Giving Birth While Shackled to a Bed

KADIJA CLIFTON LEARNED she was pregnant with her second child while being booked at a Maryland county jail. She had no idea that she was expecting. She was halfway through her pregnancy before she got her first ultrasound. On that day, two armed sheriffs escorted her to the medical facility with her wrists cuffed in front of her belly. A female correctional officer sat in the corner of the room while she was being examined. Clifton felt she had no privacy — “it was invasive and not fun at all.”

Clifton, who has been out for several years and is raising her son with her parents’ support, recalls that she spent the rest of her pregnancy in the county jail worrying about the health of her unborn child. She was already anxious about leaving her then 5-year-old daughter to be raised by her ex. The news of the pregnancy made things even more complicated.

“During those months I remember simply wanting a comfortable place to sit, versus plastic chairs or stools with no back support. I was seriously pregnant,” says Clifton. “Then there was the food, or lack of it. You have a limited amount. You get three meals a day, and if you are pregnant, it is just not enough.” Luckily, by the time Clifton was due, she was able to pay the bail bond and was awaiting trial at home.

I first met Clifton at a graduation ceremony in Alexandria, Va., for Together We Bake, a workforce training program. Clifton shared her life story in front of a handmade collage while hugging her then-5-year-old son. She had completed a 10-week training, learning about food safety, business administration, job readiness, and other critical life skills. Two months later, she became a senior adviser to a podcast on reentry I was producing at the time. Clifton now works as a night supervisor in a facility that hosts at-risk LGBTQI+ youth. Her daughter, now 14, still lives with her dad, but she and Clifton speak regularly.

A growing population

BECAUSE CLIFTON WAS able to pay bail, she delivered her son in a regular hospital, but other women find themselves pregnant and in pretrial detention for months because they can’t afford bail. A report on women’s mass incarceration released by the Prison Policy Initiative in March 2024 noted that more than half of all women who are incarcerated are held in local jails, and more than 60 percent of those have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial. Women, whose incomes are often lower than men, struggle more to pay bail.

Between 1980 and 2021, according to The Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women and girls in the U.S. has grown by more than 500 percent, more than twice the growth rate for men. This sharp increase is primarily due to stiffer penalties and mandatory minimums for drug possession and trafficking that many states have implemented over the past few decades. As a result, the United States has the highest female incarceration rate in the world — the number of female prisoners per 100,000 of the national population — followed by Thailand and El Salvador, according to data from the World Prison Brief. More than 190,000 women and girls are currently incarcerated in the U.S.

Most incarcerated women are in their reproductive years, and many are pregnant when they are admitted into jail or prison. The Prison Policy Initiative reports that approximately 58 percent of incarcerated mothers in state prisons have children who are under the age of 18. Many incarcerated women are single parents and the primary caregivers for their families.

Historically, prisons in the United States are not made for women, let alone pregnant women. And research shows that between 40 and 60 percent of women on probation, in jail, or in prison report having experienced violence or abuse as children or adults prior to incarceration. Many of them suffer from mental illness and have a history of homelessness and addiction. “We design our prisons for men who are violent and then we throw women in there who are not violent, but who have a lot of traumas,” says Maggie Burke, a veteran of the Illinois Department of Corrections now working with the Keyway Center for Diversion and Reentry in Missouri. “Our processes, procedures, and operations trigger women.”

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In labor with shackles?

ONE OF THESE trauma-inducing procedures is the shackling of pregnant and birthing women. Amy Ard, executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a Georgia nonprofit that supports children of incarcerated mothers and their caregivers, still remembers the day she saw a gurney coming out of an ambulance with a pair of handcuffs hanging from it.

“It stopped me in my tracks,” says Ard, a doula and former owner of a Washington, D.C.-based doula agency. “I had been on labor and delivery floors for about 8 to 10 years, and I had never seen anything like that before.” The handcuffs had been used to chain a woman to her bed while she gave birth in the room next to Ard’s client. That day, after watching an armed guard walk out of a birthing room, “everything turned a little sideways for me,” Ard says.

After researching pregnancy and incarceration, and reading Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, she told her husband that she was ready to move back to her home city of Atlanta to work on anti-shackling legislation. Ard, who is a Vanderbilt Divinity School graduate and a mother of three, says her job is “to build bridges of empathy between people inside and outside prisons.” As a person of faith, she hopes Matthew 25:36 will inspire more churches to extend help to incarcerated parents.

In May 2019, Georgia passed HB345, commonly known as the Georgia Dignity Act, a law that addresses the shackling of pregnant women, among other dehumanizing practices. Previous efforts to change the Georgia law had failed, “but this time we had people with incarceration and shackling experience who had tragically miscarried because they had tripped and fallen,” explains Ard. Forty-one states and the District of Columbia now have laws that restrict shackling, though enforcement differs from state to state.

