In prison on a parole violation, convicted shoplifter and former drug addict Donna Cox, 29, thought her situation couldn’t get much worse, until she found herself in a tussle with another inmate.
“She stood up and pushed me, and I pushed her back and we started fighting,” Cox said.
The scuffle, over idle gossip, landed Cox in segregation for 14 days.
“It’s terrible to be over there,” said Cox, who has since been paroled again. “It’s a lonely and cold place.”
At Dwight Correctional Center for Women, Illinois’ largest women’s prison, tiffs between inmates are common, in part due to overcrowding, officials say. With roughly 1,000 inmates, the facility, which has minimum-, medium- and maximum-security buildings, is more than 300 inmates over capacity.
“It’s too many women trying to get along in the same place,” said Donna Klein-Acosta, the Illinois Department of Corrections’ deputy director of the Women and Family Services unit.
Since 1970, the number of women in the Illinois correctional system has risen from 130, or 2 percent of the prison population, to 2,853, or 6.3 percent of all state inmates. The upswing is creating challenges for Illinois and other states.
“A lot of states are really struggling both with the soaring increase in the number of women and the precise question: How should we design facilities for women?” said Meda Chesney-Lind, professor in the women’s studies program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and author of the book “The Female Offender.”
To accommodate the increase (largely due to mandatory drug sentences), Illinois embarked on a building program to add 2,500 beds for women, 1,800 of them in an $80 million prison in Hopkins Park, near Kankakee, slated to open in the fall of 2002. Housing maximum-, medium- and minimum-security inmates, the prison will become the largest for women in the state and will serve as a transfer point for all female state offenders.
Two other facilities for women opened in January: a 200-bed work-release center in Dixmoor, and a 500-bed, medium-security jail in Decatur.
Accustomed to housing large numbers of men, state officials find themselves grappling with how to plan and operate prisons for women that are secure and cost-effective, and yet accommodate their special needs, everything from visits with children to privacy in bathrooms.
“It has to be a facility that can be maintained, but is not quite as hard as a typical male facility,” said Jeff Goodale, project manager for HDR, the Chicago-based architectural firm tapped to design the Hopkins Park prison.
Simply modeling a women’s prison after a male prison, in other words, doesn’t work, the officials agree.
Said Klein-Acosta: “Women do time differently.”
Who’s inside
Nationally, about 84,000 women were confined in state and federal prisons in 1998, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics; 72 percent of those held in federal prisons were there on drug offenses, as were 34 percent in state prisons. Only 28 percent of women in state prisons were being held on violent offenses, 11 percent of them for homicide. Seven percent of women in federal prisons were being held on violent offenses.
In Illinois, roughly 40 percent of the women are incarcerated for drug offenses. Prison officials say the figure is higher when you factor in property crimes committed to support drug habits.
Three women are on Death Row (although Gov. George Ryan recently declared a moratorium on executions). Some female inmates are as young as 17, others are in their 70s, Klein-Acosta said.
Cox’s latest trip to Dwight, on a parole violation, came after she served time for retail theft.
“I stole some clothes and two CDs from Wal-Mart,” she said.
In dealing with inmates like Cox, Klein-Acosta said, security is less a concern than teaching life skills: how to get and hold a job, how to budget, how to choose a man who does not leave them holding the bag of drugs.
Such lessons require space for counseling, but in the medium-security “X” building at Dwight, where Cox was incarcerated, there are only two tiny offices for counselors, with barely enough room for two chairs. Yet there are 448 inmates in the building, many of whom could benefit from small group sessions, Klein-Acosta said.
Unlike the majority of male inmates, most female offenders are the sole caretakers of children. Often they need help planning for their children’s care in their absence and in weathering the separation.
Of the 84,000 female inmates in state and federal prisons in 1998, more than 54,000 had children under age 18, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Illinois estimates that 80 percent or more of its female inmates are mothers. At any given time, 30 to 35 inmates at Dwight are pregnant, Klein-Acosta said. (Babies are delivered at local hospitals.)
Ideally, in prisons for women, Klein-Acosta said, visiting rooms should be welcoming environments for children, with toys and light and space to run around, as well as quiet play areas where mother and child can bond.
At Dwight, an area of the fenced-in grounds, called Camp Celebration, is set aside for tents where the women and their children spend some summer weekends cooking and sleeping outdoors.
“It gives them a place to practice their parenting skills,” Klein-Acosta said.
Designing for women
Only in recent years have most of the country’s correctional systems and the architecture profession begun to design prisons specifically for women. As late as 1970, half the states had no separate prisons for women, Chesney-Lind said.
Gradually, as the number of incarcerated women began to rise, states began converting former mental hospitals, abandoned motels and the like into prisons.
“Anything that was big and unused was grabbed,” Chesney-Lind said.
Women were put in former men’s prisons, in a wing of a men’s prison or in a prison based on blueprints for a men’s prison.
