Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

A Women's Prison Expands in Chicopee
Do women who commit minor offenses need more jail room--or less jailing?
Thursday, March 29, 2012
By Maureen Turner
Valley Advocate (Northampton, MA)

This spring, the Hampden County Sheriff's Department will break ground on an expansion project at the women's jail it operates in Chicopee, increasing the number of medium-security cells from 120 to 184.

The project has been a long time coming, in the view of the sheriff's department, which has wanted the extra cells since the facility, officially called the Western Mass. Regional Women's Correctional Center, was first planned a decade ago. The department says the expansion will allow more Western Mass. women who are now serving their sentences in the eastern part of the state to come closer to home, to aid their transition back into life outside. It will also help relieve overcrowding at the state's only women's prison.

But not everyone is cheering the expansion. Activists rallied against the opening of the women's jail in 2007, urging officials to consider spending public resources not on locking up more women—in this case, women serving terms of less than two years, sentenced, overwhelmingly, for non-violent crimes like theft, drug offenses and prostitution—but instead on programs and services that might help them avoid committing those crimes in the first place. To them, adding more cells to the jail feels like a repudiation of efforts to reform the criminal justice system in favor of the same old punitive approach.

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As first envisioned, the Chicopee women's jail would have included the extra cells from the start, explained Larry Lajoie, assistant superintendent in the Hampden sheriff's department.

Work on a 176-cell jail was supposed to begin in 2003, to provide a place for women who, at the time, were held at the Hampden county jail in Ludlow, along with men. The men-to-women ratio in Ludlow at that time was 11 to one—an untenable situation that meant there wasn't enough space for programs and services for women, sheriff's department officials said.

The department had advertised for construction bids for the women's jail and was getting close to choosing a contractor, Lajoie said, when newly elected Gov. Mitt Romney pulled the plug on the project, citing fiscal constraints. The project got off the ground again in 2005, although this time, due to rising construction costs since the new jail was first approved, the plan was divided into two parts for the sake of the bidding process: the main jail, with 120 cells, and an addendum, with 56 cells. In the end, when the bids were opened, the state only had the funds for the main project, Lajoie explained. The jail, which cost $26 million, opened in 2007.

"We have been chasing that [expansion funding] since," Lajoie said.

Money for the new facility will come from a $550 million bond authorization through the state capital budget. Bids are due at the end of March, with the hope that the builders will be on site by late April, said Lajoie, who declined to estimate the final cost until the bids are in. (In 2006, the sheriff's department sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, $6 million from the state Legislature to build the 56 cells that had been excised from the original building plans.)

The new facility, which will be separate from the main jail, should take about 16 months to complete, Lajoie said.

The jail addition, he said, "would truly be regional," housing women from Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester counties. That would include women from Western Mass. who now are serving sentences at MCI-Framingham, the only state prison for women in Massachusetts. Local women who've been sent to Framingham would come to the Chicopee jail for the final six to eight months of their sentences—the "step down" period—when they would have access to "tools to re-enter their communities," Lajoie said. Rather than women newly released from Framingham returning home to Western Mass. to start from scratch, he said, "We'd try to hook them up to services on their way out," such as substance abuse treatment and housing and employment assistance.

Overcrowding is a major problem at MCI-Framingham; as of last month, according to figures from the Department of Corrections, there were 402 women in the prison's general population unit, which is designed to hold 388, and 144 women in the pre-release unit, meant to hold 125.

The most dramatic problem, however, is in the unit for women awaiting trial—women who've yet to be convicted, and who, in most cases, are there because they can't raise money to post bail. That unit held 252 women, four times the number it was meant to hold, according to a recent report in the MetroWest Daily News. That's because only four of the state's 14 sheriff's departments, including Hampden County, have space in their county jails to house women awaiting trial; the rest send those women to Framingham.

