Nursing grad guard shines light on women’s health in jails
When Michelle Parsons started work as a correctional officer, she thought the job would be relatively straightforward.
Three nights a week, she would be responsible for care, custody and control of inmates at Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre, a medium-security facility outside Edmonton. The rest of the time, she could work on her nursing degree at the University of Alberta. Going in, she thought the job at the jail would simply be a means to an end. One inmate changed all that. “She was on my unit and she was pregnant, and she delivered her ( baby) while in custody,” Parsons said.
The next summer, the same woman was back in custody again. Once again, she was pregnant.
“She was removed from her children because she still hadn’t finished her sentence,” Parsons said. “(She wasn’t) the only woman that was pregnant while incarcerated. It just made me wonder ‘what’s going on here?’”
That inmate made Parsons realize she needed to go back to corrections once she finished her degree — which she did when she graduated from the Faculty of Nursing June 5.
“I was kind of in a unique position as a student nurse and a correctional officer to shine a light, to look at the population through a different lens,” she said.
Parsons didn’t set out to work with incarcerated women. She became a correctional officer in 2014 after leaving the military — where she was a medical technician — on the advice of her husband, a CO at the Edmonton Remand Centre.
Around her second year at U of A, Parsons began to study what are called the “social determinants” of health, and her nursing world and corrections world collided.
“You start looking where people begin — their upbringing, their economic status, their education, their lifestyle choices,” she said. “You start to realize everything we do in our day-to-day lives affects our health.”
Incarcerated women have often experienced a “lifetime of exposure to trauma, and chaos, and abuse” that has ongoing effects on their health, she said.
Parsons realized there are significant gaps in research about women’s health care in Canadian correctional facilities. U.S. studies, for example, have found upward of 80 per cent of inmates had experienced an unplanned pregnancy. But when asked by Postmedia, neither Correctional Service Canada nor Alberta corrections could produce statistics on how many women in each system are pregnant.
“Women make up about 16 per cent of all people (who are) incarcerated. They really are a minority,” Parsons said. “There really is a lack of women’s health research in the population to begin with.”
In her final year, Parsons interviewed six inmates. All of the women had had pregnancies that weren’t planned, and all felt health-care services for women in prison weren’t good enough.
“I think we need to be advocating a little bit more for women’s health options in the correctional setting,” Parsons said. “Incarceration provides a huge opportunity for them to finally make their health a priority. In the community, it’s often not, because of their need to survive.
“I think it’s important that their voices are heard and their needs are recognized,” she said.