Transcriber: CEM KILAVUZ Reviewer: Annet Johnson
Sandra Kassis said, “You never understand life until it is growing inside of you.”
As a mother, I feel like no statement is more true.
I found out I was going to be a mother for the first time
in a nurse station in a county jail in Arkansas.
My charges were possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver,
delivery of methamphetamine,
and simultaneous possession of drugs and a firearm.
As I was sitting in that nurse’s station in county jail
with three very serious felonies pending,
I sat with my arms crossed.
I had been conditioned to do so
because my substance use disorder was so bad at the time
that I had track marks from the top of my arms all the way down to my wrists,
to the back of my hands, some on my neck and even my legs.
That nurse in that jail told me I was pregnant
and tried to rush me out of that room
because she had a hallway full of women waiting to be seen.
I had my arms crossed like I always had.
But when the words, “You’re pregnant” came out of her mouth,
I dropped my arms to my side in complete disbelief.
I forgot how to breathe for a second.
And in that moment, she saw my tracks and I saw her judgment.
I was arrested at approximately three weeks pregnant,
found out I was pregnant at five weeks, and spent three months in absolute denial.
During those three months, I was denied access to prenatal vitamins, clean water,
a bra and underwear.
Finally, the jail realized that I wasn’t going anywhere,
that this was now my place of residence for the foreseeable future.
As my case was pending, they decided that they would take me to a free clinic
every so often to check on the status of my unborn child.
They chained my wrists, my stomach and my legs
and took me into the free world.
And there I sat in a doctor’s office with chains all around my body,
a very glamorous orange outfit and two correction officers on my shoulder.
It was in that free clinic that people would take pictures of me, stare at me,
give me one of these, “eww.”
It was all very humiliating,
very dehumanizing and very embarrassing.
I ultimately signed a five-year plea agreement
and at six months pregnant, I was sent to prison.
They put me in a dorm with other women that were pregnant.
Up until that point, my knowledge of pregnancy, labor and delivery,
postpartum care was all secondhand knowledge;
my only resource for that knowledge was the women that I was serving time with.
They all had very different birth stories from their first children,
very different experiences, and not one person told me the same thing,
thus adding to my absolute fear and anxiety
that I was about to give birth in prison.
Unlike the other women that I was serving time with, I had no family.
My daughter was going into foster care.
The last few months of my pregnancy,
I would watch other women have their babies on a Wednesday
and by Saturday they would see their families in visitation.
And even though I knew that wasn’t going to be my story,
I thought I could handle it.
I was blindly unaware of the fact that everyone handles trauma differently.
At 4 a.m. on June 12, 2012, I went into labor with my daughter Micah.
The corrections officer told me to walk to the infirmary.
Prison is full of long corridors,
long hallways with doors you have to be buzzed through,
and I walked in active labor,
grinding my teeth every step more painful than the last.
And I thought, if I could just get to the infirmary, they’re going to help me.
They’re going to be there
and they’re going to help me with my labor and delivery.
I’m going to get to a hospital immediately
and everything is going to be okay, just make it to the infirmary.
I knocked on the infirmary door, which you’re not supposed to do.
You’re supposed to stand quietly and wait to be buzzed in.
Finally they buzz me in.
I tell the nurse that I’m in labor.
She puts me in a wheelchair with a puppy pad underneath me
and I am left there for over four hours.
See, the night shift didn’t want to take me to the hospital.
They wanted to wait until day shift to take me.
Luckily, I was transported to Little Rock, Arkansas,
where I delivered my child at 3 p.m.
I wish I had the time to describe
the horror of giving birth with corrections officers on your side.
I wish I could tell you the unbelievable pain I felt
holding my newborn baby with leg chains around me.
I wish I had the time to explain to you all of the trauma
and psychological damage that had done to me.
I wish I could show you what it was like
to be forcibly removed from that hospital room.
I wish I had audio so you could at least hear the officers telling me
I was not allowed to get out of that bed for two days.
The birth of my first child caused PTSD and postpartum depression
to the point where I couldn’t speak.
I was kept in the infirmary for two weeks.
I was not given access to mental health care.
No psychologist came to see me,
and no one told me that I was, in fact, going through postpartum depression,
and that that trauma is the reason why I remember flashes of that moment,
but not the entire thing.
The human mind is such a powerful thing; it compartmentalizes trauma and pain.
And I will have flashbacks, little glimpses into that moment,
but I can't tell you every detail of it.
What I can tell you is that moment in time changed who I am as a person.
It changed my perspective on prison reform
and on the women that were also serving time with me.
