THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 16, 1995 TAG: 9505160330
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Former prison inmates, mothers and inmate advocates say women - especially mothers - who have committed nonviolent crimes belong at home.
They kicked off a campaign called ``Mothers in Prison, Children in Crisis'' Friday at a Richmond news conference sponsored by Friends of Incarcerated Women.
``This Mother's Day. Is it not time to call for a moratorium on the madness of imprisoning mothers who are guilty of nonviolent offenses?'' asked Kathleen T. Kenney, associate director of the Office of Justice and Peace for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond.
Kenney said ``women . . . belong with their children. Virginia should seek ways to keep families together through alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenses.''
Julie McConnell of FIW said there are programs in Virginia that can be used as alternatives to jail and prison. Under such a program a woman would be required to get a job, undergo counseling, make restitution, take periodic drug screenings or meet other requirements.
The problem is such programs are so underfunded that judges are left with no alternative but incarceration, McConnell said.
Gloria T. Edwards was locked up in 1981, when she was 26 and the mother of a 6-year-old son. She was paroled after serving a year for writing bad checks.
Edwards said, ``They do not separate nonviolent offenders from violent offenders. I learned some things that I could never have learned from books because I did my time around long-timers, women who are sentenced to life.''
Speakers at the news conference offered some dismal statistics.
There are more than 30,000 children in the state with one or both parents in prison or jail, and 40 percent of the youngsters in the juvenile justice system have a parent behind bars.
Roughly 76 percent of the more than 1,008 women in Virginia prisons have children under 18. There are an additional 1,800 women being held in local jails across the state.
Since 1980, the number of females in prisons has increased by 256 percent across the country and 227 percent in Virginia. Yet, the number of women arrested for crimes has increased only 60 percent and the number for violent crime has increased less than 20 percent.
``These statistics show that women are not getting more violent. The system is,'' Kenney said. by CNB