Reviewing plans for the new Northern California Women’s Facility in Stockton, Calif., in 1986, Teena Farmon, the woman slated to be the warden, said: “Everything’s fine, but the urinals are going to have to go.”
The “X” house at Dwight, opened in May 1997, was based on a design for a male prison. Named for its shape rather than any chromosome, the building contains two-woman cells that are 8 feet wide, 9 feet long and 9 feet high. Although the cells have solid walls instead of bars (which are somewhat passe in most prisons nowadays), the rooms are by no means soundproof.
“It’s hard to sleep,” said Cox’s roommate at the jail, Dejuana Plato, 32. Their cell is next to the day room, where inmates congregate, themselves struggling to be heard or to think over TV noise and high-decibel chatter.
“Women tend to be more verbal than men,” Klein-Acosta said.
The closeness of the quarters can create friction between women who prefer to talk in small groups and form more intimate relationships than men do, prison experts say.
“It does seem women’s relationships are more important to them,” said Gail T. Smith, executive director of Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers (CLAIM). “So to live in a situation where there is overcrowding and where your relationships become a source of so much stress, it seems more destructive to women.”
Smith says some of her clients, once released, experience post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“Think what it would be like to never have a quiet moment to yourself for months, or years,” Smith said.
There is no nursing station, which would make it easier to dispense medications. Prison officials say women suffer more than men from regular aches and pains, as well as from more severe problems relating to years of poor nutrition, drug abuse and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Prison administrators would rather that the women have more room for contemplation, counseling and comfort, but space costs money, and officials are leery of appearing to pamper criminals.
“Would you support your tax dollars paying for a sun porch?” Klein-Acosta asked. “I don’t think so. But it serves a wonderful purpose.”
Privacy is priority
Nearly 6 in 10 women in state prisons reported that they had been physically or sexually abused in the past, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. One-third of the imprisoned women said they were abused by an intimate and just under a quarter said they were abused by a family member.
When it comes to bathroom use, the inmates can be particularly reluctant to reveal their bodies, prison officials say.
In male prisons, showers normally are open, in full view of guards and other inmates. “Men just don’t care,” Goodale said.
At Dwight, however, prison officials added 12 inches between shower heads to provide more space between female inmates, and installed privacy partitions. And at Decatur, shower heads, set for a 5-foot-11-inch man, were lowered so that women would not have to stand halfway out of the stall to feel the spray.
Ideals and reality
In the early 1990s, Roula Alakiotou, of Roula Associates Architects in Chicago, was asked to design the Cook County Division 11 jail at 31st Street and California Avenue for women, though it later ended up housing men.
Alakiotou spent a great deal of time with female inmates to find out how their living space affected them. The women told her they wanted more space to be able to think and talk quietly. They also said they wanted to see the sky.
Instead of designing corridors with cells on both sides, Alakiotou clustered the living spaces in triangles, with one side of glass and smaller spaces in the corners, instead of one large day room. She created smaller living quarters, with only 24 cells in each triangle, holding 48 inmates. Each cell would hold two prisoners.
At the new prison in Dixmoor, 8 to 10 women share a room, increasing the chances of conflicts, Smith fears.
Said Klein-Acosta: “We can’t build spacious cells. You have to take your cuts somewhere.”
In Decatur, a former mental health center was remodeled to serve as a medium-security prison for women. Three to six women share each room.
“It’s a beautiful facility with lots of windows and lots of lighting,” Klein-Acosta said.
She also noted that, often in lower-security prison buildings, each cell might house more women, but they also have more freedom of movement.
The Hopkins Park prison is still being planned. Goodale hopes the minimum-security portion will have fewer heavy doors. More glass could allow views to the outside. Showers may have perforated metal sceens to provide some privacy.
Goodale also said he envisions homey visiting rooms for children. “You don’t want to have big sliding doors and very loud locks,” he said.
Of course, when female prisoners complain about prison conditions–the lack of peace or too little privacy–some members of the public have little sympathy. Klein-Acosta regularly hears that the women simply shouldn’t have committed the crimes.
“You’re right,” she said, “they shouldn’t have. But they’re still human beings who will return to society.”
Added Smith: “I don’t think people want the Department of Corrections driving people crazy so they’ll be more dangerous.”
ANGELA DAVIS SPEAKS ON PRISONS
As part of Women’s History Month, political activist Angela Y. Davis, a professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz who spent time behind bars herself, will speak at Indiana University Northwest on “Social Justice: Women and Prison.”
– When: 7:30 p.m. March 23.
– Where: Indiana University Northwest, Tamarack Hall theater, 3400 S. Broadway, Gary, Ind.
– Cost: Free.
– Call: 219-980-6660.
Davis, acquitted in 1972 after she was accused of being an accomplice in a deadly shooting, advocates prison abolition and cites racism in the criminal justice system.
