Episode 35: Inside Women’s Prisons – with Emily Warneke

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: Today I’d like to begin by sharing a quote from American feminist, political activist, philosopher, academic and author Angela Davis. She said, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” I have been wanting to learn more about the prison system for years. The punitive system of locking people up when they make mistakes seems very connected to patriarchy to me. I’m specifically interested in women’s prisons and how incarceration affects women’s lives, so you can imagine I was thrilled to meet a classmate in my PhD program who has expertise in this very area, and she agreed to join me today. Her name is Emily Warneke. I’m so excited to have you here, Emily! 

Emily Warneke is a third-year PhD student in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah, where her research centers on access and equity in post-secondary education in prison. For her dissertation, she intends to explore the experiences of formerly incarcerated mothers who pursued higher education while incarcerated, and how this experience informs the ways that they navigate motherhood and education post-release. Emily currently works as a graduate research assistant with the research collaborative on higher education in prison. She’s currently involved in developing a student center inside a women’s designated prison that is led by currently incarcerated students through the Utah Prison Education Project. Drawing from feminist and intersectional frameworks, her work seeks to challenge dominant narratives about incarceration, motherhood, and educational justice. 

I also want to say that Emily and I had planned to record in person today, but due to a childcare shuffle, Emily has her adorable toddler Ivy with her today. So if you hear cute noises, just know that that’s Ivy. And we decided to include her as a feminist choice to normalize the balance of parenthood and work and education, and also to make visible the work that so often falls to women. So, welcome to Emily and welcome to Ivy, too. Listeners can already tell that I was so excited to have Emily on the podcast, and it’s been so amazing to hear a little bit about your work in class, Emily. But before we dive into that, I’d love you to introduce yourself and tell a little bit about where you’re from and some details of your life that brought you to where you are today.

Emily Warneke: Yeah. I am from Nebraska, and I grew up in a really small town in northeast Nebraska, just right on the South Dakota border. And I actually didn’t come to prison ed until I was about a year into my master’s program. I got my master’s from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and I actually was an English major, which is quite different from what I’m doing right now, which is getting a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy. I originally wanted to get a PhD in English, and I was trying to figure out a way to actually make my application stand out for PhDs in English, and I realized that there were these incarcerated students that were taking credits through the school that I was going to. They didn’t have access to the on-campus resources that everybody else has access to, and one of those is tutoring through the writing center, where I worked as a graduate assistant during my master’s. I felt like that was really not right and really not fair, especially when these were largely humanities-based classes. How do we expect people to succeed? How do we expect people to grow in their writing and grow in their thinking if they’re not having access to the tools that they need? 

I talked to the people who ran the program and I started a writing center at the prison in Omaha, and I just fell in love with working with incarcerated people. I realized that there’s so much stigma and so many lies that are told about who they are, and they’re really painted as a homogenous group when they’re just people. That’s what made me get started in this work, and then I realized that that was the work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So then I found the Utah Prison Education Project, and now we’re here. 

AA: Wow. That’s amazing. I did not know all of that. That’s really incredible that you just found it in that way. You said that when you were doing your master’s, you noticed that there were students who were currently incarcerated who were doing their college work, right? How did you become aware of them in the first place?

EW: The writing center that I worked at was getting ready to host a national conference, and I was thinking about outreach and the writing center’s responsibility to outreach. So I talked to the director and he was like, “You should really talk to this person. His name is Dustin Penley, he works in the English department, talk to him if you’re interested in community outreach.” So he connected me to Dustin, who works with the program at UNL.

AA: Okay, got it. That makes sense. I’d love to hear more about the Utah organization that you work with now, but we’ll do that a little bit later. I want to start by backing way up for listeners who, like me, have never really studied the prison system. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the history of prisons in the United States, and specifically about women’s prisons, because I actually don’t know anything about that history.

EW: Yeah, for sure. My understanding is that before the 1820s, women’s and men’s prisons were combined. There were no women’s prisons, and I think that the reason for this is because there was such a small incarcerated women population. And during this time, women in prison typically lived in a classroom-style dorm where everyone slept in one space, and it was an extremely violent place for women. In 1825, in the Auburn Prison in New York, they started to separate men and women. Men started getting access to individual cells at nighttime, and then during the day they participated in forced labor and they were forced to be silent. Women, however, were confined to the attic above the kitchen, in absolutely deplorable conditions. I think they had a bucket to use the restroom, which they all shared. They were only given food once a day, no programming, they just were all shoved in there. A chaplain famously noted that “to be a male convict in this prison would be quite tolerable, but to be a female convict for any protracted period would be worse than death.” So, not very well conceptualized. 

