For just a moment, Carolyn Lindsey got to hold her newborn daughter.
The mother, exhausted but elated, smiled and cooed at the infant’s tiny, scrunchy face. Then a prison guard shuffled nervously at the door.
“It’s time for us to go,” the guard said.
Lindsey, mother to Desiree Nicole and Inmate No. 948149 to the Texas Department of Corrections, handed her baby to a nurse. “Letting go of her was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” the 28-year-old ex-waitress later recalled. “It was awful. It’s the worst punishment I could ever receive.”
Baby Desiree left the hospital that afternoon to live with Lindsey’s mother. Lindsey, serving nine months for violating her probation on a Ft. Worth drug charge, was escorted back to her room at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Southern Regional Medical Facility, a sort of infirmary behind bars.
“I didn’t think those barbed-wire fences were real when I first got to prison,” she said, speaking to a visitor via telephone from behind a glass partition. “It really didn’t hit me at first, what it meant not to be able to just come and go.
“Well, when you see your baby being carried out–she’s leaving and you’ve got to stay–that’s when you know that the fences are real.”
Such wrenching farewells are played out more often each year in Texas, as they are across the nation. Births to female felons behind bars, once an uncommon occurrence, have become an everyday aspect of life in the criminal justice system as the number of women in prisons and jails nationwide has risen to more than 130,000. An estimated 6 to 10 percent of those women, typically young and unwed, enter prison pregnant.
“It’s among the fastest-growing segments of the prison population,” said Leslie Acoca, director of the Women and Girls Institute at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a San Francisco-based research organization. “The trend is truly alarming.”
In Texas, the female inmate population has more than doubled since 1994, as prison capacity has been expanded, sentences have grown stiffer and early release has become the exception instead of the rule. Texas prisons now hold more than 10,700 women.
Rarely does a week pass when someone isn’t giving birth at the prison hospital on the Galveston campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch. (UTMB, the oldest medical school in Texas, provides the bulk of health care for state prisoners.) In 1998, the number of prison births exceeded 200–almost a threefold increase from five years earlier.
Often, the pregnancies occur when convicted women, knowing they are headed to prison, engage in a farewell liaison with a boyfriend or spouse. Prison officials said there are no records of Texas inmates being impregnated by prison guards.
Like most states, Texas makes no provision for keeping babies and incarcerated mothers united. After a woman gives birth, she typically has one chance to see her child, usually the next day. Then, one of three things happens: The infant is turned over to a relative who agrees to provide care until the mother’s release; the infant is placed in foster care until the mother is freed and can seek custody; or the baby is put up for adoption.
“We just don’t have a lot of good options. The system is set up to deal with male inmates, not pregnant and parenting female inmates,” said Acoca, who is writing a book about the growing crime rate among American women and girls.
Children are allowed to visit their mothers in prison, but it happens infrequently, experts say. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency surveyed incarcerated mothers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Almost 60 percent said their children had not been to prison to see them. “And many more had had very few visits,” Acoca said.
She said only two states, New York and Nebraska, have prison units with nursery wings where babies can live with their mothers for up to a year. A few other states, notably California, are experimenting with alternatives to prison, such as halfway houses where female offenders can serve their time while raising their babies.
But most women who give birth behind bars find themselves with no better alternative than Lindsey’s: Stare lovingly at baby photos taped to their cell walls, hope someone brings their children by for occasional visits and count off the days, hours and minutes until release.
“You just have to be strong and hold on,” Lindsey said, shrugging her shoulders and brushing back shaggy, strawberry blond bangs. “There’s barbed wire holding you in. You can’t run nowhere.”
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Among Texas inmates who gave birth during the past two fiscal years, the average sentence was just over five years, according to prison records. One in 10 of those women was looking at 10 years or more behind bars.