Female inmate surge spurs national forum

PORTLAND – The problem of Maine’s rapidly growing female prisoner population will serve as a backdrop for a national conference in September when corrections experts will explore why more women are living life behind bars.

Denise Lord, associate commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, said the 10th National Workshop on Adult and Juvenile Female Offenders will be held Sept. 6-10 at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland. The conference will feature national experts in criminology such as Meda Chesney-Lind of the University of Hawaii, along with representatives of Maine’s criminal justice system, including Leigh Saufley, chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

“We’ll be bringing in the best nationally known experts in juvenile and adult female offender issues,” Lord said. “We’ll have some high-level, powerful presenters and it will be a public conference featuring some of the best thinkers on this issue, so that’s very exciting.”

According to organizers, the conference will provide a forum for those who work with adult and juvenile female offenders to meet one another, exchange ideas, deepen alliances, celebrate successes, and promote promising practices on behalf of women and girls in the correctional systems. Uniting under the session’s theme, “Charting a Course – Lighting the Way,” speakers will emphasize strategies that require female offenders to chart their own life courses with guidance from corrections program directors.

A variety of seminars at the conference will highlight changes over the past 20 years in rehabilitative techniques for female offenders. Targeted workshops will focus on rural and urban offenders, best practices for jails and institutions, and community issues affecting female offenders inside and outside corrections institutions.

By coincidence, the event arrives on the heels of newly released Maine statistics indicating the number of incarcerated women has increased from 57 in 2001 to the current total of 108. The state’s new 70-bed women’s unit at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham was not supposed to reach maximum capacity until 2010. Lord said it was full when it opened last summer.

Now, women who cannot be placed into the special programs and community setting offered at the Windham unit are being placed in the multi-purpose unit at the facility. Lord said housing arrangements there make it more difficult for corrections officials to deliver the kind of rehabilitative services available in the women’s unit.

“Part of the dilemma for us is that the whole philosophy of the women’s unit isdeveloping a community using the socialization of a community to reinforce positivebehavior, which becomes difficult to achieve in the multipurpose setting,” Lord said. “What we really need is not for more women to come to the state prison system. What we really need are better community options.”

In addition to the September conference, the issue of Maine’s increasing female prisoner population will be studied this summer by a special blue-ribbon panel as part of an overall review of the state’s corrections system.

All of the appointments to the 17-member Commission to Improve the Sentencing, Supervision, Management and Incarceration of Prisoners have yet to be forwarded to Gov. John Baldacci, who included $250,000 in the state budget for the panel’s expenses.

The commission is ordered to deliver its report to 121st Maine Legislature no later than Jan. 2, 2004, and will literally explore every facet of the corrections process beginning with court sentencing and continuing through follow-up reports on released prisoners who have re-entered society.

State Rep. Linda McKee, D-Wayne, recently visited the women’s unit at Windham, and said the commission needs to adopt more rehabilitative models such as those offered at the facility that strive to bolster self-esteem and confidence.

“After visiting there, I said to myself, ‘This is hope,'” McKee said. “You can see the hope in these women’s eyes and hear it in their voices. You just know the recidivism rate among these women is going to be next to nil.”