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Californians call it The Campus, and with its low-lying, red-brick buildings set against 120 acres of dairy land, the California Institution for Women at Frontera looks deceptively civilized. The illusion ends inside. Constructed in the early 1950s as a repository for 800 or so wayward ladies, Frontera today holds more than 2,500 women at any given moment. The convicts complain that guards spy on them while they're showering or using the toilet. Inspectors have found rodent droppings and roaches in the food. In a lawsuit against the state, inmates charged that shower drains get so backed up, they have to stand on crates to avoid the slime.
A continent away, New York City's Rose M. Singer jail stands as a testimony to penal enlightenment. Because most inmates are young and sometimes high-spirited, the jail can feel a bit like a boarding school for girls. But the starkly lit hallways and pervasive smell of disinfectant are constant reminders of the true purpose of the place. And even though it was completed only two years ago, it is already seriously overcrowded--a dining room has been turned into a dorm. Above all, the inmates hate the lack of privacy. Says Carmen Gonzalez, who is serving nine months for selling crack, "I wish I was in a cell."
Stiff penalties: For years, the ranks of convicted criminals have been swelling steadily, bringing the nation's prison system perilously close to an overload. The vast majority--94.4 percent--of those inmates are men. But even in jail, women are breaking down the barriers to equal achievement. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported last week that the female prison population jumped 21.8 percent from 1988 to 1989--the ninth consecutive year that the rate of increase at women's institutions far outstripped the men's. The number of l women doing time has doubled to 40,000 in the last five years (chart). The main reason is drugs. Stiffer penalties are on the books throughout the country and women, who have turned to crack in a way they never embraced other narcotics, have been caught in the sweep. Judges have also shown a greater willingness to incarcerate women than in the past, when chivalry extended even to lawbreakers. "Courts I used to look at it as if they were sentencing a mother," says Gary Maynard, Oklahoma's corrections director. "Now they look at it as if they are sentencing a criminal."
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Prisons have been largely unprepared to handle the unique problems of their growing female populations. "We assumed that they could benefit from the same programs as men," says Dan Russell, administrator of Montana's division of corrections. "But women have a lot of psychological and medical needs" that men do not. Often, children are at the heart of the matter. Three quarters of the women are mothers, and many of them single parents. In recent years, a number of prisons have created programs to provide greater contact between kids and inmate moms (box). And public officials have begun to acknowledge--some times nudged along by lawsuits--that prisons do not provide women with the same rehabilitation or educational programs as men. Inequities in the correctional system, says Washington, D.C., Superior Court Associate Judge Gladys Kessler, "are a mirror of the sex discrimination that occurs in the nonprison population."
Fed by steamy, seamy '50s movies like "Reform School Girl," Americans have had a long fascination with women behind bars. The reality is a good deal more disturbing--and pathetic. The typical offender, according to a 1988 national study conducted for the American Correctional Association, is a young minority mother. In general, she is slightly better educated and less violent than her male counterpart. Many inmates were victims themselves--of poverty, physical violence or sexual abuse. Though most poor people are obviously law abiding, some analysts say more women have taken to crime to support their families as economic conditions have worsened. In Florida last year, more than two thirds of the men were working at the time of their arrest, while 73.8 percent of the women were jobless.
New Breed: Women prisoners have always been easier to manage than the men--they're more prone to verbal than physical abuse. But that may be changing. Some penologists worry that the lack of space will not only exacerbate existing problems--for example, fights stemming from lesbian jealousies--but provoke the women into new forms of aggression. "The recidivism, as well as the level of violence, seems to be directly linked to the amount of overcrowding," says Rebecca Jurado, an attorney with the ACLU of southern California.
Drugs, in particular, have stimulated violent outbreaks. More than half the women in the federal system were convicted on drug charges. And the problem doesn't stop at the prison gate. Mary Vermeer, a deputy warden in Perryville, Ariz., says new inmates are delighted to discover that, despite efforts to stem the flow, the drug pipeline makes it almost as easy to get a fix inside as out. At Frontera, crackhouses and shooting galleries operate in portable toilets in the yard. Old-timers complain about the new breed of "druggie." "They don't care about nothing," says Delores Lee, 37, who is doing 25 years in Florida on a murder conviction. "They steal; they break things."
AIDS also contributes to the crisis atmosphere in American prisons. So far, there are no national figures measuring the disease among the convict population. An official Massachusetts study based on 400 inmates who volunteered to be tested found that 35 percent of the women were HIV-positive compared with 13 percent of the men. In California, any woman who tested positive was put into a segregated AIDS unit--whether or not she was actually ill. As a result of a discrimination lawsuit, many HIV inmates at Frontera have been mainstreamed during the day-but must return to their separate quarters to sleep.
Though few would argue that male convicts are socially well adjusted, penal experts tend to agree that female inmates require--and desire--more psychological counseling. Many women feel enormous guilt about their kids. "When men get arrested, they ask for a lawyer, " says Brenda Smith, an attorney at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C. "When women get arrested, they ask about their children." The children effectively serve as hostages on the outside, ensuring that the women make few demands. "The No. 1 issue for women is getting their kids back," says Sarah Buel, a battered-women's advocate in Massachusetts. "The unwritten rule is, don't make a fuss and we'll help you get [them] back."
Prison officials have begun to acknowledge the enormous disparity in the treatment of men and women. In a number of recent lawsuits, women plaintiffs have accused the system of gender bias. A major problem is "overincarceration." Because of a lack of facilities, many low-security inmates have landed in medium-security penitentiaries. Many of the women have been subjected to greater restrictions, such as strip searches, than their crimes warrant--and which their male counterparts are largely spared.
Some social critics believe the states should help inmates break the cycle of abuse and poverty that led many of them into crime in the first place. They also argue that the system should recognize that women generally pose less of a threat to public safety than men and deserve more lenient sentences. "Assuming that we want to help offenders, the best place to do this is not in prison," says Nicole Hahn Rafter, author of "Partial Justice," a history of women's prisons. That attitude is unlikely to win much support, particularly now that public opinion favors strict penalties. But it is clear that the overcrowded conditions and lack of rehabilitation programs doubly punish women--and do little to advance the society's interests.
The number of women inmates has also tripled in the last 10 years.
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