And then in 1835, they opened up a Mount Pleasant female prison in New York, which was the first standalone women’s prison in the United States, which was located adjacent to Sing Sing Prison. But just because it was separate didn’t mean there was less violence. It’s been recorded that women were subjected to punishment practices like straightjackets and gagging, and actually it was closed in 1865 due to poor conditions. The 1870s was really when they started to separate women and men kind of across the board, across the United States, and that was the time of the rise of women’s reformatories, where women’s prisons started to focus on trying to turn incarcerated women into “true women” that were trained in domestic skills like sewing and cooking. 

AA: Wow. 

AA: Oh gosh.

EW: Yeah. And they would blame diagnosable things like epilepsy and PTSD from sexual trauma and mental illness as being inherent flaws with female biology. I found this quote that I would like to share because I thought it was interesting. A scholar notes, “Could it be that in order to succeed in implementing segregated incarceration, the women reformers had to include sexist programming?” This idea that the separation of men and women wasn’t actually a progressive move, it really just opened up so many ways for women to be further traumatized in their own way, you know? I think that’s the best I can do, that’s the most that I know about the history of women’s prisons.

AA: Yeah, that’s a great overview. That’s really fantastic. Did you find out anything about what women were historically incarcerated for? And then you can talk about what they’re typically incarcerated for now in the 21st century, because I don’t know the answer to either one of those things.

EW: Yeah, so typically everything that I’ve read says that historically women have been incarcerated for “nonviolent” crimes like drug offenses, property offenses, things like that. And I would say that that’s still true today, but something about the women’s incarcerated population that’s pretty jarring is that it’s risen seven times since the 1980s. It’s grown by almost 700%. And 2022 was, I think, the last time they were able to clock exact numbers, but it’s grown from about 26,000 in 1980 to 180,000 in 2022. And that disparity is seen especially more amongst Black women and Latina women, who are imprisoned 1.6 times and 1.2 times the rate of white women, respectively. And a caveat that I always like to talk about when we’re thinking about why people are imprisoned, especially conviction history, because it’s so loaded, like, why are people in prison? Are you here because you hurt somebody, or are you here for other reasons? 

And something that I have really tried to focus on in my time working in the prison is realizing that everyone who is in prison is there because of systemic failure. Whether it be chronic abuse as a child, or trauma, poverty, addiction, you name it. All of the issues that we have that are so magnified by race and class in the United States. I guess what I’m saying is that when I work with my students, I never ask why they’re in prison. We never talk about it, and I think an important thing for me is realizing that it doesn’t really matter. For me, what matters more is that there is such a growing number of incarcerated women, and I think it directly reflects the lack of care that so many people receive in our communities, whether it be housing, education, all of those combined. To answer your question directly, nonviolent offenses are more typical. I think it’s changing a little bit, but that’s at least not the focus for me. 

AA: Yeah, well, it makes a ton of sense for your role going into the prison, helping and being a teacher, so that’s really important. I was thinking that systemically, as you answered, what’s going on in society, and what is it that our society would punish in women? You know what I mean? Where do they bump up against the law? I was wondering specifically about prostitution, also, if that was something that historically has been something that women are in these terrible circumstances and then end up imprisoned because of that. And then end up leaving children, as you mentioned, which we’ll talk about a little more in a minute. But is that a factor? 

EW: Oh, yeah. Historically, it’s a huge factor. Moral behavior, women getting arrested for prostitution, absolutely. 

AA: And not the men who are propositioning them, they’re not arrested. It’s crazy.

EW: Not the men. Let’s not forget that that’s real.

AA: Yeah, it’s crazy. I do want to ask about women who go to prison when they have children at home. What happens to those children? 

EW: I mean, I think it really depends. It’s really situational and case by case. But I know that sometimes women get to have a say in where their children go, so if they have family they often will live with family. Or if they have partners or ex-partners, which is sometimes a double-edged sword because if they are no longer together with their ex-partner, then their ex-partner gets complete control, because a lot of times you lose legal custody when you go to prison. So they have control over whether or not these women get to see their children. And I would say that there’s a good mix of women whose children get put into foster care. I know some women who have allowed their children to be adopted because they’re going to be in prison for so long. It really depends. 

But I will say that there have been studies that show that children who have incarcerated mothers, only 2% of them statistically will go to college, versus the national average, which I think is 30-something percent. So it’s a really large indicator for lifetime educational achievement. I don’t work a lot with children, and I don’t know a lot of the answers, but just from the women’s perspective, I know it gets really messy and it’s really hard and they don’t have a lot of say. I know some women who say that especially when they first went to jail, they spent weeks not knowing where their children were or what was happening.

