Inmates/Women/Mothers: The New Women’s Prisons

The campus of Colorado’s new women’s prison consists of 14 different buildings.

An increasing number of specialized women’s facilities are being built throughout the country in response to a swelling female inmate population. Nationally, the women’s prison population nearly doubled from 39,054 to 75,241 since 1990, according to 1998 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the last year the statistics were tallied.

More comprehensive medical facilities and improved provisions for personal care often are found in today’s centralized women’s prisons. A new emphasis is placed on family visitation, aimed at minimizing the disruption of maternal bonds in an effort to interrupt the cycle of intergenerational criminality.

Transitional housing, child-friendly visitation areas, and expanded industries programs are the tools used to meet these goals. “Women’s facilities were previously built so they [administrators] could change the mission of the facility later to other uses, such as converting them to men’s prison,” says Bill Buursma of DLR Group. “Prison planners have to be mindful of building to the correct security and hardness level for women, as they are different than male offenders and offer unique challenges to the facility design. If you aren’t mindful of the gender differences, you can bury the program.”

Buursma served as principal in charge for the new Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon, which will house 925 women in a facility shared with the state intake center. Minimum-security units already are complete and housing for the remaining custody-levels will be finished within a few months-one of many new women’s facilities being built with an improved understanding of female needs.

Dayrooms in Oregon’s Coffee Creek facility have grooming stations equipped with slanted mirrors that allow officers to monitor activity.

Coffee Creek’s most ambitious component is a special facility for mother/child bonding. Situated outside the secured perimeter in a secluded wood, the 4,000 square-foot facility functions as a day school with a bona fide Head Start program, where inmates work with at-risk youths. Female offenders learn valuable parenting skills while children reap the rewards of motherly attention. The facility currently allows full-day visitation between inmates and their families, and the state is considering future plans where mothers and infants would be allowed live-in housing to further strengthen maternal bonds.

Additional features at Coffee Creek include grooming stations in dayrooms that are specially wired for heavy electrical loads from hair dryers. For security purposes, sloped stainless-steel security mirrors lie low on the counter allowing unimpeded officer sightlines. Another fresh transitional-housing application is found at the new Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, a 900-bed prison completed in December. In addition to a campus setting with 14 different buildings, the facility includes four, two-bedroom “reintegration” apartments. These residential-style units, each with its own outdoor patio, are arranged around a central common room and children’s play area. As they near release, inmate mothers are placed in these apartments with their children for stays ranging from a day to a week, allowing counselors to monitor their progress.

There are two separate interior visiting areas, each with children’s playroom containing toys and videos. Outside, the central courtyard contains pavilions that also are suited to visitation. Teal green roofing and red splitface block construction offer a soft look. Flower beds are tended by the inmates, according to project manager Rick Backes of Reilly Johnson Architecture, who reports that the flower beds are flourishing and creating good-spirited, but intense, competition between the inmate units in Denver.

At the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women, a three-phase upgrade and expansion is driven by an awareness of the ways in which women deal with conflict. “Men are typically more ‘in your face,’ whereas women seek to withdraw,” says Buddy Golson, president of Rosser Justice Systems.

In Kentucky, kitchenettes and washer/dryers reflect an inmate preference for personal self-care.

Rosser’s spatial provisions include places for women to retreat and also provide behavioral incentives geared to females. As at the Coffee Creek and Denver facilities, washer/dryers allow personal laundry to be done by Kentucky’s female inmates right in the units. “Women usually prefer to wash their own clothes, even if it is only a uniform,” says Golson.

Expected to confine a population of 900 women by 2006, the newly expanded Kentucky facility also will provide each unit with modest kitchenettes with cupboards, counter space, and light cooking. Women earn the privilege to shop at the commissary, where food is purchased in what Golson describes as a grocery store setting.

Kentucky also is adding 10,685-square-feet for medical facilities and 4,845-square-feet for psychiatric services to stay current. “The size of space dedicated to medical support also sets women’s facilities apart from others,” says Golson. “Some women arrive pregnant, and a high percentage of women arrive with a history of drug use or prostitution, so there are higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases to handle.”

Psychiatric services take precedence because a large number of women have experienced sexual or physical abuse and arrive at prison with psychological problems and issues of mistrust. The treatment they receive in prison may be the only serious attempt to intervene on generational cycles of criminality. The challenges of managing incarcerated women are imposing, but today’s women’s prisons are better able to accommodate the needs of this population, on whom so much depends.