Not too long ago, women's issues among the offender population were an afterthought for many corrections administrators. Women made up a small proportion of the total inmate numbers for one thing, and for another, there was little research available on what women needed in terms of programming and care while in prison or jail.

Today all that has changed. There's plenty of work being done by researchers to outline the specific needs of the female inmate population nationwide and, the number of women being sentenced to prison or jail is climbing -- good reasons for the approach towards women offenders to change.

"Unless you can relate to the issues that bring women into the system in the first place, you can't develop an appropriate response to improve outcomes. Our approach has been gender neutral for so long and many of our opinions of gender neutral [actually] mean focusing on males. It's important to identify the reasons why women come into the criminal justice system so that we can prevent this cycle from continuing and we can also prevent the inter-generational cycle," said Barbara Bloom, Associate Professor, Department of Criminal Justice Administration at Sonoma State University and an author on the subject of women offenders.

Programmatically, according to Bloom, there's much that corrections officials need to consider when serving the female offender population. In the study she co-authored, Gender Responsive Strategies, six major principles were identified relating to female offenders that should be used to guide decisions about them: gender, environment, relationships, services and supervision, socioeconomic status and community.

"They are broad principles that can be adapted by agencies in the community, [and] people working in jails and prisons. We intend for them to be general enough so that whatever jurisdictions that were interested could use them," she said.

First and foremost, according to Bloom, officials need to acknowledge that gender makes a difference in almost every aspect of how a woman comes to a criminal justice facility.

"If you look at the relationship between past abuse and trauma [for example] and that so many women are survivors of trauma and then you look at some of the standard operating procedures, like the use of restraints or the use of isolation, then you also have to look at how those procedures impact women," Bloom said.

Other major themes that illustrate the distinction between male and female offenders are the participation level in the crimes they commit, their levels of motivation to commit those crimes and the types of crimes they commit.

There are also differences in the levels of harm caused by crimes committed by men and women, she said.

Beyond this, agency heads and officials need to consider the differences between men and women in relation to how they are classified, where they are housed and what programs and treatment they need.

Bloom said that she has started to see a slow attitudinal shift among corrections agencies to include some of these principles.

"It used to be we believed all people in the criminal justice system should be treated the same, but over time, people have found that there are unique differences and they come into the system requiring different approaches," Bloom said.

Considering Classification

As research has increased regarding the different programming requirements of female offenders, so too has work been done to examine the classification issues surrounding female offenders.

In the study Developing Gender-Specific Classification Systems for Women Offenders, researchers Patricia Hardyman and Patricia Van Voorhis looked at how current classification practices could unfairly impact female offenders.

Also as part of the study, Hardyman, Senior Associate with the Criminal Justice Institute, and Van Voorhis of the Center for Criminal Justice research at the University of Cincinnati, examined classification practices in seven states and made recommendations for improvements throughout the corrections field.

"Agencies will readily admit that managing women offenders is totally different than working with male offenders, but not all realize this needs to translate into a different classification system for women offenders," said Hardyman.

Among the recommendations for agencies are to ensure the validity of the classification systems for women offenders, to avoid overclassifying women offenders and to modify current risk factors to reflect differences between men and women.

Hardyman explains that the criteria and standards designed to predict men's behavior in prisons do not translate into predictors of women offenders' behavior and, if used with female offenders, will tend to overclassify them in security levels that are inappropriate.

The report suggests that housing a woman at custody levels that are too high is unethical and has an effect on their ability to program in a facility.

"Women might behave differently but also their criminal history and the current offense that brings them in [differs.] They may be a co-defendant where they were a partner and the other person was the leader or they might be led by another person," said Hardyman.

In the study, the researchers found that in Idaho, certain property offenses - such as forgery or a bad check - that are typically considered low-risk for men, tended to be correlated with institutional misconduct for women.

In addition, Hardyman said there are a whole host of other factors that contribute to a women's behavior in prison.

"Also important are the issues associated with stability factors. Some jurisdictions will consider substance abuse, current age, education, employment at time of arrest, women tend to have different pathways to getting into crime, it looks different," she said.

Substance abuse, for example, plays a different role in the assessment of men and women. Hardyman said that it is so common for female offenders to have a substance abuse problem that it can't really be a predictor of behavior.

"If everyone has it, it doesn't tell much different about one person over another," she said.

Beyond these factors, children play a major role in stability for female offenders. Hardyman suggests that if something is wrong with their children on the outside or there is a concern about their children, it will affect their behavior inside the prison.

"It creates stress factors and they tend to act out or have problems. Some different jurisdictions will look at the stress factors going on for women offenders [on a periodic basis,]" said Hardyman. And that is what they should be doing, she adds.

Understanding risk factors, that can tell a corrections official something different about a man or a woman, is important to making the system fair.

Also of concern in correctional facilities are the disciplinary codes used for offenders who have infractions. Hardyman said that two women fighting is likely to be a different kind of fight than a fight between two men.