AA: That’s traumatizing on top of everything else that’s happening. And I know you mentioned that that was kind of wielded against them, almost weaponized against them to take women’s children from them. I can’t even imagine how horrible that would be. 

EW: Yes. I mean, obviously that would not be a stated goal of the prison system, right? 

AA: Yeah, that’s good. Okay, moving into what it’s actually like there today, if a woman does go to prison, what is it like for her there? And I guess there’s a difference between staying a few days in a jail versus getting a prison sentence and going to a state or a federal prison. But can you give us some information about what daily life is like?

EW: Yeah. As somebody who’s never been incarcerated, I’ll do my best. It’s a very rigid structure. They have very little control over when they wake up, when they go to sleep. I’ll touch on this a little bit later, but in some prisons and in some states, people are required to work, but from my understanding, sometimes there aren’t enough jobs. I think if jobs are available, most incarcerated people are required to work. And most of them want to, because a lot of the women, at least those I know, even if they’re only making 50 cents to a couple of dollars an hour, they try to send everything that they can home to their children. They just don’t have a lot of control over their day. But something that I really noticed when working inside a prison is that not everybody is treated equally. An example is that undocumented people can have a harder time getting access to jobs, and not everyone in the women’s-designated prison, and we call it the women’s-designated prison for this very reason, identifies as a woman. There’s a lot of stigma and bias and individual beliefs from correctional officers that can affect the way these people are treated on a daily basis. 

AA: Yeah, that’s really heartbreaking. I hadn’t even thought of that. If an undocumented person is convicted of something in the United States, in some cases they’ll send them to their home country, but in some cases they’ll incarcerate them here, is that right? 

EW: From my understanding, people who are undocumented will oftentimes do their time here in the United States, and then be instantly deported after their prison sentence. 

AA: I see. You said that women are sometimes required to work in prison, but sometimes there aren’t jobs for them to make money. I have one other question, because I think you mentioned to me at one point, maybe in class, that they have to buy their own sanitary supplies, right? There aren’t available, free period products. Is that right? They still need to buy stuff while they’re in prison, they do need money, but sometimes they can work and sometimes they can’t. That seems like a big problem. 

EW: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. That’s something that’s not well known, is that yes, women in prison are still required to buy their own feminine hygiene products. But it doesn’t just stop there. They’re required to buy their own toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo. They get soap, but if you want shampoo or conditioner, you have to buy that. Living in prison is super expensive, because a small bottle of shampoo can be up to $9, and when you make 50 cents an hour… That’s a fortune for shampoo, you know? 

AA: Whoa, yeah. Wow.

Okay, your area of experience and expertise is in the education side, so I’m wondering what opportunities there are for incarcerated people, and especially incarcerated women, to continue their education. Because it seems like to me, I mean, I have opinions about the incarceration system, the prison system in general, but if someone is going to be in prison, it seems to me that it would be at least kind of a silver lining to be like, “Well, let’s help you work on your education while you’re in there.” You’re taking the time out from your family and from a job, and there’s all this time, why not help people to rehabilitate and have more opportunities afterwards by getting an education? What’s available, and what does it look like? 

Living in prison is super expensive

EW: I mean, it really depends on state to state, prison to prison. I think that with the reinstatement of Second Chance Pell, access is growing at an exponential rate for both men and women. 

AA: Can you tell us what that is? 

EW: Yeah, Second Chance Pell. In 2020, they reinstated Pell grants for incarcerated people. In 1994, with the violent crime bill, Clinton took away access to Pell grants for incarcerated people. Starting in 2020, like, for the previous 25 years, all education programs had to figure out their own private funding, things like that. In 2015, they started a pilot reintroducing Pell, and then it was reinstated in 2020. I think that because now incarcerated people have access to Pell, grants programs are just popping up all over the nation. Something that we really need to focus on now is quality, best practices, standards, things like that. So I think it is growing. Women still have far less access to education than men. Men have five times more access to education in prison than women. 

AA: Wow. How so? 

EW: I think it has to do with the fact that when you think of somebody in prison, most of the time people think of men. And even though the population is growing at a rapid rate, they still only make up about 7% of the prison population. I feel like it takes a lot of nuance and a lot of thought to bring education to women, because the men’s population is so much larger. With that said, I believe that if you bring education to women, they’re more likely to enroll than men, statistically. So there’s that piece. And then I would say that the programming that I’ve seen ranges from certificates to associate’s degrees to bachelor’s degrees. Very few programs will have a master’s degree option. And some places offer 100% online, some places offer hybrid. I’ve only ever worked in 100% in-person programs. Last spring, the spring of 2024, a student who is enrolled in our bachelor’s degree program came to the director and said that she felt like there was this need in the prison, and that it was people who were seeking extra help to further their education. People who were seeking tutoring, people who wanted help completing their high school degree. There just wasn’t really a place in the entire compound that allowed incarcerated people on the women’s designated side to seek help across all levels of education. 

