Jeffrey sez "WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR SPACE IN JAILS"
Jeffrey Matthews
US NC: Women Claiming Their Space In Jails
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1733/a07.html
Newshawk: chip
Pubdate: Sun, 15 Sep 2002
Source: Winston-Salem Journal (NC)
Copyright: 2002 Piedmont Publishing Co. Inc.
Contact: let...@wsjournal.com
Website: http://www.journalnow.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/504
Note: The Journal does not publish letters from writers outside its
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home delivery circulation area.
Author: Amy Frazier
WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR SPACE IN JAILS
Some Counties Slow To Make Room For Female Inmates
MOCKSVILLE - As a detention officer announced from behind a slit in
the jail wall that lunch was being served, Melissa Gordon grabbed the
hand of a fellow inmate and held an empty hand out for another woman
to hold.
Like a chain of paper dolls cut out of a single orange sheet, six
women in prison-issue jumpsuits formed a circle and bowed their heads.
Gordon recited thanks for the meal of beans and hot dogs.
"I love to see that. They do that every day," said Terry Prevette,
one of eight female detention officers assigned to women inmates in
the Davie County Detention Center.
Until Davie began housing females at its new jail earlier this year,
Prevette worked with male inmates.
Female inmates are far different from men, law-enforcement officials
say, in terms of how much more privacy women are afforded, how they
interact with each other, their health-care needs and the length of
time that most spend in jail before being bailed out.
And, until recent years, women were also different from men in that
they rarely landed in jail. For that reason, some jails - such as the
one in Yadkin County - aren't set up to hold women. Women arrested in
Yadkin County are housed in neighboring counties.
Last year, law-enforcement made about 1,400 arrests in Yadkin County
and 18 percent of those arrested were women. In the mid-1980s,
deputies might have arrested one woman a month, said Captain Danny
Widener of the Yadkin County Sheriff's Office.
Sheriff Michael Cain has a simple explanation for the increase.
"There used to be a day when a girl was a girl. Now they'll fight,
shoot and carry on like anybody else will. Maybe they're not teaching
about being a lady no more," he said.
Officials also attribute the increase to the simple fact that suburban
counties are growing. As the number of male prisoners increased, so
did the number of women in jail.
According to the N.C. Sentencing Commission, jails in Davidson,
Davie, Forsyth, Yadkin, Wilkes, Surry and Stokes held 1,639 men and
319 women in 1995 - a ratio of about five to one. By 2000, the ratio
was essentially the same, 2,075 men and 420 women.
Gordon, 21, is among the new class of women who have found themselves
behind bars. She was locked up for violating the conditions of her
pre-trial release by smoking marijuana. Her bond had been set at
$10,000.
"My grandmother is trying to get me out," said Gordon from jail in
June. "If she does, she does. If she doesn't, she doesn't. I try to
keep my head up."
Rough Road
When Gordon went to jail the first time in September 2001, her abuse
of crack cocaine had caused her weight to drop to 92 pounds.
Just days before, she had given birth to an underweight baby whose
blood contained traces of cocaine, she said.
Gordon went to jail to await trial for charges of forgery and
uttering, felony possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia.
Her arrest was fairly typical of those involving women, Cain said.
Women are mostly arrested for nonviolent crimes such as forgery and
narcotics use.
In the past 10 years, though, local jails have started housing a
larger and "harder-core female population," said Bob Lewis, the chief
of the state's jails and detention section.
"One of the things that promoted that is the infiltration and the
extensive use of drugs," he said.
Gordon agrees. She blames crack for the trouble in her life and said
she has her crack problem under control. "I despise that drug so
much," she said.
Gordon grew up in Yadkinville, at first under the eye of her mother
and stepfather. During her first years at Forbush High School, she
started down a path that would lead her to jail.
"That's where I started smoking pot. Either after school or we would
skip and go get high," she said. "It got to the point that I would
come to school so stoned I didn't understand my lesson."
[well DUH! - Jeff]
Gordon moved in with her grandmother, Minnie Pearl Gordon, when she
was 16. She dropped out of school soon after and started to use
cocaine. On her 18th birthday, she said, she tried crack for the
first time.
"I seen the devil when I did that drug," Gordon said.
To Jail
In June 2001, Gordon borrowed the keys to her grandmother's purple
Chrysler and told her grandmother that she would be back in a few
minutes.
"I didn't see 'em for a month," Minnie Pearl Gordon said.
Gordon said that she traveled through several counties buying drugs
with her grandmother's checkbook. She was six months pregnant.
"I'd take the drug dealers shopping and I'd get them what they want,"
she said.
She said they would spend as much as $500 a day on drug binges. A $20
rock of crack lasts only about five seconds, she said. "You could
spend $1,000 in three hours."
The binge stopped with an arrest in Rowan County. Though she had
several charges pending, she wound up in Davie County facing forgery
and uttering charges for writing bad checks from her grandmother's
bank account.
Gordon was jailed in September after her daughter, Destiny Pearl, was
born.
