Testimony in support of Moratorium on new prisons for women in new England
I sit before this committee as a concerned citizen with lived experience of our carceral system here in America. I did my own stint of service as a medical director at the Massachusetts state prison for women in the late 1990s. I expected to serve three to five years; the same amount of time as many of the incarcerated women stuck in the system with mandatory drug sentences.
I only lasted for 2 years.
During that time, I saw nothing rehabilitative happening to those women. There was one program "Girl scouts beyond bars" that connected mama's with their 9 to 11 year old daughters once a month for a girl scout troop meeting within the prison walls. The other three weeks out of the month the daughters met with their scout leader out in the community.
After starting my job on a good bad note (translate I fired a Night nurse who was pocketing the single dose of anti-anxiety medicines prescribed for inmates coming in who suffered from opioid addiction),
I came to understand that I was not hired to work as a medical director caring for the incarcerated women. I was actually hired to work as an agent for the Massachusetts department of corrections. The incarcerated women were simply a commodity being moved around like pieces in a chess game, in an institutionally broken system.
My salary was paid by a private for profit agency called Correctional Medical Systems, a subdivision of Aramark (1) a business that had started off as hot dog vendors for stadium football games.
I was paid well (in the six figures) and I will say that my colleagues were generally substandard physicians-- trained outside of the United States-- who could not easily get jobs that paid as well as they were paid within the prison industrial complex.
I saw from inside the belly of the beast a corporatized management system that did not have the best interests of the incarcerated individuals at heart. Apparently, corruption and greed in the prison industrial complex has only grown in the last 20 years. Vermont currently utilizes Core Civic to manage its prison system and has just announced a new contract with Well Path to manage Medical Care within that prison system.
I easily Googled "Corecivic controversy" and "Wellpath controversy". I got an entire page of references to various concerning events in prisons around the nation: from maggots being found in food prepared for inmates, through inmate deaths due to insufficient medical care, to the illegal firing of whistleblowers.
I suggest to this committee that the last thing Vermont needs at this moment in our growth is another prison for women. This is a time and a moment in history when our entire country is reassessing our relationship to crime and punishment.
Our brave little state is uniquely positioned to explore alternatives to incarceration. In Massachusetts I worked with a revolving door population of over 600 women incarcerated at MCI Framingham at any moment in time. Those women's primary problem seemed to be developing relationships with the wrong people; PEOPLE WHO OFTEN INTRODUCED THEM TO DRUGS AND GOT THEM HOOKED. Sadly and frustratingly this is a problem that was illustrated 73 years ago in a 1950's movie (CAGED) which ends with the chilling image of the warden of the prison gazing out at the naive young woman-- who has become a hardened criminal through her punishment-- and saying "she'll be back"...
That 1950s movie is entirely through the white gaze and speaks only of white incarcerated women as does the Spitfire Grill-- a 1996 film funded to be a positive propaganda piece for alternatives to incarceration and for reintegrating women into small rural communities.
I'd like to know if anyone on this committee went to see a thousand and one at the Savoy? A movie about 2 formally incarcerated people who actually find a way to thrive presented over a 20-year timeline?
Those two people were Black.
Sadly in our American consciousness that story is still a fairy tale. But I believe it is a fairy tale that has a chance of being a seed of growth and promise here in Vermont. When I left prison healthcare, it cost the state of Massachusetts over $35,000 a year to support each incarcerated woman.
At the time, that happened to be the cost of one year at Harvard. It was one of the things I truly couldn't stomach and a reason I left that system.
My understanding is that number for Vermont is up to $113K.
Really?
How can my legislators expect the average Vermonters to believe that this is a good investment while we have a moratorium on building any new schools?
I believe that chronic recidivism is a part of the plan in the for-profit prison industrial complex. As my state representatives and legislators, I expect you all to pay attention to the STAKEHOLDERS in this conversation. I realize CoreCivic and Well Path have more money for lobbying you all than an organization like the National Council for Formally Incarcerated girls and women.
I beg you to look at the numbers. We are actually talking about just over a hundred individuals if we are talking about women currently incarcerated here in Vermont. That's 1/6 of the population that I used to work with in Massachusetts; and about 60 of those women were pregnant at any moment in time.
That means only about 10 women will be pregnant at any time in Vermont's system. Incarcerating pregnant women is a morally incomprehensible issue that most of us want to simply skim over. Are Vermonters who are incarcerated when they go into labor expected to deliver while shackled to a bed? That was another issue I couldn't stomach researching; I hope it is no longer true; it certainly was true when I was in Massachusetts.
To me, this represents an amazing opportunity to do things differently. To me this represents opportunity for my legislators to wake up and do a reality check about who's public safety we are looking at.
I witnessed a member of this very committee's eyes glaze over at the idea that "rehabilitation" and "redemption" are words to be associated with incarcerated people. Immediately I saw the conversation shift to "but, what do we do about the bad ones?"
Well let me just tell you that in my experience the bad ones aren't at all who you think they are. Who do you think are "bad ones" in a women's prison, anyway? In my experience, murder is what springs to mind. I experienced three types of murderers:
#1. The Framingham 8, women from my prison population who had fought back against their abusers. The phrase "battered woman syndrome”came out of that exploration of why women kill.
#2. The DUIs driving under the influence. Most poignant was a woman in her 60s who would never see the light of day having plowed her car into an entire family while she was drunk. Does anyone on this committee really believe that $113,000 a year needs to be spent on a woman like that to continue to punish her? To protect our public safety?
#3. Third and perhaps most troubling? I was the medical director at MCI Framingham while Louise Woodard was incarcerated there. Go look her up. She was a British nanny, convicted of manslaughter for shaking a baby to death/sentenced to 15 years/ sentence appealed, and released after serving less than a year.
I argue that none of these three extremely dramatic and challenging situations are served well by locking up the human who committed these crimes as punishment; and the one that I considered most heinous, Louise Woodward, did not even "stick".
While Vermont has its own problems with institutional racism and the disproportionate amount of BIPOC people who end up incarcerated, VERMONT remains a white state dealing with white inmates and how to rehabilitate them. The Louise Woodard case was complicated by many issues of class and race (the parents of the dead baby being a mixed race couple, with a BIPOC father). Whatever Vermont decides to do next, it is still working with a more homogeneous population than many parts of the country.
If we can't do prison reform here in Vermont it's not going to work anywhere in the US. I believe the prison industrial complex and its corporate lobbyists are rubbing their hands together gleefully in the hope that this is true.
I pray that it is not true.
I am a creative and a visionary who tends to think outside of the box. About 10 women were discharged from the Massachusetts women's prison each month. When I would drive the 45 minutes to and from my work as medical director at MCI Framingham in Massachusetts, I passed 11 churches. I counted them; because in my mind if each one of those churches followed through with any kind of good Christian ethic and pledged emotional and financial support to just one woman leaving MCI Framingham for a year it could break the cycle of recidivism.
It is my belief that if I can see something that clearly, a just transitions working group--initially set up as a study group out of appropriations set aside to explore selecting a site for a new women's prison/PREFERABLY OPERATING UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE--is a vital next step in this entire process. Please do not throw good money after bad, simply because we've become mired in what feels like a quicksand of a mess of misappropriated dollars.
Human prisons are simply not good for humans; especially female humans.
Respectfully,
Opeyemi Parham, M.D.
resident of Montpelier
1. Aramark is an American food service, facilities, and uniform services provider to clients in areas including education, healthcare, business, prisons, and leisure” https://medium.com/hope-in-the-dark/aramark-the-not-so-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-9a603b9a05a4
2.https://www.justmedia.org/video/framingham-8-women-who-fought-back