Maintaining maternal bonds

ALL INCARCERATED MOMS face and struggle with separation from their children. If a woman gives birth while incarcerated, chances are she will be separated from her child within 24 hours, disrupting the bonding and interaction that babies need to develop and thrive. Children without immediate kin willing to care for them risk ending up in the foster care system. Often children are raised by their grandparents, aunts, or close family friends. But unlike the foster care system, where foster families are given a monthly stipend, these caregivers receive no financial or material support from the state.

If an incarcerated mom has more than one child, the siblings may grow up in separate households, making it harder for moms to stay in touch with all their children while in prison. The cost of phone and video calls from prison is expensive (on average $2.80 for a 15-minute out-of-state call), while coordination with multiple households is tricky. In addition, siblings who grow up separately risk being estranged from one another.

“They label us bad mothers because we went to prison, and this is farthest from the truth,” says Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. “Sometimes we wait for hours to get to one of the few payphones in prison, and parenting from a payphone is very hard,” says James, who did a two-year sentence in federal prison, leaving her four children with her husband.

“There is a heaviness that hangs in women’s prison that you don’t feel anywhere else, and it is because of this separation of these women and the children,” James continues. “You are sentenced twice. It’s brutal, and no one cares.” She observes that the underlying traumas that often contribute to bad decision-making are not considered when it comes to incarcerated mothers.

The irony is that incarcerated mothers who see their children regularly are more motivated to stay out of trouble and can envision a better life for themselves. At the time of our interview, 28-year-old Nakia Nicholson was serving a two-year sentence in a federal prison in Virginia with an expected release date of June 2024. Regular in-person and video visits with her 7-year-old daughter, facilitated by her partner, sustained her. “Every time she comes, she draws me a picture. I keep track of our visits through her pictures. Every day she tells me that I am the best mom ever. It makes me feel good and I am filled with gratitude.”

For mothers incarcerated in out-of-state federal prisons, distance and transportation costs can make it difficult for children to visit. When a child does visit an incarcerated mother, they may or may not be able to hug, depending on the child’s age and the facility. In some facilities, children under the age of 3 may sit on their mother’s lap, but after that, they can only sit next to her, until age 16, when they must sit across from her.

Vanessa Garrett says she was lucky. She was able to rely on her parents to raise both of her children while she served an eight-year sentence in a state prison in Georgia. “When the judge told me I would go to prison, it was four days before my daughter’s first birthday and a month before my son’s 10th birthday. I knew that if my children stayed with my parents, I would get the visits, the phone calls, and the pictures. All I could think about was the number of birthdays I would miss.”

Garrett, who is now program director at Motherhood Beyond Bars, witnessed many mothers struggle to stay connected with their children while in prison. Her organization offers wrap-around services that support caregivers, help children stay in touch with their incarcerated mothers, and help mothers reintegrate when they come home.

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Bringing mothers home

SOCIETY EXPECTS MOTHERS who return from incarceration to immediately assume their parental role. If they don’t, they are judged negatively. This perception arises from gender roles rooted in a patriarchal society, where mothers are the ones raising children, says Lashonia Thompson-El, executive director of Women Involved in Reentry Efforts and author of the book Through the W.I.R.E.: My Search for Redemption. Her organization supports the reentry process of women in the District of Columbia.

“This can be another trauma for returning mothers because you want to be able to step up and be responsible for your child, but sometimes you are in a situation where you can’t,” says Thompson-El, who was separated from her two children for 18 years. “You might be homeless, unemployed, or struggling with mental health issues while trying to reacclimate yourself to society.” Another often overlooked fact, she adds, is the impact that parental incarceration has on the children themselves.

According to the ACLU, incarceration touches the lives of one-twelfth of all children in the United States. Data on this topic is limited, but an analysis conducted by the Center for Health and Justice Research at Indiana University suggests that young children with incarcerated mothers are more likely to experience insecure caregiver relationships, which can lead to depression and anxiety in adulthood. Older sons are also more likely to drop out of school.

Thompson-El and her daughter are not on speaking terms now. Thompson-El’s daughter did not respond to Sojourners’ request for an interview. “I know that my absence harmed her, and I was not there to protect her,” says Thompson-El, while emphasizing that a restorative justice model could be used to facilitate family reunification and healing.

In April, for its 10th anniversary, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls held a march in Washington, D.C. Its goal is to end the incarceration of women and girls and to reimagine communities. “Police and prisons don’t create healthy and thriving people,” says Andrea James. “We invest billions of dollars into the criminal system when what we need is a healing system that invests in people and communities.”

This year, children of incarcerated women led the march. Despite the seriousness of the topic, the mood on this sunny spring day in the nation’s capital was festive and uplifting. Formerly incarcerated women and their families came from every state and the District of Columbia. They brought handmade quilts with the names of currently incarcerated women stitched on them. Periodically, they called out their names and danced. Their message to President Biden was unequivocal: Stop building new prisons for women, commute the sentences of elderly women inmates, and invest in diversion programs to avoid separating mothers from their children.