Television Reviews : Shriver’s Gritty Look at ‘Women Behind Bars’

“Women Behind Bars” may sound like an SCTV expose on the problems of women entering the bar-tending trade. Actually, it’s a pretty good report about life in the Dwight Correctional Institution, a college-campus-looking women’s reformatory in Illionis that is home to 600 inmates whose crimes range from welfare fraud to first-degree murder.

NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver’s formative years may not have put her in close contact with folks like 65-time arrestee and ex-drug addict Diane Maxwell, but Shriver does a commendable job as narrator/host. She and producer/writer Candyce Martin show and tell us a great deal about the regimented daily lives and troubled personal histories of some of the mostly poor, mostly uneducated, mostly minority prisoners at Dwight.

The statistics are discouraging enough: Half of the women have histories of drug or alcohol abuse, 70% were victims of physical, sexual or mental abuse and 80% are mothers of young children (the 600 inmates have 1,500 children among them).

In addition to destroying many of the B-movie Hollywood stereotypes of women’s prisons, Shriver reports that whereas men’s prisons foster violent behavior, women’s foster dependency--which makes it that much harder for women to support themselves on the outside.

“Women Behind Bars” is sympathetic to the inmates without being apologetic, and it doesn’t stoop to depicting them all as helpless victims of a sick or heartless society. It makes no grand pronouncements and doesn’t pretend to have any big answers. It could have made it clearer how Dwight compares to other women’s prisons, but overall the hour provides a depressingly sharp picture of what passes for life in one women’s prison.