The Prison System
The Prison System
An Interview with Rosemary Sarri
Conducted by Phillis Engelbert
What are some of the major flaws you can identify with the system of processing and incarceration of prisoners? I think the single biggest flaw in our system, and this certainly is true in Michigan, is that we process too many people. Other flaws are institutionalized racism and sexism, and the reliance on closed institutions as the punishment mechanism rather than probation and community alternatives.
Particularly notable as a flaw in our prison system is the lack of any kind of program. People are essentially locked up and the vast majority receive no appropriate program that will help them to be law abiding when they leave prison. And persons who are incarcerated are disproportionately persons who are undereducated, who are poor, who have been unemployed - often times unemployed for a long period of time or maybe never really gainfully employed. By not providing any program - so that they can be gainfully employed in a society that demands that every adult be employed - the system is setting them up to fail. And not surprisingly, they fail. You can say "they've leamed their lesson" or something like that, but if someone who has never really been at all successful at getting employment receives no training or no work experience in prison that prepares them for finding employment, what leads you to believe that when that person walks out of the prison with a record, that they 're going to be able to find a job?
How is racism manifested in our prison system? First, by a tremendous overrepresentation of Blacks in the system, and increasingly now, Hispanics. Hispanics will probably catch up and surpass Blacks in the system as they become the majority minority population sometime in the early part of the 21st century. A good example is the current situation in Michigan, where there is a great overrepresentation of Blacks in the prison population and an almost total absence of Blacks on the staff. In Coldwater, which is in the southwest part of the state, there is a prison facility for close to 500 women. Most of the guards are white males. Most of the inmates are Black women. That whole interaction there - the whole social meaning of being subjected to supervision by white males - has a lot of overlay that is extremely problematic for Black women.
What problems, in particular, are faced by women in prison? The majority of women who go to prison have family responsibililies. Most are single mothers. A major, if not the major problem, is being able to carry out, in some fashion, their parental responsibilities while they're in prison. And that is made almost impossible. They don't know where their children are unless family takes them and keeps them informed. If they have a very long sentence, their parental rights are terminated and their children are adopted by somebody else. Women prisoners are very much concemed about their kids. They really worry about what's going on with their kids - what's happening to them, are they getting to school, are they getting this, that and the other thing taken care of, and so on.
Another major problem is that the vast majority - perhaps three out of four women who come to prison - have a substance abuse problem. Most prisons have no treatment for substance abuse. You can go cold turkey - that's it. You're lucky if there's an Alcoholics Anonymous or some such program, but there is no systematic, ongoing treatment program.
I mentioned that a major flaw of the prison system is the lack of training and vocational opportunities. Men, in general, even though the situation's not good for men, have more opportunities for education than do women. The Glover v. Johnson case which began in Michigan in 1977 and which has still not been settled fully, was about the fact that women did not have equal opportunity with respect to education or vocational programs. Women who go to prison and who want to do something about their education, now in particular, have very little opportunity to do anything other than to earn a G.E.D.
Very few women in prison get health care of any significance. And it's not surprising that there are some bad accidents and that a fair number of women have died in prison because of lack of health care. That's a serious problem because if you're incarcerated there's nothing you can do about your own health situation.
I suppose another problem for women is their inability to deal with the lack of justice in the way the criminal justice system operates. They were trying often times to make it. They weren't able to make it on the outside and ended up in prison. Sometimes we talk about welfare fraud and how bad it is. I can tell you about some cases where people worked while receiving welfare because they had sick children and then ended up in prison and had their parental rights terminated. But actually they were probably doing the right thing in many people's opinion. They didn't receive enough in welfare benefits to take care of their family responsibilities so they did something in addition, for which they were punished. Now those women have a hard time in prison figuring out, "What did I really do wrong? Why am I being punished for this? I broke this law but then there's this higher law." I think that a lot of them get very conflicted about that.
What attention is being given to the problem of battered women in prison? There was almost no attention given to that problem for a long period of time. People sort of knew that a very large proportion of the women in prison for homicide had committed homicide in their families. It is most unusual to have a woman commit a stranger homicide, and for a hit-person to be a woman is practically unheard of. Then, as we began to look at who were the women who killed their spouse or partner, we found that many of these women were themselves battered. They were battered for extended periods of time, maybe many years by their partners or their husbands, and finally in desperation, killed them. With the onset of the domestic violence movement in this country, there is now considerable interest in trying to work with and help battered women in prison.
Are there programs specifically designed to encourage the continuation of the relationships between incarcerated mothers and their children? Yes, there are programs. They began in California and Massachusetts and we've now got a program going in Michigan called the Children's Visitation Program. It's a very exciting program because it involves three groups of people, and this is the first time to my knowledge they've ever worked together.
One is a group of about 30 community volunteers - professionals, non-professionals, lawyers, social workers, church people, etc.
There's also a committee of prisoners. They are women in prison who are trying to work on what kind of really good experience they can have with their children when the children visit the prison.
And the third group of people is the staff in the prison. And we have a lot of staff people actively involved. These people are all working together. And it's very interesting for us to sit down and try to talk to one another about how to work out a children's visitation program. The warden puts on a very different hat in this situation than she usually does. What I find very exciting about it is that people get to see each other in different ways.
What alternatives can you recommend to incarceration? There are hundreds of alternatives that have been tested, and work. There are community service programs, community restitution programs, probation supervision, fines, community-based residential programs where people work in the community during the day and they stay in the program at night. There are a lot of states in the U. S. that have very interesting community based programs. The problem is not that we don't have any community programs, it's that we don't use them heavily . The numbers of those going into community programs have dropped, particularly in probation. We've been increasing the numbers in prison and we've been also increasing the length of stay in prison. As a result we have this tremendous buildup. I think these numbers will force us to start moving toward more community based programs.
Rosemary Sarri Is a professor of SociaI Work at the U-M.