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This issue of Corrections Today focusing on female offenders is a part of the American Correctional Association’s long-standing effort to improve programming and services for women and girls in the criminal justice system. Until recently, women and girls were called the “forgotten offenders” because they were frequently overlooked in correctional research, policy development, pro gram design and organizational management. As the articles in this issue illustrate, this has changed during the last several years. It would not have been possible without addition al knowledge about female offenders and the development of effective policies and practices for them. With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the expanding roles of women and girls, some predicted that females would begin committing the same types of crime as males did. While this did not happen, the number of female offenders grew mostly as a result of the war on drugs, and the need for better treatment surfaced as poor conditions were documented in a number of studies. Faced with a need for change, limited research about women and girls, and the requirement for equal or comparable programming for females, many began to claim that an inmate was an inmate and that being female made no difference. “Equality” came to mean corrections should provide the “same” programs for women and men. Women and girls were issued male uniforms instead of letting them wear their own clothes or uniforms designed to fit females. Razor ribbon was strung around female facilities housing mostly minimum security inmates, and curtains, rugs and other “feminine” items were removed. In one egregious example of ignoring differences between men and women, one state began charging women for sanitary napkins, claiming women were not discriminated against because men were also charged for hygiene products. In response to the excesses of this “equality,” research concerning the difference between male and female offenders began. In 1990, ACA published a land mark study by Jackie Crawford titled The Female Offender: What Does the Future Hold? This study was one of the first publications that profiled adult and juvenile female offenders in the United States, in both local jails and state facilities, and it provided invaluable data on their characteristics and needs. Under the leadership of the late Susan Hunter, Ph.D., the National Institute of Corrections began funding research on female offenders in institutions and proposing new approaches. Other government agencies, including BJS, OJJDP and NIJ, followed suit. The NIC research culminated in the very informative report, Gender- Responsive Strategies: Research, Practice, and Guiding Principles for Women Offenders (2003) by Barbara Bloom, Ph.D., Barbara Owen, Ph.D., and Stephanie Covington, Ph.D. It established the following six guiding principles to ensure correctional agencies provide gender responsive management, supervision and treatment services for women: • Acknowledge that gender (being female) makes a difference; • Create an environment based on safety, respect and dignity; • Develop policies, practices and programs incorporating the fact that women are relationship- oriented; • Address substance abuse, trauma and mental health issues in a comprehensive, integrated and culturally relevant manner in services and supervision; • Provide women an opportunity to improve their socioeconomic status; and • Establish a system of community supervision and reentry with comprehensive, collaborative services. National correctional policy began to change as more data became available on women and girls. The most recent version of the ACA policy “Public Correctional Policy on Adult and Juvenile Female Offender Services,” extensively revised in 2006, reflects the NIC guiding principles and calls for “gender responsiveness in the development of services programs for adult and juvenile female offenders,” Rather than simply import services designed for males, it specifies, “programs must be designed and implemented to meet the needs” of the female population,
To implement programs reflecting the basic principles of gender responsiveness and ACA public policy, everyone from top administrators to line-level staff must agree that gender does make a difference. Correctional administrators need someone at the policy-making level in central office who will say, “What is the impact of this policy or procedure on women and girls?” For example, to save money, a number of systems now charge for sick call. This means women and girls who statistically come to correctional facilities with more medical problems than do males will have to pay extra for something that is a result of being female, In addition, disciplinary policies do not always work out as planned. An agency that decided to place inmates in pink jumpsuits to punish them for inappropriate sexual relationships did not anticipate that women inmates would relish wearing pink over dull prison beige. Having every inmate leaving a maximum-security institution wear belly chains and leg-irons may make sense for males. This practice, however, can be dangerous for women in advanced stages of pregnancy. It can also be time consuming and unnecessary for minimum-custody women who are in a maximum-security facility because it is the only place to house them.
Women-centered approaches, such as those in New Mexico described in the article by Helen Carr, are difficult or impossible without central office leadership and support. The positive benefits of a central office focus on women and girls was illustrated recently in South Carolina when the director of the Department of Juvenile Justice, Judge William Byers, made better services for girls a priority and assigned a senior staff person to make it happen. As a result, the number of incarcerated girls dropped from the 90s to the 30s. As noted in the article by Marilyn Moses and Ellen Kirshbaum, currently 14 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have directors of women’s services. Unless these positions are written in to law, they are very vulnerable to leadership changes or budget cuts, which happened recently in Minnesota and North Carolina and earlier in Florida. They are also subject to having other responsibilities added to their job descriptions that negate their effectiveness. As the articles on PREA by Andie Moss and ethical issues and training staff to work with girls and women by Joanie Shoemaker illustrate, recruiting and preparing talented people who want to work with women and girls is a major challenge. Many corrections professionals believe the stereotype that women and girls are more difficult to work with than males. Former Idaho Warden Bona Miller said it best in a 1998 article in the December issue of Corrections Today, noting that women are “different not more difficult. An emphasis on implementing gender-responsive programs in the community is critical. Most women and girls under supervision are not in institutions but are assigned to probation, parole (aftercare) or other community-based programs that historically have received the least attention. Judy Anderson, warden of the Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C., Rita Rhodes, Ph.D., from the University of South Carolina and Joann Morton, DPA, held focus groups with women within 30 days of leaving South Carolina, prisons and with those who had just returned. They found that women had unrealistic expectations about what would go well when returning to the community from prison and also that relationships with family and community supervisors were critical to reducing technical violations that would return them to prison. Single-gender caseloads and gender- responsive policies for women and girls in community programs might help alleviate alienation from supervisors. They certainly can save money. The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, for example, implemented single-gender caseloads for girls more than 10 years ago, and in two years, they reduced the number of girls from Baltimore being sent to juvenile facilities by 90 percent. As the descriptions of programs for females in this issue illustrate, gender-responsive services cannot be successful without the support and involvement of others. Multi-disciplinary task forces on female offenders, which have been established in a few states and by the South Carolina Correctional Association; women’s organizations such as state commissions on the status of women; community domestic violence programs; and organizations such as the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, have already committed to help. Seeking out and building alliances with academic institutions, medical and mental health organizations, other governmental agencies, individuals, and groups in our community is essential in implementing meaningful gender- responsive services for women and girls in the criminal justice system. By sharing information and program ideas, implementing the principles of gender-responsive programming, and following the policies and standards established by ACA and related organizations, we can ensure that correctional systems nationwide will met the needs of women and girls. |