Indiana Women in Prison

The front page of today's Indianapolis Star tells a story we are, unfortunately, familiar with at Women's Fund. In the past eight years, the number of women incarcerated in Indiana has risen 61%. If you read the article (if you click on the title of this blog post, you will be directed to the article on the IndyStar website), you can discover the varied reasons why; as you might imagine, drug use/abuse is a huge contributing factor.

The article doesn't mention how domestic violence contributes to crime activity, but we know from our work with the Indiana Women's Prison that many women are there due to an abusive relationship: being force to drive the getaway car, carry the drugs or stolen items, etc. and sometimes, the women are there because they committed a crime against the abuser in retaliation for the abuse.

Women's Fund has had a long relationship with the Indiana Women's Prison (IWP). Some may ask why? There are several reasons, the most signficant being that with few exceptions, the women who are incarcerated at IWP will be released and return to living in our community. We want to help support programming that will give these women a good head start in being successful contributors to our community, as opposed to a continued drain on the community.

We also know the children of incarcerated mothers are among the most vulnerable and marginalized children in our community; by providing support to programs to help mothers with parenting classes and opportunities to connect and bond with their children, they have even more motivation to be successful upon release.

Women's Fund has provided significant grants to the Indiana Women's Prison over the past ten years. I will highlight the three major areas (Family Preservation, summer camp, and the new Nursery) in the next several blog entries.

The Department of Corrections has announced they will be moving women out of the 100 year-old Women's Prison to a new facility. How will this impact the women and the services they receive? I am not sure. As a member of the Community Advisory Board of the Indiana Women's Prison, I have been in touch with the Superintendent, Steve McAuley to learn more about the situation and will continue to do so in the months ahead. At this point, I don't know much more than has been in the papers, it seems like there is still a lot of work to be done in the planning and implementation process. Look for updates from me in this blog.