For Women Behind Bars, "Health Care" Can Be Deadly
By Silja J.A. Talvi, Seal
Press
Posted on November 1, 2007, Printed on November 1, 2007
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 66637/
Why a book about
women in prison?
Readers of Women Behind Bars might ask the logical
question of why an
entire book should be focused on female incarceration
while men are
still, by far, the majority of people getting arrested and
locked up.
To many criminologists and writers who cover prison issues,
the
percentage of women in prison is so small as to warrant little,
if
any, attention or analysis. (Indeed, at many of the
prison-related
conferences that I have attended over the years, prisoners
are
referred to by the male pronoun almost exclusively. )
This
question is entirely valid, and deserves a response. Men do face
unique
issues and hardships in prison, and the overrepresentation of
men of color
(especially African Americans), the mentally ill, and
poor people in general
has been more of an overall focus in my work
than women's issues in prison
until this point.
The deeper I began to delve into the underlying reasons
for the rapid
growth of girls and women in lock-up, the more insight I gained
into a
world that few outsiders see, much less understand. Once I began
to
pay particularly close attention to the ways in which females in
the
criminal justice system were portrayed in the media, it became
clear
to me that stereotypes and judgments about "fallen women"
from
centuries ago were still holding fast.
There's much more to all
of this, of course, from the overt medical
neglect of women's chronic health
needs; to the prevalence of sexual
coercion and abuse in women's detention
facilities (primarily at the
hands of correctional officers, as opposed to
other inmates); to the
fact that girls and women enter the criminal justice
system with far
higher rates of drug abuse, sexual violence, childhood abuse,
mental
illness, and experiences with homelessness. Women are also
being
punished heavily with undeserved federal "conspiracy charges"
for
their general unwillingness (or inability) to "snitch" on their
loved
ones or friends in drug cases -- to the point that this has began
to
be known as the "girlfriend problem" in the criminal justice
system.
Today, the number of girls and women doing time is
utterly
unprecedented in U.S. history. In 1977, there were just slightly
more
than 11,000 women in state or federal prison. By 2004, the number
of
women in prisons had increased by a breathtaking 757 percent. At
the
end of 2006, there were 203,100 women in jails, state and
federal
prisons, plus another 1,094,000 women on probation or parole, for
a
total of 1.3 million females under some form of
correctional
supervision. (Another 15,000-20,000 girls are being held in
juvenile
detention.) While Euro-American women still outnumber any
other
demographic group in jails and prisons, African American women
are
four times more likely to be locked up than their
Euro-American
counterparts. (Collectively, African American women and
Latinas
represent more than 60 percent of women doing time.)
The
following excerpt provides just one woman's story from Women
Behind Bars. She
did not live to tell it, but I am able to share it
with you
here.
****
I was already several months into the process of
writing when I
received an e-mail from a woman by the name of Grace Ortega.
Grace had
heard about the book project, and wanted to know if she could tell
me
what happened to her daughter, Gina Muniz, after she was
incarcerated
for the first (and last) time in her life. In truth, I already
had
enough women's stories to fill the pages of a few books --
if
anything, I was overwhelmed trying to figure out which stories not
to
include -- but there was something about Grace's letter, the
sheer
urgency of it, that made me want to talk to her.
In our first
conversation, Grace and I talked for two hours -- or, to
be more precise, I
listened for those two hours. It actually didn't
click until a few days after
that conversation that something sounded
very familiar about what Grace had
been telling me in great detail.
Sure enough, I had once actually written
about Gina, albeit briefly,
in an article about the allegations and emerging
evidence surrounding
shoddy, abusive, and sometimes life-threatening medical
"care" in two
adjacent women's prisons: Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW)
and the
Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in
Chowchilla.
Grace and I stayed in touch, and I made it known that I would
be
interested in researching the details of her case for Women
Behind
Bars. I asked her to send me court documents, medical records,
prison
memos, grievances, or anything else she might have that would
enable
me to grasp the chronology of events in Gina's life, and to look
more
deeply into her situation. A few weeks later, a cardboard box the
size
of an orange crate arrived at my home. Grace had taken my
request
seriously and literally; from what I could tell, she had sent
me
absolutely everything she possessed pertaining to her daughter's
case.
I didn't actually examine the contents of the box closely until I
was
already well into a few chapters of this book. When I did
finally
start to sort through the material, I saw that Grace had included
four
8" x 11" color photos of her daughter. I set them down on my
kitchen
table and just stood there, staring at them. I don't know how
much
time passed, but I know it was long enough that the images
were
actually seared into my mind.
When I mentioned earlier that I was
haunted by Gina's story, I meant
that I have also been haunted by these
images. For a time, I actually
buried the photos under piles of paper in a
strange attempt to block
out my emotional reaction to them. It didn't matter;
my mind couldn't
erase any of it.
As I write this, these pictures are
out of hiding, because I can
finally give Gina's story a voice. The
photograph that I have placed
next to me is of her emaciated body, shackled
to a bed in a community
hospital near CCWF. Another of Gina's photos, which
was taken just two
months before her arrest on August 8, 1998, is on top of
my desk. This
is a snapshot of a naturally, strikingly beautiful woman with
thick,
dark curls framing her wide smile. Gina's warmth and kindness
radiate
from that picture, just as the one taken just a few weeks before
her
death conveys the agony of living in a body taken over by
cervical
cancer, which had started out as an entirely treatable,
early-stage
illness.
