Old adages can be true: Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes, however, it is paved with the dangerously mistaken notion that jails and prisons can solve social problems.

I have spent much of the past two decades listening to and learning from women who have been incarcerated in my home state of Massachusetts. Both in my blog and in my book Can’t Catch a Break I’ve chronicled their painful carceral experiences. Most women swept up in the criminal legal system have experienced abuse and poverty, and spend years cycling through shelters, jails, residential therapeutic programs, rented rooms, and the streets. Incarceration cuts them off from existing medical care, takes them away from their children, and — due to the coercive nature of jails and prisons — tends to retraumatize them.

Isabella, for example, is a woman I knew outside of prison as communicative, vivacious, forward-looking, and well-groomed (she could put together a fabulous look out of bits and pieces of donated items). The one time I visited her in prison, in contrast (she was in for a few months “clearing up” an old charge), she sat across from me in silence, blank-eyed, with stringy hair and acne. The next time we got together she explained that she hadn’t want to speak because guards overhear conversations and use what they hear to taunt, report, or retaliate against prisoners; that her eyes were blank because she had been put on too high a dose of psychiatric medication; and that she was dirty and unkempt because the showers were filthy and lacked privacy. In short, my meetings with Isabella and other women prepared me to dislike all prison and jail staff, both those who coldly follow the rigid carceral rules and those who use their positions of power to humiliate, abuse, or deny services to the people in their custody.

Unexpected Encounters (of the good kind)

And then, about a year ago, as part of a study of women and county jails in Massachusetts, I began meeting deputies, superintendents, clinicians, and others frontline staff who work in women’s jails¹. And much to my surprise, I found myself really liking most of the people I was meeting!

Staff members — most of whom are women — spoke with passion about their concern for the well-being of the women in their custody and about their dedication to rehabilitating, guiding, treating, and teaching these women. Many go above and beyond the call of duty trying to arrange services for women both during incarceration and after release. I spoke with personnel who are proud that their jails offer drug treatment, anger management and parenting classes, yoga, and other therapeutic and quasi-therapeutic programs. They describe their facilities as good opportunities for women struggling with addiction, abusive partners, fractured families, and homelessness to evaluate their lives and learn to make better choices in the future. At some jails staff members actually refer to women under their custody as “clients”, a term indicating a voluntary and therapeutic relationship (though, of course, jail is not voluntary).

The jail employees I met are not Pollyanna-ish. Working on the frontlines, they acknowledge that most of the women who cycle through the jails deal with mental health problems that caused or exacerbated their criminal legal system involvement. A few staff members expressed frustration that the same women keep coming back to jail, despite the services they receive while incarcerated. Still, they (the staff) remain convinced that the orderly and ordered life enforced in jail will teach the women to build less chaotic lives on the outside. A couple of staff members even told me that they wish they could hold the women longer than required by their sentences because a few months [the average time women spend in jail] is not sufficient for women to make the most of the programs the jail provides.

Most importantly, however, at least to my mind, more than one senior jail employee told me, “These women need treatment, not jail. But there’s nowhere else to send them, so here we are.”

Kindness is Not Enough

The kindness expressed by frontline personnel is a good thing. Every human being deserves to be treated with kindness, and a culture of kindness likely arouses positive emotions for everyone involved. But to be clear, we’re talking about jails. Whether “inmates” or “clients”, women cannot leave. Inmates / clients do not control their own bodies, relationships, or daily schedules. And here’s the rub, there is NO EVIDENCE that therapeutic programs in coercive settings such as jails and prisons provide any sustained therapeutic value for women. To the contrary, the physical and mental coercion intrinsic to incarceration is far more likely to reinforce than heal the impacts of abuse that launch women into the criminal legal system to begin with.

The large majority of incarcerated women in the US experienced abuse and victimization – often beginning in childhood. Most suffer from chronic physical and mental health challenges, and they face re-traumatization and other threats to their emotional and physical well-being in punitive and restrictive environments. I take issue with staff pronouncements regarding women needing to “learn to make better choices.” Having worked with criminalized women for close to two decades, I can say with complete confidence that no one “chooses” poverty, sexual assault, childhood abuse, or homelessness.

Despite good intentions on the part of many employees, jail is not a place in which women will “recover” from trauma. Poverty, insufficient affordable housing, pervasive gender violence, and lack of resources to support individuals escaping abusive or exploitative relationships are the paths that lead women into jails and prisons. Addressing these problems requires structural solutions, political will, sustained funding, and commitment to building a more just society.

The frontline staff members who said, “there’s nowhere else to send them, so here we are,” are spot on. But jails cannot – and should not – be tasked with picking up the slack left by decades of half-hearted commitment to and funding of social, educational, and health services for all people. Unfortunately, this will remain the case as long as federal government, state legislators and other elected officials continue to generously fund law enforcement and correctional agencies while leaving social service programs and agencies to fight over the budget crumbs.

1. Massachusetts county jails, run by county sheriffs departments, incarcerate people serving sentences of up to 2.5 years as well as individuals waiting for their case to be resolved by plea bargain, trial, or sentencing hearing; people who can’t afford or who are waiting to raise bail; people who violated a condition of their probation; and people coming through the court system who are homeless or waiting for placement in a mental health or drug treatment facility. People with longer sentences are incarcerated in state prisons run by the state Department of Correction (DOC), though several women’s county jails incarcerate some women under DOC custody who are nearing the end of their sentences and who are deemed appropriate for a minimum security setting. ↩︎