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What People Get Wrong About Incarcerated Mothers

Broadly spoke to VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung about what she learned while making "Women Behind Bars."

While there's been a resurgence in interest for prison reform in the United States, the tremendous growth of women's incarceration is often overlooked. Since 1980, the rate of women's incarceration in the US has increased more than 700 percent. Because of these skyrocketing conviction rates, the US currently imprisons more women than any other country in the world.

The population of incarcerated women in the US constitute one third of the global total of incarcerated women. The majority of women in US prisons are serving sentences for non-violent crimes, and once they arrive, they face the threat of losing their children and families while navigating inadequate health services. When women are released from prison, they're often thrust back into cycles of poverty, homelessness, and systemic injustice that led them to incarceration in the first place.

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Tonight, VICE on HBO is premiering "Women Behind Bars." Hosted by VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung, the episode focuses on the surge of women in US prisons and jails and navigating day-to-day life as an incarcerated mother. Broadly spoke with Yeung about her experience making the episode, and what people often get wrong about incarcerated women.

VICE on HBO correspondent Isobel Yeung speaks to a woman in custody at the Indiana Women Prison.

Broadly: What did you learn while working on this piece?
We knew the statistics going in there. We knew that women are incarcerated—[the] fastest growing population of the incarcerated population in the US right now. We knew that the US locks away more women than anywhere else in the world,

But there were a lot of things that we learned, and there was a spread of issues we wanted to tackle: hygiene, health care, mental health. All of those things where relevant, but what stood out to me was when you were talking to these women, they all wanted to talk about the separation they had from their own families. Being incarcerated meant that these families were separated and broken.

Were there any women's stories that particularly stuck with you?
With everyone we spoke to, each story was more heartbreaking than the last. Nakita was a woman living in a halfway house in Indiana. And I think she is emblematic of one of the biggest problems of the system: the Adoptions and Safe Family Act of 1997.

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With the Adoptions and Safe Family Act, if a child has been in foster care for the past 15 out of 22 months, the state has to start the legal process of terminating parental rights. Nakita is a victim of that act. We met when she was serving out the remainder of her 18-month sentence waiting on early release in order to keep her child. This woman was so clearly attached to her son, her only child. Every time she spoke about him, her face would light up. It was incredibly, gut-wrenchingly sad to see the effects of that law implemented and seeing families torn apart.

Do you think that there is currently political or cultural momentum to reform women's incarceration?
I think that there is more conversation around this topic now. That's partly because there are incredible people driving and leading change, and in general there is more rhetoric about [women's incarceration] resulting in positive movements and increased empathy for the situation that these women are in.

On the other hand, I do have to say that the current political climate is moving in the opposite direction. Attorney General Jeff Sessions just stated he wanted to increase mandatory minimum sentences, meaning more people will be incarcerated no matter how small their crimes are. Already more than two thirds of women are incarcerated for minor crimes. So, on one hand there are these great reformers, and on the other, these people actually in power, not taking these pictures into account.

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What do you think people most misunderstand about women who are incarcerated?
Shows like Orange is New Black are some of the biggest resources that people use when thinking about what it means to be incarcerated as a woman. It does a great job highlighting some of the issues and drawing that conversation into the public eye. But I think some of those issues are sensationalized. The real issues are not highlighted.

I'm sure a lot of people will watch [this episode] and think all these women are criminals. That might be true, but I think that often, the crimes that they're in [prison] for are related to drug conspiracy chains where they are in the lower level. They are associates to the crimes of their partners, boyfriends, or husbands, who are actually driving the crime. [These women] refuse to rat out their partners, resulting in some of them serving longer sentences than others involved in the crime. I think we need to take a long hard look at that. So many of these women are mothers and so many are primary caretakers. We need to take that into account.