Abstract

The Women Get Chains..

Some 90,000 female prisoners in the U.S. serve their sentences in an array of overcrowded institutions that take away their privacy, their relationships with their children, their very identities as women and mothers. They are predominantly poor minority women who have been inadequately educated and badly served in terms of health care. They have the highest rates of HIV infection and their children have the highest infant mortality rates. Many have been physically or sexually abused. Most are single parents, the sole breadwinners of their families; 65 percent have drug or alcohol problems. More women are now sent to prison than at any other time in the nation's history-the result, largely, of mandatory sentencing minimums and other strict federal sentencing guidelines. INSET: The kids get pain, by Beverly Cage.