First Shot: Thanks, But No Thanks

A women's jail is set to open? But do we really need it?
By Maureen Turner
Valley Advocate, September 6, 2007

After five years and more than $26 million-and despite countless protests and petition signatures-the new women's jail in Chicopee officially opens for business this month.

The minimum- and medium-security facility will house more than 200 women from the four western counties who've received sentences of less than 2 1/2 years.

Supporters applaud the fact that the jail will have the space and staff for programs-from parenting classes to addiction treatment and mental health services-that were hard to offer when women were housed in the already crammed men's prison in Ludlow.

Certainly, those kinds of services, if done right, could be a great benefit to the targeted women-but do they really need to be locked up before they get that support?

As Jo Comerford, formerly of the Western Massachusetts American Friends Service Committee, which has fought the creation of the jail, has put it, "A woman shouldn't have to get locked up to get healthcare, to get her addiction looked at, to get a GED. ... What I'm interested in is the root cause of what brought her to jail."

The majority of incarcerated women are there for non-violent offenses, namely, prostitution and drugs. Local prison officials acknowledge that about 85 percent of the women now at Ludlow have some kind of addiction problem. It's hard to believe that the social, economic and health problems behind their crimes couldn't be solved in a way that's healthier for the women and society, less damaging to their families and their post-incarceration lives, and less costly to taxpayers.

And when women are locked up, there's another group of people who are adversely affected: their kids. Across the country, there are 1.3 million kids whose mothers are under some form of "correctional supervision," according to journalist Christina Rathbone, author of A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars.

A 2003 study by UMass Boston found that there are 7,000 mothers, with a combined 16,000 children, incarcerated in Massachusetts. Often the children will be sent to stay with already overburdened family members or put into foster homes.

Of course, the building of the new jail profits some, including the contractors who took part in the pricey construction and the city of Chicopee, which sold the land for the jail for more than $1 million and receives another $100,000 for each bed at the site-meaning some sectors, at least, have plenty of motivation to back Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe's call to add another 56 beds to the jail. (For more on the true costs of prison projects, see www.realcostofprisons.org.)

Ashe's bid to add more cells to the jail means the fight's not over for activists like the Statewide Harm Reduction Coalition, or ShaRC (www.massdecarcerate.org), who've fought the facility. They're rallying behind proposed legislation, cosponsored by state Rep. Peter Kocot (D-Northampton), that would create a five-year moratorium on new jail and prison construction.

Instead, the bill calls for the creation of a special commission to study the "system of incarceration," looking at the unfair treatment of poor people and people of color, overcrowding, drug sentencing policies and the effect prison and jail spending has on anti-poverty and health programs. Ultimately, the commission would consider whether there are more effective and cost-efficient ways to deal with those who are now locked up, while also protecting public safety.

"What we need is drug treatment, childhood sexual abuse prevention, quality education and job training," Lois Ahrens, director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, offered as testimony in support of the bill at a Statehouse hearing last spring. "These are long-term solutions; however, right now, we can alleviate jail overcrowding and the need for more and bigger jails though bail reform and pre-trial diversion programs and the diversion of resources from jails and prisons to drug treatment and meaningful job training."

-mturner@valleyadvocate.com
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