So that’s what we set out to do. We knew that it had to be led by incarcerated students. We knew that it had to come from a feminist philosophy of thought. We knew that it had to be collaborative. So what we did is we interviewed incarcerated students who were enrolled through the Utah Prison Education Project who were interested in becoming what we then called tutors. Now we call them education advocates, because that’s the name that they’ve chosen for themselves. We did a six-month training with them, and then we opened our center in January. And something that we were really happy to get is we were able to actually pay our advocates $12 an hour, which is the same rate that anybody else who’s working at the University of Utah as a student gets. 

AA: Wow.

EW: Yeah. From the very beginning, our director felt like it was so important that we were able to establish paying people inside a prison a living wage, and that’s the work that we do. And we serve every type of student, whether or not they’re trying to get their high school diploma, trying to get their associate’s degree, or starting to help with reentry planning. Really it’s just a one-stop shop for anybody who is curious about education and educational pathways in the prison. 

AA: Okay, so just to make sure I’m understanding correctly, any student who is incarcerated can be an education advocate for other incarcerated folks who come in and say, “Hey, I want to learn a topic.” You have tutors or educational advocates who can help them, right? It’s among incarcerated folks that this is happening, and you’re just there to support that process. 

EW: Correct. 

AA: Okay. That’s really awesome. Where does the curriculum come from, and are people able to work toward degrees while they’re incarcerated?

EW: Yes. We just rolled out a bachelor’s program last spring, where we were able to enroll 15 incarcerated people into a bachelor’s degree program through the University of Utah. We have teachers, professors from the University of Utah, come out and teach accredited courses. So there’s that pathway, the bachelor’s degree pathway, and then associates pathways through community colleges in the area. And a few technical colleges offer programming. I’d say those are the main pathways, and then obviously high school is offered as well. 

AA: Okay. So are people able to get a GED while they’re incarcerated?

EW: Yeah. Actually, in Utah they offer a high school diploma, but in most places, and in most states, they’re offered a GED.

AA: Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. Now I’m thinking back to what you shared at the beginning about when you were working on your master’s degree, and the thing that led you here is you noticed that even those students didn’t have access to a lot of the benefits and the support and some of the resources and tools that you did, and that’s what made the light bulb go off for you. I’m wondering, what are the limitations for students who are getting an education while incarcerated? Well, I have two questions. What are the limitations on resources, and then secondly, I want to know more about what happens when women get out of prison and then try to go back into life outside. And if they have gotten a degree, is that considered just as valid? I mean, this is kind of embarrassing that I don’t know this, but I’m picturing Les Misérables where Jean Valjean has to carry a yellow card everywhere he goes and just can’t get a job. So, limitations while incarcerated and then we’ll move on to what happens afterwards.

EW: Yeah, I mean there are just so many, and we try to do what we can. A big leap for us is that we are able to get laptops into the prison for our students who are enrolled at the University of Utah with white-listed pages. So they have access to some JSTOR, they have some internet access. But, I mean, it’s still not perfect. And oftentimes students will need print-outs, they’ll request, “Can you print this for me? Can you bring this for me?” Just general access that everybody else can just hop on the internet, hop on Google Scholar and easily try to find some sources. It’s so much more complicated. And our students have access to securebooks, where they’re able to type on Word, but in Omaha, my students did not. They had to hand write all of their papers. 

AA: Whoa. 

EW: It’s such a barrier, because when I would go in and I would work with them, it would take me sometimes a couple of minutes just to get used to their handwriting because I’m so not used to it. There are varying levels. I will say, in Utah, I feel like our students have more access than a lot of students, but it’s still a large barrier. 

AA: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. My second question was what happens when people get out. What are their prospects like, especially in education and in work?

