The state’s newest prison has plenty of tall, chain-link fences and cinder-block walls. It also has a beauty shop, mammography clinic and children’s playroom, where colorful cutouts of Plucky Duck and his Tiny Toons friends dance on the walls.
That’s so the kids have a cheery place to romp when they come to visit their mothers.
The sprawling, $53 million Fluvanna Correctional Center, still permeated by the scents of fresh paint and household cleanser, is Virginia’s fifth prison for women, built with a capacity of 1,200 — and the hope that it can contain the state’s steadily rising number of female criminals.
The problem is not peculiar to the Old Dominion, where the female inmate population has nearly doubled since 1990. Nationally, the number of women in state and federal prisons rose an astounding 478 percent from 1980 to 1997, nearly double the rate of men.
North Carolina opened its sixth women’s prison last year. Texas houses more than 2,400 women violent crimes alone. Virginia was among the states running out of room, and here, as elsewhere, penologists are scrambling for explanations.
“I don’t know that I have an answer — I don’t know that there is one,” said Fluvanna’s warden, Patti Leigh Huffman. “And if there is, I know it’s not a simple one.”
Recently, the first 140 inmates in Huffman’s charge were settling into their quarters. The facility sits on the remains of a men’s prison work camp, and staffers were combing the grounds for metal scraps from the demolished camp, collecting anything that could be turned into a weapon.
Inmates here will be serving time for crimes ranging from theft to murder. Like their male counterparts, they will have access to a gym and law library. But the Fluvanna prison also houses a cosmetology center, where prisoners can earn state certification as hair stylists, and special units equipped to deal with women’s health-care needs.
Although there is space for 1,200 inmates, it will house only 900 for the time being, with the extra 300 beds held in reserve. They are unlikely to remain empty for long: The number of women in Virginia’s prisons has increased from 925 in 1990 to the present 1,754.
“I see the inmate population continuing to grow,” Huffman said. “It’ll be nice to have those beds, because they’ll never be cheaper to build than they were in 1998. And if we never fill them, that’ll be fine with me.”
Nationwide, women still are only a small fraction of the inmate population — about 6 percent. But their numbers are growing faster than those of almost any other demographic group. The 478 percent increase in women in state and federal prisons between 1980 and 1997 — from 12,331 to 71,294 inmates — compares with a 260 percent increase among men, from 303,643 to 1,094,252, according to the Justice Department.
“It has been an amazing period of growth,” said Allen Beck, a researcher with the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The reasons behind it are complex, overlapping and in many ways unclear. Some authorities believe tougher sentencing laws have ensnared many women who played minor roles in drug organizations. Others say women simply are committing more crimes. There’s some evidence that more of today’s liberated, assertive women see violence as an acceptable way to solve problems — an attitude particularly prevalent among women who themselves have been victimized.
Violent crimes among young women more than doubled between 1985 and 1994, from 9,000 to 21,000. Many of those women “may be responding to a culture of sexual abuse and physical violence by fighting back — often with knives, guns and other weapons,” according to a study by the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington.
When polled, young women who had been physically abused were twice as likely to say it was always acceptable to answer a threat with violence. Many felt brutality was permissible not only if they were struck, but if, for instance, someone spread a rumor about them.
“It’s a generation that is looking at the world and seeing we have only given them two options: Be a victim or be violent. And they’re refusing to be victims,” said center president Leslie Wolfe. “More women and girls are responding to violence by committing violence.”
Yet many researchers see one primary reason for the growth: drugs.
A majority of the women who are arrested in the United States are charged with drug offenses or crimes committed to support drug habits, particularly theft and prostitution. More than half test positive for drugs.
The women tend to be low-level drug offenders with minor criminal records, rarely the leaders of criminal enterprises, according to research by the Sentencing Project in Washington. But under strict mandatory-sentencing laws, their sentences are likely to be similar to those drawn by major criminals. Women who in the past might have gone free on probation now go to prison, while those who might have been given short sentences now get long ones, the project said.
That thesis is borne out by some of the numbers. In New York state in 1982, for instance, 67 women were imprisoned on drug charges. By 1993, there were 1,315.
“They are very small cogs in a very large system, not the organizers or backers of illegal drug empires,” New York Warden Elaine Lord told a Senate committee. “The glass ceiling seems to operate for women whether we are talking about legitimate or illegitimate business.”
Race appears to play a role, too. The Sentencing Project found that the number of young, black women under the control of the criminal-justice system — that is, in prison, on parole or on probation — increased 78 percent from 1989 to 1994, double that of black men and white women, nine times that of white men. The number of black women held in state prisons for drug offenses rose from 667 in 1986 to 6,193 in 1991.
“It’s several things coming together,” said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project. “Drug arrests and prosecutions have disproportionately taken place in inner-city areas. Many low-income women have been caught up in the cycle of drug addiction. . . . On top of that, with the introduction of mandatory sentences in the mid-1980s, your chance of going to prison increased substantially, along with your odds of going for a longer period of time.”
Traditionally, drug suspects could avoid harsh sentences by cooperating with prosecutors, Mauer said. But women involved in drug operations generally know less than the men running them, and thus have little information to trade. “She’s less culpable, but she gets the harsher sentence,” Mauer said.
Many researchers say that more women are going to prison simply because they are committing more crimes. From 1987 to 1996, the overall arrest rate for women increased nearly 36 percent, three times the rate of men. Property crimes actually decreased among men but rose among women.
Violent crimes by women increased at more than three times the rate for men; the women almost invariably attacked someone they knew, such as a boyfriend, husband or ex-husband.
The community of Zion Crossroads is defined by the Crescent Inn Restaurant and a Texaco gas station, set in the rolling central Virginia woodlands 15 miles east of Charlottesville. The prison is a small, self-contained city of more than 15 buildings on 100 acres. About 40 prisoners will arrive each week until the population reaches 900.
If those who come here are like other female prisoners nationwide, most will be members of minority groups, unmarried mothers over age 30 who have at least a high school education. Nearly six in 10 will have grown up in one- or no-parent households. Four of 10 will say they have been physically or sexually abused.
A comprehensive Justice Department study found that half the women in state prisons were serving time for nonviolent crimes. One in four said they committed their crime to get money for drugs. Nearly four in 10 used drugs every day.
Warden Huffman estimates that 80 percent of the inmates who will end up at Fluvanna will have abused drugs or alcohol. She hopes they will take advantage of the counseling programs here and alter their lives.
“I get a real sense that they do want to `try,’ ” she said. “I can’t change anybody . . . but we can provide the opportunity.”
