

However, famous Sufrin, “these [reporting requirements] are after the very fact. There aren’t any necessary units of well being care requirements or system of oversight or accountability to entice jails and prisons to observe the requirements.”

In the end, mentioned Sufrin, the answer to insufficient and horrible being pregnant and postpartum care “is to not incarcerate pregnant individuals within the first place and to put money into entry to satisfactory being pregnant and postpartum care in the neighborhood.” However, she added, “that’s going to take a very long time. We’d like some necessary requirements and methods of oversight and accountability.”