EW: Yeah. We do not know a lot about formerly incarcerated women, let alone formerly incarcerated mothers. What we do know is that formerly incarcerated mothers, their first priority is usually to reunite with their children. They’ll do anything that they need to do to get their children back, whether that looks like securing housing, which obviously it does, securing a job, which it does. And that’s where my interest lies for my dissertation, is thinking especially about women who had access to education in prison, but when they get out, education just falls so far down on the priority list because they need a job right now, not in the future. They don’t really have the luxury of thinking, “If I go to school, then I can get a better job.” That’s such a privileged idea and such a privileged notion, you know? They also just face, especially women, this incredible stigma of being a bad woman and a bad mom. About 60% of incarcerated women are mothers, so it’s a very large percentage of women who had responsibilities before coming to prison. They’re trying to get back and reestablish themselves as mothers and as working people, and just as people in society. So, the barriers are just so many and the stigma, from what I’ve read, is so strong. And as far as getting jobs, I would say that a degree helps, especially an associate’s degree really helps, but obviously it doesn’t mitigate bias. 

EW: I mean, it depends on the university. Most do ask for criminal disclosure, and most of the time that right there will chill somebody to the point that they won’t apply. And universities, a lot of times, will make people go before a board if they do apply, and they’ll make them relive their entire conviction, their trial, it just gets really invasive. And it’s actually been proven empirically that it doesn’t make campuses safer. Admitting formerly incarcerated people has nothing to do with campus safety. So yeah, there are so many hoops that formerly incarcerated people have to jump through to continue their education. 

AA: Yeah. That’s so, so hard. I’m wondering if there are any organizations who are working to help women in that situation so that they can create a healthy and flourishing life after prison. I’m sure there has to be, right? My thought is that if I were in that position, what would I do if I wanted to go to school? If I wanted to get a job? The whole point is to try to help people to get on their feet and get out into society and be able to have a thriving life, so where’s the bridge that helps them get there? Are there private organizations that do that? 

EW: Yeah, so there are a few. There’s the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, which was founded by formerly incarcerated women, which works advocacy, leadership development, and ending incarceration of women and girls. And then there’s A New Way of Life Reentry Project, which is based in California, and it provides housing, legal services, leadership development, and policy advocacy for women. And then I’d say that the next biggest one would be called Survived and Punished, which works to decriminalize survival, particularly for women and gender non-conforming people criminalized for defending themselves against violence. And then there are a couple of other organizations I know that help incarcerated women. One of them is the Thurman Perry Foundation, which has multiple fundraisers. They always have something going to raise money, especially for feminine hygiene products to bring into prisons. And then the last one that I would like to bring up is called Free the Mississippi Five, which is an organization that centers around trying to help five women in Mississippi who have been in prison, I think at least for 30 years each, and they’ve been denied parole for really no good reason. They were sentenced to life without parole in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so this organization is doing everything that they can to get these women to be able to come home.

AA: Yeah, that is absolutely heartbreaking, Emily. And that reminds me, actually, the last question that I wanted to ask you was about how people can get involved and help. And I know that there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of nuance to this question because of the history of perhaps some savior complex attitudes coming into prison. So maybe you can talk about what people can do and if there’s anything that people shouldn’t do when trying to help. 

EW: There are so many things that people can do to help. One of the first things that people often think about wanting to do when they hear about incarcerated people is they want to volunteer. And I always think that the intention behind volunteering is really great, and I always caution people, because what incarcerated people need is expertise. They need people who are well versed in programming and who are capable of providing the most wonderful programming that they possibly can. So for a lot of people, they might not have a background in education, programming, or any type of programming in prison. And that’s okay, there are still so many other ways you can help, like just educating yourself about prisons and the unique issues that women face. You can read work that’s written by system-impacted people. I feel like that is one of the best ways to really understand their struggle and try to get to know what their issues are in a really intimate way. You can also assess the ways that privilege protects some and punishes others and really do your part to de-stigmatize incarceration. Talking about incarceration and talking about people who are incarcerated like they’re people is so important. 

And then you can support organizations, especially those led by formerly incarcerated women. This can look like donating or volunteering, whichever one you feel more comfortable with. And then supporting policy changes like ending cash bail, which is an extremely classist thing. Or you can support policy changes to expand access to education, banning shackling laws and banning prison labor exploitation like we talked about earlier. And then finally, don’t underestimate small local acts like supporting reentry efforts, showing up to protests, and being skeptical of how crime is displayed in media, especially on TV, in the news, and in movies. So many stereotypes are created through the media. And then always using humanizing language, like I say “incarcerated people” instead of “prisoners” or “inmates”, which I think is so important. And that’s something that you can do right away. And believing somebody’s story, believing their side of the story, I think, is one of the most powerful things that you can do for incarcerated people. I have so many reading recommendations. I lean towards abolition, so I really enjoy reading books about abolition. My first book recommendation is Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, and Gina Dent. The second book recommendation that I have is Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. And then, finally, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba. 

AA: Emily, thank you so much for being here today. I learned so much from you.

EW: Thanks so much for having me, Amy. It was a blast getting to talk to you. Thank you so much.

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