Gina's face in the hospital picture is that of a
much, much older
woman. The only parts of her that still look young are her
hands and
long fingers, which resemble a pianist's. Her left arm is shackled
to
the bed, per the requirement of the California Department
of
Corrections and Rehabilitation that even terminally ill prisoners
be
shackled to their beds and guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven
days
a week. Her right arm tenderly cups the head of her
then-eight-year-
old daughter, Amanda.
Her eyes give away the intensity of her suffering,
which started out
as horribly as it ended. When she was first taken to the LA
County
Jail, Gina began to bleed so profusely that she would go through
many
sanitary pads in the space of a few minutes; most of the time, she
was
just left to bleed all over herself and her cell. When her cries
got
loud enough, jail guards would typically come over and look at
her
with disgust, and then throw toilet paper rolls into her cell.
All
of this went on until Gina passed out while talking to her mother
on the
phone after nearly eight months of nonstop bleeding in jail.
Gina's collapse
was apparently what it took for her pleas for medical
assistance to be heard.
Even then, it would be months before she was
examined properly and diagnosed
with Stage IIB cervical cancer, which
has a high success rate of being
treated and stopped in its tracks if
it is treated aggressively and
consistently.
Gina's pleas for justice, however, were not heeded. She
received a
life sentence in state prison, with an additional seven years
tacked
on. A life sentence would seem to indicate that she had committed
a
heinous crime, and most certainly a crime of violence. But Gina
had
actually committed a nonviolent act, although even she thought
she
should be punished for stealing $200 from a fifty-one-year-
old
Vietnamese American woman. Gina did not have a gun, knife, or
any
other weapon with her, but she admitted that she "strong-armed"
the
woman into going to a nearby ATM and giving her the money. Even
the
victim herself, when the police arrived on the scene, stated that
Gina
had not hurt her in any manner. Gina hadn't been a career criminal
by
any stretch of the imagination.
Her only violations were for
car-related misdemeanors, including a
June 30, 1998 charge for driving
without a permit.. (Gina did not do
jail time, although the incident did go
on her record.) What happened
that pushed this twenty-seven- year-old, with
no history of criminal
behavior, to the point of rob- bing
someone?
Grace explained to me that Gina's father's death on April 22,
1998,
triggered a serious, debilitating spiral of depression in
her
daughter's life. Although Gina's father had periodically been a
heavy
cocaine and heroin user, and Grace had left him when Gina was just
a
child, Gina still adored him and tried to see him as much as
possible.
By all accounts, cocaine hadn't even been a part of Gina's life
until
after her father died. Although she had gotten involved with men
who
hadn't exactly done right by her, Gina had set her sights on
becoming
a nurse and paving the way for a good life for Amanda.
Seeing
her grief, a much older, married male family member offered his
"support" to
Gina, and then gave her a taste of a drug that he
promised would help her get
through the pain. His encouragement of her
cocaine use was obviously far from
being in Gina's best interest. When
her use turned into dependency, he
started demanding sexual favors,
which she provided to him for a time in
exchange for money to buy more
drugs.
The "exchange" went on for a few
months, until a day when she asked
for $200 and this relative demanded
another sexual favor. As Gina
later admitted to her mother, she was suddenly
consumed by hatred and
disgust -- toward him and toward herself. She refused
his advances,
and he in turn refused the money. But Gina's desire for more
cocaine
overtook her ability to think clearly. As her mom put it, "Gina
did
something that she would have considered unthinkable" in
the
not-so-distant past.
A mere surface examination reveals that
Gina's poor attempt at a crime
was obviously a fumbling act of desperation by
a woman addicted to
drugs. But that's not how the court saw it. Gina's own
defense
attorney took Grace's hard-earned money (which he was
eventually
forced to return when Grace filed a complaint with the California
Bar
Association) , did nothing to argue her case, and then urged Gina
to
plead guilty in exchange for a short sentence. While the judge
was
announcing the terms of her sentence, Gina heard the words "life"
and
"seven years," and anxiously asked her lawyer what was
happening.
As a bailiff would later testify, Gina's lawyer had lied to
her,
telling her that entering a guilty plea would get her only
a
seven-year sentence, not life in prison. Gina did not find out until
she
was sent to CCWF that she was going to spend the rest of her life
in prison.
Medical "decisions" made at some level in the process
ensured that she was
denied the necessary hysterectomy, radiation, and
chemotherapy that would
have saved her life. In essence, her already
cruel and unwarranted life
sentence was hastened into a death sentence
over just a few horrible months
of pain and suffering, during which
she and her mother pleaded constantly for
medical intervention and
urgent treatment.
It took many months of
letter writing, and the volunteer assistance of
the San Francisco-based
advocacy group Legal Services for Prisoners
with Children, for Grace to get
her daughter out of a depressing
community hospital room under the constant
watch of prison guards.
Gina wanted to die at home, and so she did. On
September 29, 2000,
Gina Muniz slipped away in silence, surrounded by her
immediate
family, just two days after her mother took her home.
Where
is the healing or hope in a story like this? Gina was certainly
not given the
chance to experience either.
Instead, they have manifested themselves in
Grace's ability to turn
her own grief into advocacy on the part of other
women in prison.
Grace has traveled across California, testifying before
legislators
and advocating for compassionate release for terminally ill women
in
prison so that they do not have to endure anything akin to the
needless
and slow death that Gina suffered.
Grace still looks at the pictures of
her daughter every day, and she
worries that her daughter's life will be
forgotten entirely or, worse
yet, dismissed as the plight of a criminal whose
life and death were
of no particular significance. "Please," she asked me
again at the end
of our last conversation, "Please make sure that Gina
isn't
forgotten."
Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These
Times. Her work
appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge,
2003).