And it lit a fire inside of me to share my story
and to tell people what women go through in prison.
Many of the women that I served time with had mental health issues,
substance use disorder, came from traumatic childhood upbringing,
were victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, emotional abuse.
And almost all of them were told they were nothing at some point in their life
or in their current prison bed.
A very common misconception is that prisoners’ needs are being met;
there’s a roof over their head, “three hots and a cot,”
and they have free health care.
I’m here to tell you that women in prison
are often denied access to feminine hygiene products.
Women in prison are often verbally abused, sexually abused,
and upwards of 60 percent leave with PTSD.
The women in prison that I met and served time with were not asking
for deep tissue massages, a nail salon, a Tempur-Pedic mattress,
although those things would have been very nice,
they were asking for their basic needs to be met.
Clean water is often not given to inmates across this country.
Many inmates are targeted by the staff
and told they will never see their family again,
their visitation rights will be revoked, their phone privileges will be revoked,
and the already very limited privileges they have will be taken away from them,
if they so much as look at an officer the wrong way.
Recidivism rates are upwards of 60 percent,
in some states, it’s as high as 70 percent.
I was released from prison in shower shoes, which are very cheap flip flops,
prison sweat pants that said 711548 down the side and a very worn down Bible.
That was all I owned in the world.
My parole address was a halfway house,
and immediately upon entering that halfway house,
I was required to pay one hundred dollars a week to live there.
I was also required to pay parole fees of fifty dollars a month.
It took me a few weeks to find a telemarketing job
that paid seven dollars an hour, and I had to borrow sneakers
from another woman at this halfway house to go to that job.
After a year of fighting to be a mother and to regain custody of my little girl,
I was granted sole legal custody.
And while my story has a happy ending of triumph and success, my story is rare.
What is not rare is all of the men and women fighting to stay out of prison.
Society labels us as criminals, felons.
As if that label is not challenging enough,
there are so many obstacles in our way.
Those obstacles and feeling as though we can’t succeed
are the reason many of us find our way back to prison.
Studies have shown that inmates participating in education,
vocational job training, prison work skills development, drug use,
mental health or other treatment programs all reduce recidivism significantly.
But why should you care?
You’re a law-abiding, taxpaying member of society.
Why should you care about prison reform?
You didn’t break the law, right?
Those people over there did.
There’s a very prevalent mentality in prison;
it is us versus them, cops versus cons or inmates versus correctional officers.
That mentality, I believed at the time, was just in prison.
However, that mentality translates into the free world as well.
Felons versus squares, which I very proudly consider myself today,
to be a square;
I’m in bed by 9:00 p.m.
But the us versus them mentality continues to divide us
when talking about prison reform.
The cold, hard truth of it is it’s all of our problem.
The United States incarcerates more citizens per capita than any other nation
in the world and we are the land of the free.
How does that make much sense?
It is our responsibility to help our most vulnerable;
that would be our prison population, our homeless population,
those with mental health issues and substance use disorder.
Both people in prison have a release date.
Now, I promise you, you don't want to live next door to the old Jessica.
I wouldn’t have been a very good neighbor in my old life.
But now that I am a “square” or a law-abiding criminal, if you will,
I’m not selling drugs, there is no traffic coming in or out of my home,
and I’m a very quiet neighbor.
That is the reason we should care most.
We’re told that prison keeps society safe
and that the dangerous people are behind those walls.
The truth of it is most of those people will be released, as I mentioned.
So we need to release people that want to go to work,
that have the means to find a job, people that are emotionally healthy,
people that believe that they can stay out of prison.
The conversations that I witnessed before a person is being released from prison
are literally just conversations about how they’re going to stay out of prison.
And they feel that immense pressure and that weight that’s on them
to do a good job this time and to never come back to prison.
There are a few things that we can do when talking about prison reform:
the first is to listen with an open heart and an open mind
and to allow yourself to feel empathy for the people that made a mistake;
The next thing that we can do is we can pressure our lawmakers to change the laws.
The war on drugs increased the prison population by over 500 percent.
If we stopped incarcerating and punishing those with substance use disorder
and mental health issues, we would lock up half of the people that we currently do.
Once we start incarcerating less people,
we will be able to have the funds
to have a massive job training and job placement program.
And that, just those two things, could reduce recidivism by more than half.
I was not the first woman to give birth in prison, nor was I the last.
But if you remember nothing else from my story, please take this with you today:
we need to judge a society based on how they treat their most vulnerable,
and prisoners in our country are our most vulnerable.
Thank you.