For a moment, Carolyn Lindsey held 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 to a year 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 by 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. Births to women 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 research organization in San Francisco. “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. Currently, Texas prisons 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, has historically provided most of the health care for state prisoners.) In 1998, for the first time, the number of prison births exceeded 200, almost a threefold increase from five years earlier.
Often, the pregnancies occur when convicted women, knowing they’re 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 correctional officers.
Like most states, Texas makes no provision for keeping babies and incarcerated moms 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 mom 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 said. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency surveyed incarcerated moms in California, Florida and Connecticut. Almost 60 percent said their kids had not been to prison to see them. “And many more had had very few visits,” Acoca said.
Only two states,New York and Nebraska, have prison units with special nursery wings, where babies can live with their mothers for up to a year, she said. A sprinkling of 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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After recuperating in Texas City for nearly a month, Lindsey was shipped back to Texas’ women’s prison in Gatesville, 35 miles west of Waco.
In one sense, she’s lucky. If she completes a prison drug-treatment program, she could be freed by mid-May, when Desiree will barely be 4 months old. Lindsey said she plans to return to Granbury and assume care for the infant and three older children.
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.
“We’re making the best of a bad situation that we didn’t create,” said Jenny McClain, nursing director at the Texas City regional medical facility. The institution, a 25-minute drive from the UTMB prison hospital, is where pregnant inmates go to await delivery and, afterward, to recover.
“If it was up to me,” she said, “we’d never have moms and babies separated by prison bars. But what else can we do?”
Acoca and others said states should do more to develop alternatives to prison time for pregnant offenders, especially nonviolent ones. More than half of the pregnant inmates in Texas are drug offenders. Many others were convicted of nonviolent crimes, like forgery and credit-card theft, often associated with a drug habit.
In California, nonviolent female inmates who are nearing the end of their prison terms can be moved to one of a half-dozen small community centers where they live in dorm-type rooms with their young children.
“It gives them a chance to get acquainted with kids they might not have seen since birth,” said Sharrell Blakeley, who oversees women’s and children’s services for the California Department of Corrections. “It helps mom prepare to return to life on the outside.”
But in most states, such alternatives are nonexistent. A 1995 national census of correctional institutions by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that only 66 of 1,500 surveyed facilities–or less than 5 percent–allowed infants or young children to stay overnight with incarcerated parents.
“Those babies need to be with their mothers. And the mothers need to be with their babies,” said Blakeley. “Having the responsibility of raising a child can be a powerful buffer against recidivism. A mother who bonds with her child has a reason to stay clean. A mother who has that child taken away from her winds up grieving and in rage against the system.”
Denise Johnston, founder and director of the California-based Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, said studies have consistently shown that children of prison inmates are at high risk to embark on lives of crime.
“We know where our next generation of prisoners is coming from,” she said. “It’s coming from the current generation. More than half of them, and it may be closer to two-thirds, will be children whose parents were incarcerated.”
Those odds improve, she said, if women in prison have an incentive to become good mothers, to come to grips with their drug addictions, their criminal past and other travails. A baby’s touch can provide that incentive.
“You want to have the strongest possible bond between these infants and these mothers,” Johnston said. “You want the closest relationship possible, given the less-than-optimal situation. Community-based treatment is an effective, and cost-effective, way of achieving that.
“Unfortunately, ours is a punishment system. We want people who commit crimes to pay, period. We’d rather see costly punishment than cost-effective treatment. Even if it’s biting off our nose to spite our face.”
Prison is tough. Pregnancy can be. Together, they’re often draining–mentally, emotionally and physically.
“Just being in prison makes you all way off balance. Then being pregnant on top of that, with all the hormonal changes, it can really mess with your head,” said Shawna Lee Williams, 27, who was six months pregnant when interviewed late last year at Gatesville. She, like Lindsey, is serving time for a drug-related probation violation.
“You get lonely. You get horribly depressed. You just have to tell yourself, `There’s nothing I can do about it,’ ” she said. “We put ourselves here. We have to take the blame for that.”
For pregnant inmates, the rigors of Texas prison life are relaxed, at least a little. Most prisoners are required to work. Pregnant ones, if they’re experiencing discomfort, are given light chores or a pass altogether. They get daily vitamins, extra milk with meals and a snack at night that–within the fairly severe culinary limits of a prison mess and commissary–affords a chance to indulge odd food cravings.
“When their feet start to swell, we’ll find them an extra pair of soft-soled shoes,” McClain said. “We try to make the whole process as smooth as possible.”
Pregnant inmates are never forced to give birth. If a woman wants an abortion, prison officials will find a private provider and arrange transportation. The inmate, not taxpayers, pays for the procedure.
“I know of two women who have requested that over the last few years, and both of them changed their minds,” McClain said. Adoption is also rare, she said. “The vast majority of our mothers look forward to raising their kids once they’re released.”
For all the stresses that incarceration imposes, getting caught and convicted was the best thing to happen to many of these women, prison officials said.
“A lot of them were leading dangerous lifestyles,” McClain said. “In here, they’re getting regular prenatal care. They’re getting instruction in parenting skills. They’re not being exposed to drugs or alcohol. Many of them are in treatment.
“They’re better off here than they would be out on the streets, doing drugs or drinking or whatever.”
Many inmates concur.
“If I knew I was pregnant when I was on the outside, I probably would have gotten an abortion,” said Jessica Flores, 20, a former exotic dancer from Houston. She learned of her pregnancy shortly after beginning a sentence of up to 12 months last September on a parole violation.
“I never would have thought I was ready to have a little baby. I just wanted to keep partying,” she said, acknowledging a rollicking history of drug abuse and promiscuity.
Enrolling in a substance-abuse program, taking parenting classes and having time to contemplate her future role as a mother have matured her, she said. “It’s going to be hard for me not to stumble when I get out. But I think I’m ready now to raise my baby,” she said.
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No more ready than Lindsey.
“I’m going to do all I can to choose a better life than the one I was living before,” she said. “I want to make it up to my children. I want to be a good mom.”