Inmate who gave birth while shackled featured in ‘Cosmo’
She and other inmates filed federal lawsuit
As she gave birth in 2013, Melissa Hall’s wrist and ankle strained against shackles securing her to the hospital bed. They restricted her movement and kept her flat on her back as she pushed during three hours of labor.
Hall, then an inmate at the Milwaukee County Jail, delivered a healthy baby boy. She was one of the dozens of women inmates who were shackled during childbirth under a jail policy in place under former Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. and who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the county in March.
Now she has shared details of her experience with Cosmopolitan.com, in a story headlined, “She Knew She’d Deliver Her Son While She Was in Jail. She Didn’t Expect to Do It in Chains.” The story appears only online, not in the November magazine.
Cosmo senior writer Rebecca Nelson writes that she spent time with Hall and her family in July. The article features photos of Hall, now 29, with her son Jesus, who was born while she was incarcerated, and her three other children.
In the piece, Hall also talks about why she was in jail, details that were omitted from her federal lawsuit. She had been drinking, she told Nelson, and was angry that her boyfriend hadn’t called. She wound up vandalizing his mother’s van and house and hitting her boyfriend in the face, and later left him threatening voicemails.
She was charged with misdemeanor battery, criminal damage to property, bail jumping and unlawful use of a phone. She pleaded guilty to the phone and criminal damage charges, the others were dropped and she had to serve a year, starting in February 2013. She was seven months pregnant at the time.
Hall’s lawsuit, which is pending in federal court, contends she was shackled every time she was hospitalized for prenatal care, labor and post-partum treatment during her incarceration in 2013 from February through August. It seeks class-action status on behalf of the more than three dozen other women it says experienced similar treatment at the jail.
The Sheriff’s Office no longer requires all pregnant inmates be shackled for all hospital visits, and a County Board supervisor last month proposed such a policy.
The proposal would allow pregnant inmate restraint at a hospital only if there is no objection by the medical care provider and if there is a substantial flight risk.