Babies behind bars.

• Author: Lays, Julie
• Position: Programs for incarcerated mothers and pregnant women

The benefits of keeping mothers and babies together while mom serves time are producing more community-based, alternative programs around the country.

Sandy sold drugs and got caught. Fortunately for her and her child, she lives in California. She is serving her time, with her baby daughter, at the Elizabeth Fry Center in San Francisco. Sandy has earned her high school diploma and has gone through medical assistant's training at the local community college since being accepted in the program. When she's finished serving her time, her daughter will know her, and she'll have a job at the local hospital. "She'll be making more than many of my staff at the center," says Deborah Haffner, director.

Sandy is among the growing number of women incarcerated every year. Due partly to the "war on drugs" thas has changed mandatory sentencing laws, the number of women in state and federal prisons at the end of 1989 was a record 40,556, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (Another 30,299 were in jails.) That's a 200 percent increase since 1980. And whie women still accounted for only 5.7 percent of the nation's prisoners, it's the highest percentage since data collection began in 1926. This rate of growth exceeds that for men in each year since 1981.

For women who come to prison pregnant or with small dependent children at home, the stress on them and their children can be fatal. What happens to them is the focus of more and more alternative sentencing programs for women designed to allow mothers to stay with their children, avoid foster care and return to the community prepared to stay out of trouble. Proponents of these residential care programs say they are also saving taxpayers' money and easing prison overcrowding.

"What all this increased incarceration of women is doing to the family structure and the way it is affecting the next generation," says Gail Smith, executive director of Chicago Legal Aid for Incarcerated Mothers, "makes it--from a taxpayers' perspective--so foolish that we haven't done something about it."

In 1986, most women in prison (42 percent) were there for property offenses. And the percentage of women in prison for drug offenses exceeded that of men. Forty-one percent of the women were in for violent crimes, increasingly for killing their abusive husbands and boyfriends.

More than three-fourths of the women in prison are mothers--young, single mothers with two dependent children at home. They are often undereducated, unskilled, unemployed, poor and hooked on drugs. Ten percent of women prisoners are pregnant.

For the women sentenced while pregnant, health care in prison can be inadequate. Doris was convicted of a parole violation and sentenced to six months in county jail in Oakland, Calif. She was seven months pregnant at the time and addicted to heroin. Instead of receiving methadone treatment, she was forced to withdraw cold turkey. She suffered severe withdrawal, with headaches, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea. When she...