Destiny Pearl, now 1, weighed less than 4 pounds when she was born,
Gordon said. Test results showed trace amounts of cocaine in the
newborn's system. Authorities took custody of Destiny and Gordon said
she is still trying to the child back.
"How can I live in a world knowing I have a child that I don't have?,"
she said.
Gordon was released from jail through a pretrial program. She hadn't
planned on returning, but she did.
"I slipped," she said. In June, she told her pretrial officer that
she had smoked marijuana, she said. She went back to jail almost
immediately.
Not Designed For Women
There are 114 county and municipal jails in the state, and most hold
females. "There's not five jails in the state that don't hold
females," said Lewis, of the state jails and detention section.
The Yadkin County Jail is one of them.
Female inmates have increased in both numbers and in proportion to
male inmates.
In 1992, Yadkin County had 468 male inmates and 95 females - a ratio
of about five men to every woman. In 2001, they had 1,005 men held in
the county jail and 243 women - a ratio of about four to one.
"When you don't have room, you take them far away. I have carried
them as far as Caldwell County," Cain said.
On any given day, an average of two Yadkin prisoners are locked in the
female pod at the Davie County Detention Center, Widener said. The
increasing numbers of females being arrested have led some more rural
counties to reconsider whether they should have jail space for women.
"It all boils down to the money. I wish I had a place to house
females, so we didn't have to beg around for a place. But there's no
way with the setup I have now that we could do it," Cain said.
In the nine months that it has housed women, the Davie center has
accumulated three file drawers full of information on female inmates.
"When you see new facilities come on line, you'll see places for
females," said Sheriff Allen Whitaker of Davie County.
A Different Scene
Sgt. Lindsey Bumgarner watched over the Davie center's pod of women -
including Gordon - from a window in an upstairs watch station in
mid-June.
Some women talked and sipped coffee. Others read quietly.
The behavior Bumgarner and other detention officers see from women
differs greatly from that of the men in that there is more camaraderie
in the female pod.
"If we get older women in here, they tend to take on with the younger
women and mother them," she said.
Men fight and want to be king of the pod, jail officials said.
One day earlier this summer, Bumgarner watched as one of the inmates,
a hairdresser, worked with some of the others. She twisted locks of
wet hair and locked them in place with makeshift rollers made from
cardboard toilet paper rolls.
Gordon said that jail wasn't pleasant, but that she had befriended
several women. They would talk as she wrote long letters to her
boyfriend in Winston-Salem.
"When you're in jail, you can be by yourself, or you can make friends.
Well, I'm here. You can talk to me if you want," Gordon said.
But athough women may be less problematic than men, they do require
more privacy and medical attention, said officials at the Davie
center. Becky McMahan, a nurse practitioner at the jail, said that
women also require more medical attention.
"It's just a whole different set of problems when you see females
versus guys - there are a lot of female problems," she said.
She estimates that although the jail population is about 20 percent
female, about a third of the health checks she does are for women.
Women also tend to stay in jail for shorter lengths of time, jail
officials said.
"Women are bailed out," Cain said. He said that families would bail
women out so that they don't lose their child-care provider. They
also may feel women are less likely to run.
"With men, they'll say, 'You got yourself into this. Get yourself
out,'" Cain said.
The Yadkin County Sheriff's Office also tries to reduce the costs of
keeping women in jail, Cain and Widener said.
"We do any effort we can so we don't have to pay $45 a day," Widener
said. He said that includes making sure that women are considered for
a pretrial release program.
"There's such a backlog of cases, it might be three to six months
before it goes to trial," Widener said. Criminal district court is
held in Yadkin County one day a week. Superior Court is held every
three months.
Those who are charged with felonies may be in jail awaiting trial for
up to 18 months, Cain said.
Release
Gordon expected to go to trial in Davie County in early July. When
her family learned that she would have to wait until mid-September,
Minnie Pearl Gordon decided to bail her granddaughter out.
Melissa Gordon's bond had been set at $10,000, and that meant taking a
lien on the family land.
On the day after her release in mid-July, Melissa Gordon stood in her
house watching a summer thunderstorm roll over Yadkin County.
"I haven't seen any of this stuff since I've been in jail," she said.
Upon being released, she enjoyed a long meal at a seafood restaurant.
Gordon said her primary sustenance in jail was the chips and candy
bars from the canteen.
"The food is nasty. I wouldn't feed it to my dog, except the
cornbread. It's just nasty," Gordon said.
Free to set her own schedule, she watched soap operas, visited with
her boyfriend and shopped with her grandmother for baby clothes for
Destiny Pearl. She also said that she took a job as a hostess at a
Winston-Salem restaurant.
Gordon said she knows that temptation lurks with freedom.
"I promise I'm not going to do anything," she said.
Her grandmother said she's keeping a close eye, but keeping faith.
"I don't expect her to do everything right, but I want a better life
for her than what she's got."
Gordon had a court date Monday to face forgery and uttering charges.
According to court records, she never appeared and a bench warrant for
her arrest was issued.