Over the last 20 years, Oklahoma
Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
But Oklahoma’s prisons aren’t filled with women because they pose more of a threat than women elsewhere; the state simply penalizes women’s actions much more forcefully. At the same time, social safety nets have been cut away, limiting women’s options for other means of survival.
According to Susan Sharp, a professor at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma Women Prisoners:
Drug possession and drug trafficking are the top two reasons for the ballooning women’s prison population. Of the 1,152 women entering Oklahoma’s prison system in 2013, 52.6% were arrested for a drug offense, with 26.2% ultimately sentenced for possession and 16.6% for distribution. Keep in mind that Oklahoma often ratchets up the charges by counting possessing, distributing, transporting or manufacturing a certain quantity of drugs as trafficking. Five grams of crack or twenty grams of meth can be charged as a trafficking act.
Moreover, sentencing is more severe in Oklahoma than elsewhere. Compare the state’s mean sentence for “drug trafficking” to the country’s mean sentence for the same crime: In Oklahoma, the average penalty is 10.3 years, while the country’s is 6 years.
In addition, conditions in Oklahoma often push women down the path toward prison. Oklahoma ranks among the bottom 16 states for women’s mental health, meaning that Oklahoma experience poor mental-health conditions, including stress, depression and eating disorders, at a higher average than in many other states. In 2015, it ranked among the bottom 10 states for women’s economic security and access to health insurance and higher education.
The result of all these tangled, competing forces is a vicious cycle in which the women who have the least access to social and economic independence, health insurance and mental health treatment are the most at risk for imprisonment.
And, as in other parts of the country, women of color tend to suffer disproportionately: in a state where black people make up only 7.7% of the entire population, nearly 20% of the women’s prison population are African-American. Native American women are 13% of the prison population, but Native people of all genders are only 9% of the state population.
Yet rather than address these disparities, Oklahoma continues to lock up the hundreds of women each year who are most vulnerable to them. Recently, however, the fastest-growing segment of Oklahoma’s drug-crime prisoners have been white women, convicted of illegal possession and/or sale of prescription pain medications and/or meth.
For Oklahoma’s thousand-plus female inmates, prison does not merely mean the loss of liberty; it also means a loss of their children, sometimes permanently. In 1997, Congress passed the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, stipulating that the state begin proceedings to terminate parental rights if a child had spent 15 of the past 22 months in foster care. In 2014, Susan Sharp conducted a survey of incarcerated mothers for Oklahoma’s Commission on Children and Youth and found that nearly 10% of the women participating had children in foster care, placing them at greater risk for permanent separation from their parents.
Fortunately, to some degree Oklahoma recognizes that it has a problem. To combat the drastic increase in incarceration caused by the War on Drugs (as well as the accompanying costs), counties have turned to drug courts, which send women (and men) charged with a nonviolent drug crime to treatment programs, rather than prison.
However, failing to complete the stipulations of the drug court can lead to prison, sometimes for a lengthier sentence than if a person had initially pled guilty. Oklahoma has a 42% rate of drug-court failure, Sharp noted in her book. She has stated that the average sentence for failure is 74 months. Most of these failures are for flunking a urine test or not paying court-imposed fines. It’s an “alternative” that is also a pathway to prison.
Sentencing is another area in which state is beginning to recognize the need for change. Sharp has stated:
We definitely need to revisit lengthy sentences, especially for drug crimes and low-level property crimes.
In February 2015, state legislators introduced House Bill 1574, which allows for a 20-year sentence instead of requiring life without parole for a third drug offense (so long as the two prior convictions are not drug trafficking). And on May 6, 2015, Governor Mary Fallin signed it into law. But 55 people serving life without parole for drug offenses won’t be going home, because the bill is not retroactive.
So what could stem the flow of women to prison and end the state’s womb-to-prison pipeline? Oklahoma’s incarcerated women understand how their lives—and their lack of opportunities—helped snare them in the criminal-justice net. And they know what needs to change for women in the state. Reflecting on their experiences, they see the holes in the state’s social safety net that would have kept them from falling out of society and into prison. They also know the solutions that would help keep other lives from being destroyed. But these solutions are systemic changes that might take decades, if not generations, and they would refashion Oklahoma dramatically.
For the past three years, Dr. Jaime Burns, an assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma’s School of Criminal Justice, has taken about 15 university students to Mabel Bassett Correctional Center to meet with an equal number of incarcerated women as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program. Each week, the group discusses different issues, including the idea of restorative justice. Restorative justice is a theory and practice by which people who have harmed others take steps to try to repair the damage. The process includes not only the person who has done the harm and the person(s) harmed, but also their families and communities.
In an era in which marijuana is legal in five states and legalization is pending in more than a dozen others, decriminalization of minor drug offenses is very important.
How many alcoholics are in prison for anything other than DUI? That’s because the cost of their drug of choice is not prohibitive. Nobody robs a liquor store so they can buy liquor.”
