Prison Bars Don’t Separate Mothers and Their Babies

Christopher Michael Marvaino looked up at his mother and gurgled a couple of times before settling into her lap for a late-morning nap. As Dianna Marvaino gently moved her 2-week-old son to the sofa, she sighed softly.

“It’s go, go, go from the morning until his nap,” she said. “He’s up at 2, at 5, then he’s back up at 7--the zombie hour.”

Marvaino is not just a typical mother tending her first child. Not long ago, she was pregnant and beginning a two-year sentence for grand theft at the California Institution for Women in San Bernardino County. She was convinced that her baby would be sent from the hospital nursery to a foster home.

“I think that’s why so many of the women become hardened in prison, and so resentful,” Marvaino said. “Because their babies are immediately taken away from them and they’re thrown back in jail.”

Marvaino and her baby were not separated because a Sacramento judge ordered the state Department of Corrections to speed its paper work to allow her and three other prisoners to move to facilities where they can live with their newborn babies while they serve their sentences.

“This reminds me of home,” Marvaino said of the San Diego house she shares with nine work-release prisoners and two other inmate-mothers. “It’s kind of like a family,” she said. “They fuss and spoil Chris.”

A lawsuit filed on behalf of Marvaino and seven other female state prisoners--but potentially affecting hundreds of others--claims that the Department of Corrections has been illegally denying women access to the “community treatment program” mandated by state law and designed to allow infants and young children to live with their incarcerated mothers.

The Department of Corrections has failed to notify inmates of their right to live with their children, has made applying to the program difficult and has used improper criteria in rejecting applications, the lawsuit claims.

“As far as we are concerned, the program is going,” said Les Johnson, a Department of Corrections information officer in Sacramento. “People who qualify and meet the criteria get into the program. It’s that simple.”

Five pregnant prisoners are waiting for placement once they give birth, said Joe McGrath, also a Department of Corrections information officer in Sacramento.

The program’s main problem is a lack of applicants, said Harold White, the department’s deputy regional administrator for part of Los Angeles and all of Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. “Right now, we have only one application,” he said.

Until the lawsuit was filed, McGrath added, “we had less than 50 applications a year.” Applications are beginning to show an increase, he said, “but half (the applicants) don’t meet the criteria.”

The Department of Corrections would have no problem increasing the program’s 45-bed capacity, McGrath said, but “the women just haven’t shown that much interest in the program. Now maybe that’s going to pick up. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Ellen Barry, director of San Francisco-based Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, guessed that close to half the 1,800 prisoners at the California Institution for Women may qualify for the program.

“Eighty percent (of the inmates) have dependent children under 18,” Barry said. “We’re talking about a young population, with an average age under 30 in prime child-bearing years . . . and a short average sentence of two or three years.”

Under the California Penal Code, a female prisoner with a probable release or parole date within six years and children 6 years old or younger may be eligible for the program. She must have been the primary caretaker of her children before her incarceration and must not have been declared by a judge to be an unfit parent.

The Department of Corrections also applies additional criteria, similar to those used to select prisoners for work-release programs, said Mike Badstubner, re-entry coordinator for the Southern California area.

Women involved in most violent or sexual crimes or large-scale drug and weapons offenses are excluded from the mother-infant program, as are most women with multiple previous offenses, prison disciplinary problems, records of recent narcotics use or escape attempts, Badstubner said.

Neither the Department of Corrections nor the groups that filed the lawsuit could provide an estimate of the number of inmates--among about 2,300 female state prisoners--who may be eligible for the program.

“That’s the kind of information we’re trying to get through (pretrial) discovery,” said Rebecca Jurado, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which joined Barry’s organization and the ACLU of Northern California to file the lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court.

Two of the plaintiffs in the case are still separated from their children while they live in state prisons, Jurado noted.

Paper Work Lost

Deborah Crisp, an inmate at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, is reapplying to the program because her paper work was lost, Jurado said, and Joanne Thomas, a prisoner at the California Institution for Women, is waiting for an opening in a facility near her home so she can live with her 5 1/2-year-old child and near an older child.

The other six plaintiffs have moved from prison to live with their children in Los Angeles, San Jose and San Diego.

The house in which Marvaino lives is managed by Barbara Cornist, who with her husband owns two corporations that operate five facilities to house prisoners in the San Diego area.

The state pays the company, California Mother-Infant Program Inc., $45 a day for each mother, Cornist said.

“At this place,” she added, “you’ve got people to counsel the women, to tell them how important it is to be with their children and that their children need them.”

Marvaino, like any new mother, is learning that lesson every day as she takes advantage of Christopher’s hourlong naps to put a load of laundry in the washer or clean the small upstairs bedroom that she and her son will share until December, when she expects to be released.

Chores to Expand

In a few weeks, Marvaino’s daily chores will expand when she begins to share responsibility for keeping the rest of the house clean.

“It gets pretty boring, otherwise. You can just sit around and get fat,” said Deanna Wilborn, another state prisoner who lives in the house with the youngest of her seven children, 8-month-old Angelina Sedillo.

“They’re not able to leave the premises,” Cornist said. “They’re still getting their punishment.”

Despite that restriction, Wilborn said, the facility “is almost home, except for Dad.” She paused to consider that Angelina has not seen her father, who lives in Colton in San Bernardino County, since they moved here a month ago. “It’s a long way; it’s a long way from home.”