"Men might be more violent and aggressive. Women may get written up more for talking back. It tends to over-rate their behavior," she said.

Hardyman said there are states that are making some promising changes in their classification systems to accommodate the differences between male and female offenders. They are doing so by re-defining the characteristics for risk assessment to allow for gender differences, by separately analyzing risk factors and making the assessment and classification process more dynamic so that they can assess what is going on for a female offender periodically.

"One of the main points that a jurisdiction should look at is what is the goal of women's classification? What do they want the system to do for women? Most are focused more on needs and programming issues than custody and security. It's very important when they consider gender specific classification that they also have a focus on gender specific needs assessment. That's what drives what is going to happen to them while they are in the prison," Hardyman said.

But the proper treatment of female offenders and understanding their needs, has other implications for corrections agencies beyond the ethical ones. Agencies also need to be cognizant of the legal implications for their actions or inaction.

Equality Issues and Legal Perspectives

Myrna Raeder, a Professor of Law at Southwestern University School of Law who has written on issues pertaining to female offenders, said policy makers need to think about the legal context on a constitutional level and then look at the laws in their own state when considering equality issues for female offenders.

Raeder said that first off, because female offenders represent such a small proportion of a state's or county's total number of offenders, it is difficult to create parity in programming and services for them - thereby potentially opening an agency up to litigation.

"Clearly women are often times disadvantaged. Given their small numbers, it is more costly to give them the same facilities and programming that men get, yet obviously the quest is for parity," she said.

Because of those numbers, women are often placed in one facility for women, which can be far away from their families. This, in turn, poses a problem for visitors who have to travel longer distances and because there are typically only a few options for housing female offenders, it can lead to overclassification, Raeder said.

With health care, there are even more potential issues for litigation. Because women present with different and often more frequent health care problems, the type of care they receive must be different and is more costly.

According to Anne De Groot, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Community Health at Brown University and a physician for Connecticut's Department of Corrections, because of their multiple needs, women might also be considered a malingerer by staff.

"It might seem they ask for more than men. But they have gynecological issues, all of the childbearing complications, exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. Also they are at higher risk for HIV and hepatitis C," she said.

De Groot said that their higher risk for illnesses like hepatitis C translates into chronic problems such as headaches, myalgia and other symptoms that might be perceived as malingering as well, but really could be indications of a larger problem.

On top of this is a higher prevalence for mental health issues among women and a greater willingness and desire to be treated for those issues.

De Groot said most women come to prison with previous traumatic stress and tend to have mental health issues associated with that stress. She said that a study conducted at the Bedford Hills women's correctional facility in New York showed that 70-80 percent have histories of physical abuse and 60 percent will admit histories of sexual abuse.

"People can expect they'll need a higher level of psychiatric services in prison and outside for them to have successful transition," said De Groot.

Compounding the stress of incarceration for many women is separation from their children.

Raeder agrees. She said that providing women access to their children though visitation programs can improve how these women do their time.

"Visiting is such an important thing to females because of their children and we know that women don't get visited by their kids to the same extent that men do," said Raeder, adding that caretakers may not have the time or money needed to make the visits happen. "Often women's productivity can be affected by what is going on outside."

She suggested that corrections agencies begin to consider children in the process of building facilities and sighting them to help accommodate the needs of female offenders.

In terms of programming, Raeder said that it is not so much a matter of providing an exact match for female offenders, but rather to provide similar opportunities for rehabilitation and other services.

"It really isn't that women are asking for special treatment, it's rather that they are shoehorned into treatment already given to males," Raeder said.

When agencies pay attention to this, they will avoid litigation.

"Administrators should ask themselves if they have been following along with what they have always done, business as usual, as opposed to taking a look at the women's population as a whole to determine what they need," said Raeder.

And in terms of practice in everyday prison life, this means that women offenders - many of whom have been sexually traumatized - should not be subject to strip searches by male officers or be observed in the most private aspects of their daily lives.

"You have to be cognizant of these issues," she said.

By paying close attention to these issues both inside the prison and jail and then creating a response outside in the community that mirrors that effort, many believe that the rehabilitation of women offenders will improve dramatically.

"Ultimately if we can address issues that impact women such as domestic violence and develop a support system for returning to their communities from prison and jail, [provide] affordable, safe and drug free housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, family reunification services and peer support, we may find that we see more successful outcomes for women," said Bloom. "I think we know what needs to be done; we need the will and the resources to accomplish it."

Resources:

Barbara Bloom, bloom@sonoma.edu

Patricia Hardyman, phardyman@cji-inc.com

Myrna Raeder, mraeder@swlaw.edu

Developing Gender-Specific Classification Systems for Women Offenders
http://www.nicic.org/Downloads/PDF/2004/018931.pdf

Gendered Justice, By Barbara Bloom, information at http://www.cap-press.com/pdf/1224.pdf