Why is Tianna Laboy still in jail?
Why is Tianna Laboy still in jail?
The New Britain native sits in prison, her toddler daughter – born in a prison toilet – lives with her grandmother, Karine Laboy, and a civil lawsuit says the system has let her down – again.
Tianna Laboy cut herself with razors as a child, was disruptive at school, and spent time in residential treatment, her mother said. In 2017, the then-18-year old stabbed a man in an assault serious enough to get her sent to York Correctional Institution in Niantic.
She was pregnant when she went to prison, and in February 2018, Laboy gave birth in the toilet in 2 North Cell #8, after, the lawsuit says, staff ignored her pleas for help. Attending at the birth was her “bunkie” — a woman with whom she’d shared a cell for two months. For helping Laboy deliver, Laboy’s attorneys say the inmate had time shaved off her sentence.
Laboy’s daughter — known as Baby N in court documents — is non-verbal, her grandmother says, and she has been diagnosed with developmental issues, and autism.
No one denies Laboy committed a serious crime, but using prisons as holding pens for people with mental illness is inhumane. Studies show that more female inmates report mental illness than do male inmates. A 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics study said 14% of inmates in state and federal facilities have “serious” mental health issues. Laboy has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, her mother says.
Regardless of Laboy’s mental health, what happened was wrong. An internal investigation at the time of Baby N’s birth found, among other issues, that the prison had too few medical and mental health staff, and no one on call for weekend or evening births. Laboy’s pregnancy initially involved twins, which put her at risk for, at the very least, a premature birth. The investigation found that prison staff did not provide adequate medical care, and that staff falsified records of the evening’s calls and required tours of the facilities. They also ignored prison protocol that requires that any inmate with labor pains be sent to a medical facility — off-campus — for evaluation. In the dry language of a report: “Correctional Managed Health Care Policy and Procedure does not endorse the birth of babies at York.” Indeed.
In Laboy’s case, a ride to an area hospital came only after correctional officers answered her call and found her standing in a pool of blood in her cell, holding her newborn.
School authorities identi
fied mental health issues when Tianna Laboy was a little girl. At age 7, she moved from New Jersey to Connecticut with her family. Her mother tells stories about retrieving her daughter from school once because a principal tried to get the little girl to stop stabbing herself with a pencil. When Karine Laboy arrived at the school, she said, she heard her daughter screaming.
“I know my daughter’s scream,” she said.
That was the precursor to the younger Laboy cutting herself and acting out, even while she pleaded with her mother for answers.
“Why am I like this?” Karine Laboy says her daughter asked her. “Why can’t I control myself?”
In prison, Laboy used her phone calls to call her mother to ask about pregnancy, Karine Laboy said. Karine Laboy said she was 19 when she had Tianna, and during those calls, she’d calmly explain the twinges and her daughter’s bodily changes, as Karine’s mother did for her.
When her daughter gave birth to Baby N, Karine Laboy said, Tianna Laboy was in the bathroom near the buzzer inmates use to call for help. Karine Laboy has just one picture of her granddaughter’s early hours. It was taken by someone with the state Department of Children and Families, she said. She only found out about Baby N’s birth 33 hours after the fact, and now the pandemic has complicated mother-daughter visits.
“If I could talk to the attorney general,” Karine Laboy said, “I would say, ‘It could have been your daughter. My daughter was under your care. She should have been in a hospital bed, and had medical care, and she would have been OK.’
“It didn’t happen like that.”
In a statement, a spokeswoman from the attorney general’s office said the office is charged with defending the state (state officers and Department of Correction employees), and that the state “cannot commit taxpayer dollars unless those damages are proven through trial or good faith settlement negotiations. That is where we are now. We have engaged, and will continue to engage, in good faith settlement negotiations with plaintiff’s counsel.”
Supporters created a website, and organizations such as NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut have joined the chorus of voices asking for justice for Tianna Laboy. Her lawyers want her moved to a state facility where staff can help her address her mental health challenges. Some supporters are asking for her release from prison, a process that is outside the purview of the attorney general’s office – but well within the capability of their client, the state Department of Correction.
Meanwhile, Tianna Laboy is preparing to spend her third birthday in jail this month. She’ll be 23.