Pubdate: Mon, 29 Oct 2001
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2001 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Gwen Filosa
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)

STATE WOMEN'S PRISON IS RUNNING OUT OF ROOM

New Cell Wing To Open By 2003

St. Gabriel: Everyone at this prison works. Landscapers, field hands,
housekeepers, kitchen help. Linoleum shines like a mirror, walls gleam, and
the prison grounds look more like a well-groomed city park with their
perfect flower beds and a bubbling fountain at one corner.

On a recent afternoon, several women sat on an already-mowed lawn, plucking
the tips of grass blades and collecting the trimmings in plastic bags.

"They're picking grass," Assistant Warden Helen Travis told a visitor who
asked what they were doing. At the Louisiana Correctional Institute for
Women, every inmate needs a job. And as the prison's ranks swelled like the
Mississippi River in hurricane season, prison officials had to become
creative to keep up with the new workers who keep arriving week after week.
For those on yard detail, once flower beds are weeded and other traditional
tasks wrapped up, all that may be left is grass picking.

The shortage of jobs is just one symptom of a prison population that has
outgrown its facility. And St. Gabriel, like prisons nationwide, is
wrestling with striking increases in the number of inmates in the past
decade.

Inmate Population Boom

In fact, the title of a documentary about St. Gabriel, "900 Women," was
outdated soon after its release last year as the prison's population jumped
to 1,000.

Louisiana's only prison for women opened in 1973, designed to hold 200
inmates. Though it hasn't added any new buildings in 10 years, it is in the
design stages of a 200-cell maximum security unit that is expected to open
by 2003.

The $5.7 million expansion will be paid for mostly by federal money,
including a grant from the "Truth-in-Sentencing" program. The state will
pitch in $610,000, according to the Department of Corrections.

A decade ago, fewer than 800 women were serving state prison sentences in
Louisiana. Today, the number is almost 2,200 -- with almost half of them at
St. Gabriel. The rest are housed in parish jails, which receive a lucrative
daily fee for each inmate from the state.

The national picture is similar. Since 1990, the number of female inmates in
the United States has more than doubled. While the number of male inmates
has grown 77 percent since 1990, the number of female prisoners has risen
108 percent. In 2001, women made up nearly 7 percent of all prisoners
nationwide, up from 5.7 percent in 1990.

When Warden Johnnie Jones took the helm at St. Gabriel in the 1970s, the
inmate count was below 250. Still, he says his prison runs smoothly now with
1,000 women checked in.

"Despite being a big deal here, so to speak, it's a lot quieter, cleaner and
safer," than it was in the beginning, he said.

There also are some differences he sees between running a prison for men or
women. Escapes and violent assaults are rare, and several veteran guards
said they can't remember the last serious incident.

"Women won't run and they won't hurt you, but they'll argue with you all day
long," Jones said.

St. Gabriel has learned to live with the rising population. Cells built for
one have two bunks, and the rooms designed for two inmates have three. Food
lines course with tension as inmates vie to place their orders, knowing that
on many days popular offerings run out early. The hum of voices is constant.

"It always sounds like bees," said Sarah Edmondson, who is serving 35 years
for a notorious 1995 rampage with her boyfriend that left a Mississippi man
dead and a Louisiana woman paralyzed from a gunshot. The crime, prosecutors
said, was inspired by a mix of drugs and the Oliver Stone-directed movie
"Natural Born Killers."

Like hundreds of other inmates, Edmondson is one of three women living in a
room built for two. She said she gets along with her roommates but at times
has almost lost her cool over the noise and constant "shut up, eat up, get
up" mantra from the guards at mealtimes.

Scaling Back Sentences

The crowding also could let up because Louisiana took the extraordinary step
earlier this year of easing certain sentencing laws to curb the burgeoning
inmate population and the state's annual corrections budget, which exceeds
$630 million.

With the backing of Gov. Foster, the state's district attorneys and victims
rights groups, some of the stiffest drug sentences, including mandatory life
for dealing heroin, were scaled back. Mandatory prison time for crimes such
as prostitution, obscenity and drunken driving were eliminated. A new panel
called the "risk review" board will look over old cases in which inmates
were sentenced under the older, tougher laws. There should be some
candidates at St. Gabriel, where most inmates are serving time for either
drugs or theft, though there are about 100 women serving life sentences and
one on death row: former New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank, who
was convicted of a 1995 triple murder at an eastern New Orleans restaurant.

More typical are the women who helped men sell drugs or steal. But as "tough
on crime" laws proliferated over the past decade, so did the penalties
imposed on accomplices. Mandatory minimums for drug possession also brought
more women into prison and for longer stretches.

Rae Morgan is one such woman. She helped the "him" in her life sell heroin
from her apartment in a New Orleans public housing complex.

"He created a situation for me where I would need it, so I helped him sell
drugs," said Morgan, who said she had tried to support two children on a
$192 monthly welfare check before her drug habit drove her to crime.

Consistent with stringent heroin sentencing rules laid down in many states
in the 1970s, the $40 stash police found with Morgan when they arrested her
cost her a life sentence.

'I'd Rather Be Here'

At the prison in St. Gabriel, each inmate has her own bed. No one sleeps on
mattresses on the floors, as some did a few years back and as inmates in
jails and prisons across the United States have done. Compared with the
sprawling 18,000-acre prison farm for men in Angola, the St. Gabriel
institution appears modest and comfortable. "If I have to be in prison, I'd
rather be here than anywhere else," said Bridget Francis of Lafayette, who
is nine years into a 21-year sentence for manslaughter.

But the rising numbers of inmates hasn't been lost on Francis. She can't
count the number of roommates she has been through in the past three months.

"I like cleanliness; you can't expect that from everybody," she said. "You
work all day; you don't want to have to clean up after grown females."

Everybody at St. Gabriel works. Women who have trouble standing for long
spells wash dormitory walls while seated. A woman lacking the use of her
right arm will be given a job that requires only her left.

An "office occupations" department recently replaced the sewing program.
Many women take part in the prison's prestigious horticulture program, in
which inmates grow flowers from seeds and may become certified nursery
workers. Plenty of inmates scrub toilets and mop or cook and serve meals.
Others upholster furniture and make chairs -- one of the prison industries
that earn money for the system.

For others, there is the everyday task of lawn work: planting, trimming and
mowing, which don't end with the growing season. When the lawn turns dormant
in the winter, the prison plants a special hardy grass that grows despite
the chill. They grow it so women in need of work have something to cut.
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