This week on Everyday Injustice, we talk with Katie Dixon, head of the Closure Is Possible campaign, and Renae Badruzzaman, project director at Health Instead of Punishment, a nonprofit about the problems facing women who are incarcerated at women’s prisons.
The From Crisis to Care Report ( https://humanimpact.org/hipprojects/healthnotwomensprisons/) was released in February 2023, and represented a collaboration with “Californians United for a Responsible Budget; California Coalition for Women Prisoners; and Transgender, Gender-variant, and Intersex Justice Project to create a research report, fact sheet, and social media tiles about the harms of women’s prisons.”
This report exposed “the catastrophic health harms of incarceration in women’s prisons and provides evidence in support of investments in health-promoting social determinants of health instead of incarceration.”
From Crisis to Care outlines how incarceration worsens health via multiple pathways:
- Medical neglect —including failure to provide medical examinations, stopping needed prescriptions, and long delays in treatment—is common in prison.
- Alongside the violence of the criminal legal system itself, people incarcerated in women’s prisons also experience and witness high rates of interpersonal physical, emotional, and sexual trauma and violence.
- Environmental conditions in prisons seriously endanger the health of incarcerated people, by exposing them to infectious disease, extreme heat and cold, inadequate food, foodborne illness, mold, toxic drinking water, and more.
- The use of solitary confinement can lead to increased psychological distress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, paranoia, agitation, sleep deprivation, and prescription of sedative medications, alongside physical ailments.
- Separating people from their families and communities has destructive and far-reaching consequences that harm health.
Listen as our guests discuss this report, the problems of trauma and misconduct in women’s prisons that led to the closure at FCI Dublin, why women’s prisons have more harm and trauma than in men’s prisons and why we should aim ultimately at abolition.
