You can find Part One of our Inside This Place, Not of It book discussion here. When you're done, come back and continue to follow along. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
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Danielle:
Back to what haunted me, beyond the very simple tweak or twist that could have changed my life had I made a decision differently, or not felt like someone cared about me, I also think about the young people who are having babies inside prison walls. I had not ever imagined a world where a child was born in prison or in county lockup.
Ashley:
Oh, yeah.
Danielle:
It had never been something I would've imagined being allowed. And this book is just completely full of those stories. There’s literally a birth to death timeline for these women; life experiences that are so similar to anybody who's just outside of those walls. It was just wild to me to stop and consider a woman having a child and becoming a mother for the first time, that origin story, behind bars and shackled.
Ashley:
Shackled.
Danielle:
While bringing life into the world.
Ashley:
That is the part that always gets me. Just trying to picture it, trying to visualize it. I know that’s part of the reason why I still have some hesitancy about trying to have a baby or get pregnant, give birth, whatever; a lot of my hesitancy comes from the fact that maternal mortality rates in the United States are already not great. And then you make it a black woman, and I’m just not sure me or my baby would ever even make it out of there. And then to picture being shackled…it seems like such a broken moment.
Danielle:
Too often in these stories, humanity seems to be missing. There are small lights throughout these stories where you see people being kind, and you see a human-to-human connection, whether it's between the guards or the medical staff. But it's rare. I think about my own experience of becoming a mother, and just how scared I was, and how unprepared I felt. And then to compound this idea of, well, your sentencing is going to be prolonged well beyond that child's birth, and the thought that you may never even get to know them is heartbreaking. And then people actually have the audacity to say, "You should have thought about that before you broke the law."
Ashley:
Oh, yeah.
Danielle:
I want to do more for those women. Women's healthcare outside of the system, as you were talking about, is not great for certain parts of our population. It's worse within prison walls, and I think about even my own experience as a white woman feeling unheard. I was basically being called crazy when I was telling them with my first born, I didn't feel well, something didn't feel right. And when I went in to be checked, they almost just sent me right back home. And then I had to ask and advocate for myself to be hooked up to a monitor. I just wanted to get my baby's heart rate. And they said, "Oh, yeah, let's go ahead and do that." And then that's when the discovery was made that my daughter’s heart rate was so low, it was just at dangerous levels.
I hear the echoing of certain sentiments of these women who are pregnant and saying, "Something's wrong. I don't feel right." And then even their post-delivery care, "I'm not healing. Something's wrong with me. My cycles have shifted. I don't know what's going on." It shouldn't be that hard for a human, no matter where they are, to get their basic needs met.
And the thing that keeps coming to mind that haunts me is I had a husband sitting next to me. I had health insurance. I had what was supposed to be the right way of doing things in the order you're supposed to do. And I still felt unheard. And I listen to these women, and the panic in their tone of them recounting their story, and I can't imagine just the traumatic experience of it all.
Ashley:
So what do we do? How do we even begin to do something useful that might change that for these women who are incarcerated AND each other?
Danielle:
I’m thinking about that a lot! How do we stop that cycle of not listening, or hearing, or feeling, or caring about a person who's going through, physically, one of the most traumatic experiences of their life, birth, while also trying to reconcile some, quote/unquote, "debt to society" at the same time? To me, that's so hard to comprehend, and I still need more time to wrap my mind around it, and then digging into more resources and researching. But I do believe those stories are some of the most powerful ones in here, especially when it comes to just the medical needs. We can go broader into that, too. Not just giving birth, but just the medical needs of these women, and how they're unheard, and how those of us who are on the other side of those bars feel that way, too. There's a common thread there, and I think it needs to be explored further.
Ashley:
I absolutely agree. That makes me think about another section of the book when we are hearing from Francesca, and she's talking about the issue with her teeth. The fact that by the time she was out of the halfway house, she didn't have teeth anymore. And not because her teeth couldn't be saved, not because they couldn't be cared for, but because she was consistently denied medical attention over the course of her incarceration.
Danielle:
And the only people who really advocated for her were the other women in prison with her. Yelling at the guards, "You have to do something to help her."
Ashley:
Or the fact that part of the reason why she didn't get treatment in the halfway house was because the dental office was in the sex offender unit in a men's prison. And the male inmates would masturbate while she was waiting for her appointment.
Danielle:
And she was made to just have to sit there while that happened.
Ashley:
It feels like the lack of compassion isn't even ... I can't even see how someone would be able to interpret it as necessary or correct.
Danielle:
Even once she received her diagnosis, they told her, "Well, it's not that bad." Can you imagine going to a healthcare professional, and they come up with a formal diagnosis for you, and say, "Well, we don't need to worry about it yet because it's not that bad." That was the kind of care she received. And she eventually was diagnosed with hepatitis C, but they tried to basically tell her, "Well, you kind of had this coming."
They don't know her origin. They're making absolute assumptions. They don't know the origin of her disease. They're making an absolute assumption based on their own prejudice of feeling like, well, she's dirty. And I'm with you, I cannot fathom the lack of compassion.
Ashley:
But it's also something that we are seeing in a lot of ways, I think, played out in different ways all the time, the idea that illness is a punishment. In some way or another, you get sick or you deal with illness because of something that you didn't do, or something that you didn't take care of, or something that you are not strong enough to be.
Danielle:
I agree, and I think it goes back to some of our original discussions last time, which is this idea that society in general tends to feel you deserve anything you get when you're behind bars because you put yourself there.
Ashley:
Yes.
Danielle:
Even if it means losing all your teeth. Even if it means, in her case, having to endure men masturbating on the glass walls while you wait to have a simple dental consultation. And it's that idea that we are not being restorative. We are not helping people transition back into society. We are perpetuating the pain and perpetuating the punishment because it's deserved is the sentiment, right?
Ashley:
Yes. That is the sentiment. I think that's a very common sentiment. I think that there is a certain sect of people in this society, definitely in this country, who genuinely believe that people who do the right thing generally do not find themselves on the wrong side of the law in any circumstances. And that just finding yourself on the wrong side of the law in any capacity means that you have made decisions that made that happen in your life.
And I think it has to do a little bit with this refusal that a lot of people have to accept that some things just happen, and they might be nobody's fault, or they might be a lot of people's fault all at the same time.
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Part Three coming tomorrow, along with announcement of our next Book Talk Book. Any guesses? Let us know what you've been reading in the comments below. It's good to know what you're up to. We're working on so much behind the scenes (especially Danielle), and can't wait to share more with you.
Talk soon!