A long-term master plan released by the DOC earlier this year identified relieving overcrowding at Framingham as a top priority. To that end, the plan calls for 325 more beds for women prisoners across the state over the next decade. That includes the new cells slated to open at the Chicopee jail.

"It's bad," Lajoie said of the overcrowding at the Framingham prison. "We can make a difference in these women's lives."

On the day he spoke to the Advocate, Lajoie reported that there were 175 women in the 120 cells in Chicopee. "We're managing for now," he said.

In addition to local women moved from Framingham to Chicopee to finish their sentences, the 64 new cells would also be used for women in the minimum security, pre-release program—another program, Lajoie said, that's designed to help ex-offenders reintegrate into their communities.

The vast majority of offenders will one day be released, Lajoie noted. "What we're all trying to do is, in the safest, most secure, humane way, give somebody the tools to be released back into their city or town," he said.

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But critics argue that public resources are better invested in services that would keep women from ever ending up behind bars in the first place. "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," Jo Comerford, then head of the Western Mass. American Friends Service Committee, told the Advocate when the jail opened in 2007.

Regardless of what brings a woman to jail, often what keeps her there is money, or lack thereof. The bail system, critics argue, create a two-tiered situation: people with the means to post bail, when allowed by the court, can await their trial at home. But poor people who cannot afford bail spend that waiting period behind bars, during which time they could lose their homes or jobs or become separated from their kids. That can prompt some to accept less than ideal plea bargains rather than wait for their day in court.

To Lois Ahrens, the expansion of the Chicopee jail is yet another indication of our society's fixation on a lock-'em-up approach to public safety. "The mindset is, of course, to jail people, and then you have to deal with the effects of them being jailed, instead of doing something in the beginning," said Ahrens, director of the Northampton-based Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Ahrens and other activists have worked hard for policy changes that would reduce the number of people in jails and prisons, from bail reform, which would mean that more people deemed by the courts not to be risks could afford to await their trials at home, to sentencing changes that would reduce the number of people serving long terms for non-violent crimes. While some of those efforts have gained political traction—Gov. Deval Patrick, for instance, has called for ending mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses—they face significant resistance. Right now, for instance, the state Legislature is considering a "three-strikes" bill that would prevent those considered "habitual offenders" from applying for parole, a change that would increase prison crowding and, it's safe to assume, lead to calls for building more prisons.

Indeed, while the DOC master plan addresses the need for sentencing reform, the department is also pushing a building plan, with a price tag in the hundreds of millions, that includes new women's facilities as well as facilities for elderly prisoners who cannot be in the general population because of their declining health.

Ahrens is particularly galled by the fact that the Hampden sheriff's department has been pushing for the additional cells for almost a decade—an indication, she said, that the officials behind the project had no expectation that policy reforms that could reduce the jail and prison population would ever succeed.

"They've been on this campaign since 2003," she said. "They're planning for no change. Here they are in 2012; they're getting to fulfill their plan."

In response, Lajoie pointed out that it's the courts, not his department, that send women to jail. "We don't sentence women to jail at the sheriff's department," he said. "We don't have a seat at the table [regarding] sentencing.

"We're there for their care and custody," he continued. "We want to correct their behavior and get them back into the community."

But Ahrens does not buy that argument. "Everybody can compartmentalize. Nobody is actually responsible for anything," she said. "On the one hand, they can say they're not responsible. On the other hand, they can say in 2003 they already knew they'd need these extra cells. ... It's all based on things staying exactly the same."

http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=14860

Thanks to Lois Ahrens of The Real Cost of Prisons Project, who notes, "The comment from "Lajoie reported that there were 175 women in the 120 cells in Chicopee. "We're managing for now," he said." is absurd. He is attempting to make the case for the jail being over-crowded to justify needing another jail. Each of the 120 cells were always intended to be for 2 women...hence a total of 240 women...so of course they are "managing". Since it has opened, the jail has never been full....still there has been a constant push for more, which they are now getting."