Many of us will celebrate Mother’s Day over the weekend by remembering or being present with women who raised us, or with our families. But for the more than 190,000 women incarcerated in the United States this weekend, there will be no celebration.
Close to 60 percent of these women serving prison sentences were the primary caregiver of their minor children before sentencing. All too often, a prison sentence tears them from their family connections and contact with their children, while severing their children from a vital source of emotional and financial support. State women’s prisons are often located in rural areas, with limited modes of transportation, and families struggle to visit.
As a result, families have very few in person visits, and must rely on postal mail, or pay inflated prices for telephone calls and video contacts. Many prisons have done away with real mail, and now use vendors to intercept, scan, and destroy all postal mail, delivering poor quality printouts of the original letter to the incarcerated recipients weeks later for a fee.
In addition to women sentenced to prison, more than 2.4 million women spend at least one day in jail each year, and 80 percent of them are mothers of children under the age of 18. And more than 60 percent of women in our nation’s jails are presumed innocent and awaiting trial, jailed due to poverty and an inability to purchase their freedom by posting bail.
Children with mothers incarcerated in local jails often fare no better than those whose mothers are in state prisons: Some jails have completely banned in person visitation to require all visits be done by paid video, not because of COVID, but to boost their bottom line. A 2015 study found that 74 percent of jails had banned in person visits after putting video visits into place. Even when women are able to have in person visits with their children, jail visits are often done through a plexiglass barrier. Women cannot hold, hug, touch, or kiss their children.
Although many more men are incarcerated than women in the U.S., women’s rate of incarceration has grown twice that of men in the past 40 years. Since 2009, while the overall number of people in prisons and jails has decreased, women have fared worse than men in 35 states. Women and families of color are disproportionately affected by this increase. Black and Native American / Alaska Native women are incarcerated at double their share of the population of women in the United States.