Half of Women in Prison Systems Were Victims of Abuse, Report Says

About half of the women surveyed in the nation’s correctional systems--including inmates and those on parole and active probation--say they were victims of physical or sexual abuse earlier in their lives, the U.S. Justice Department reported Sunday.

A third of women in state prison, a sixth in federal prison and a quarter in jail said they had been raped.

And roughly one-third of the female convicts questioned said they had been abused before age 18--roughly twice the percentage among the general population of American women, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

Among males, the percentage of offenders stating they were childhood victims of abuse--estimated to run as high as 14%--corresponded more closely to the figures for men overall, as high as 8%.

Among both male and female state prisoners, those who reported abuse were more likely to be serving a sentence for a violent crime.

Caroline Wolf Harlow, the federal statistician who compiled the findings, found specific links between abuse and convictions for sexual assault and for murder. Abuse leads to “a great deal of violence being accepted as normal--violence as a way of solving conflicts,” she said.

Referring to the data on women in prison, Teena Farmon, warden of the Central California Women’s Facility in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla, said:

“There is a common thread in the backgrounds of women in the system, and we have to look at the impact of that history. Those who are working in this environment are well aware of that, but this is significant information that has heretofore been ignored by the criminal justice system and the public.”

In California, home to the nation’s largest population of female inmates and to two of the world’s largest women’s prisons, the findings “weren’t surprising” but do highlight the importance of the state’s difficulties in hiring prison psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and nurses, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections.

Farmon said that abused women have “a greater likelihood of using alcohol and drugs, and a significant number of women are incarcerated, directly or indirectly, because of drugs.”

Indeed, the bureau analysis found that 80% of the women in state prison who reported prior abuse had used illegal drugs regularly, whereas 65% of the inmates who did not report abuse had used them regularly.

Abused state inmates also were more likely to have been using drugs or alcohol at the time they committed the crime that led to their incarceration, the analysis concluded.

“This pattern occurred especially among female inmates,” the report said.

The majority of women surveyed in state prisons--57.2%--said they had been abused earlier in life.

In late 1996 and early 1997, when the surveys were taken, about 57,830 females were state prison inmates.

A total of 5.5 million adults were either in custody or on parole or probation at the time.

A nationally representative sample of 2,500 probationers, 6,000 jail inmates, 14,000 state prisoners and 4,000 federal prisoners were questioned, Harlow said.

Prisoners reported higher levels of abuse if they grew up in foster care instead of with their parents, if their parents heavily used drugs or alcohol or if a family member had ever served time in jail or prison.

An overwhelming 87% of female prisoners who had been raised in foster care or institutions reported abuse, as did 44% of male prisoners--though it was not clear if their abuse came under nonparental care or if they had been removed from abusive homes, or both.

Abused men surveyed generally said they had been attacked as children, whereas women were abused both as children and as adults. Family members were the primary abusers of the men; women reported such mistreatment from husbands or boyfriends as well as from relatives.

Upon entering the prison system, California inmates are screened for medical and mental health problems, Thornton said, though “we don’t specifically ask about abuse unless it is related to a suicide problem.” If the issue does arise during counseling, “it is addressed,” Thornton said.

At the Central California prison, Farmon said, community organizations and a women’s shelter hold voluntary group sessions that help victims of abuse understand that the mistreatment is not their fault.

“When they go back [to the outside world], as 90% to 95% do, they will be better prepared,” Farmon said. “Maybe they will choose not to take drugs to try and kill the pain.”

At the same time, Thornton cautioned, “it’s important to remember that many people experience abuse as children and do not get involved in criminal activity.”