Study adds piece to justice picture

AFTER studying practices at the Oklahoma County jail two years ago, researchers with the Vera Institute of Justice noted that roughly four-fifths of the population was made up of people awaiting trial. Those weeks or months (or sometimes longer) of waiting can turn a person’s life upside down.

This is especially true for mothers, as is noted in a recent report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The two organizations produced a study titled “‘You Miss So Much When You’re Gone’: The Lasting Harm of Jailing Mothers Before Trial in Oklahoma.” Our state, sadly, was a natural choice for the project, because it incarcerates more women, per capita, than any other state — and has for years.

Women “are the fastest growing correctional population nationwide” and local jails are the major drivers of that growth, the report notes. “On a single day, the number of women in jails across the U.S. has increased from approximately 8,000 in 1970 to nearly 110,000 in 2014 …” the report says.

When those women are mothers, the impact on families can be devastating.

The report begins with an anecdote — a 25-yearold mother of four arrested in January 2017 after her boyfriend called police during a fight. She couldn’t afford her $6,100 bond, so she spent nearly a month in the Oklahoma County jail before pleading guilty to charges of domestic violence and obstructing an officer. “I was sick of being away from my kids,” she said.

But she doesn’t have them back yet. She says she can’t afford to meet some of the requirements of her child welfare reunification plan (including 52 required domestic violence classes at $25 apiece), and that she’s burdened by the required $40 per month for probation supervision, and the $900 she was billed for the time she was jailed, along with other fines and fees.

The report, based on more than 160 interviews with jailed and formerly jailed mothers, substitute caregivers, attorneys, child welfare employees and others, found that “pretrial detention can snowball into never-ending family separation as mothers navigate court systems and insurmountable financial burdens …”

Consequently, the report says, women often feel pressure to plead guilty even when they might prefer to fight. One subject in the study, against the advice of counsel, pleaded guilty to a robbery in exchange for a 10-year suspended sentence. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh I am going to be a felon the rest of my life,’” she said. “I was just thinking I have to take care of my kids.”

The report says roughly 80 percent of females in U.S. jails are mothers with minor children. When mothers are incarcerated, their children are more likely to end up in foster care.

Visitation policies in Oklahoma jails often bar children from in-person visits, the report said, and visitation via phone or video may be cost-prohibitive and, when the children are young, impractical.

Among other things, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU want Oklahoma and other states to require consideration of a defendant’s caretaker status when bail and sentencing are determined, expand alternatives to incarceration, and cut back on imposing fees and other costs.

This report is one policymakers should review as Oklahoma continues to pursue justice reform at the state and local levels.