By C1 Staff
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Hospital staff across the state are still reporting inmates who give birth being shackled, despite a new law making such a practice illegal in 2010.
News Works reports that the Pennsylvania Corrections’ own records show pregnant women were shackled 109 times in the 2012 – 2013 fiscal year.
“Now we’re just working to get it implemented effectively,” says Pennsylvania state senator Daylin Leach, the primary author of the anti-shackling bill.
“The fact is, when you do pass new legislation, you do have to notify people as to the requirements of that legislation. Particularly the people who are going to be dealing with that legislation.”
The Snyder County Prison warden Shawn Cooper gave an explanation as to why they still sometimes shackle pregnant inmates who go on doctor’s visits.
“I don’t want to have to have to explain to the public why I let an inmate overtake one of the officers because they weren’t restrained.”
He explained further that he worries about inmates recognizing someone in the waiting room and making a break for it. He did say that he would never shackle a woman in her third trimester or a woman in labor. But he doesn’t think the public realizes how dangerous some pregnant women can be.
“So there could potentially be a time,” he says, “when there’s going to be an exception made and we may be forced to put handcuffs on a female during transport just because we’ve got officer safety, we’ve got inmate safety, we’ve got the community safety – we’ve got a lot of factors that go into making that decision.
But Senator Leach and the others who wrote the anti-shackling law say they made sure to allow for exceptions. If corrections officers think a woman’s dangerous to herself or others, they can still use restraints. But in some jails, it seems like this exception gets used fairly liberally.
News Works submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for records of pregnant inmate shackling at Blair County Prison, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh. They received over a hundred incidences of pregnant inmates being shackled, even though the prison only handles 55 women at a time, and the reasons why all followed a pattern: the only explanation given was “safety” or “security” reasons, and nothing more.
“You have the individual correctional facilities policing themselves,” says Danyell Williams, the prison doula who helped sparked the anti-shackling law. “There’s no uniform accountability. I think if there was an identified body that could really be held accountable, and there were some concrete consequences to violating the bill, it wouldn’t be violated as much.”
The only place the law appears to be working is in Philadelphia, such as the Riverside Correctional Facility. Not only do they not shackle pregnant inmates, they also provide support for pregnant inmates and those with children. They invited the Maternity Cares Coalition’s Momobile to set up an outpost in 2008.
The Momobile offers parenting classes and doula programs for pregnant inmates. They also attend inmate births, acting as a third party to ensure that inmates aren’t being shackled.
“I actually think this really works,” says LaToya Myers, who runs the Momobile program in Philadelphia. “Having a nonprofit agency come in. We want to make sure that – and I think the jail here wants to make sure that – the woman has a safe birth experience. So if anything seems a little bit off, I can call one of the majors in the middle of the night. And they will make sure it gets handled.”