New York state prison authorities have illegally shackled pregnant inmates during labor, failed to provide most female prisoners with enough sanitary napkins and toilet paper, and have not trained medical staff to work with trauma survivors–a crucial oversight because most incarcerated women have histories of abuse and sexual violence, a nonprofit group that monitors prison conditions charged yesterday, the Huffington Post reports.
Reproductive health care for women in state prisons is “woefully substandard,” charged the Correctional Association of New York report. Drawn from interviews with almost 1,000 incarcerated women over five years, the result is a comprehensive and critical look at inmates’ experiences with women-specific health care. “We looked at reproductive health because it’s one lens that you can really see the specific experience of women in prison — not just the dehumanization that defines life in prison in general, but the specific dehumanization that women go through,” said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, author of the report and director of the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association.