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Commentary
>HOME >Perspectives & Views >Commentary Jailed Women's Abuse is National Scandal
By Alan Elsner

WeNews commentator

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Last week's cases of male guards' abuse of female inmates spotlight the rampant mistreatment of many of the 180,000 women in our nation's prisons and jails. From strip searches, to pat-downs to rapes, it's an ongoing and overlooked national scandal.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Sixteen months after a judge ordered Alabama to end horrific conditions and abuse at the state's Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, information that emerged last week shows that, for some inmates, the suffering has only gotten worse.

In December 2002, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson found that Tutwiler inmates were held in large dormitories, hundreds squashed together in unventilated rooms with nothing todo all day. Over 1,000 inmates occupied a facility originally built to house 364. The summer heat was stifling but there were not enough fans to cover all the dorms. Violence among inmates was common; health care was so inadequate that it bordered on the criminally negligent.

Thompson ordered the state to reduce overcrowding and in 2003 Alabama shipped 300 inmates to the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a private prison in Louisiana to comply with the order. Last week, The Birmingham News reported that the Evangeline Parish District Attorney Brent Coreil would pursue criminal charges against an unspecified number of guards accused of improper sexual contact with the prisoners.

Also last week, Livingston County in Michigan settled a class-action lawsuit brought by 233 former inmates of the county jail for $355,000. They alleged, among other things, that male guards watched them take showers and use the toilet and denied them feminine hygiene products.

Exposing Rampant Abuse

These cases shine a light on the rampant abuse that many of the 180,000 women in our nation's prisons and jails risk every day. The problem of male correctional officers sexually harassing, abusing and raping female inmates permeates our nation's prisons and jails.

Women entering U.S. prisons and jails stand a good chance of being guarded by male correctional officers. A 1997 survey of prisons in 40 states found that on average 41 percent of the correctional officers working with female inmates were men. Two-thirds of those guarding women in California were men; in Kansas, the figure was 72 percent.

In the past, the role of male guards in women's prisons was restricted to functions that limited actual physical contact. Civil rights and anti-discrimination laws passed since the 1960s swept many of these restrictions away. Ironically, this was partly a result of lawsuits launched by female corrections officers to win the right to work in men's prisons. States responded by writing "gender neutral" employment policies. But women often do not receive gender-neutral treatment.

For several years throughout the 1990s, officials at the Suffolk County Jail in Boston routinely strip-searched every single woman booked into the facility; over 5,400 women in total. This policy