This is Part 2 of a special two-part episode of 100 Latina Birthdays. After serving 10+ years in prison, Destiny and Diana had to adjust to a new life outside of prison. From finding a new job, to rebuilding relationships, and learning to regulate their emotions, returning to the community, their families, and their kids was often an overwhelming experience. Reporter Francesca Mathews investigates why Latinas impacted by the carceral system often struggle with isolation and cultural disconnection, and the negative impact on their physical, mental and emotional health.
100 Latina Birthdays is an original production of LWC Studios. It's made possible by grants from Healthy Communities Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Woods Fund Chicago, the Field Foundation of Illinois, Pritzker Foundation, and the Chicago Foundation for Women. Mujeres Latinas en Acción is a series fiscal sponsor.
Virginia Lora: This is part two of a special two-part episode of our show. If you haven't heard part one of this story, we suggest you do that first and then come back.
Mathewes: Destiny also describes a pattern of apathy and disregard for the health and well-being of women in prison by the staff and this system itself.
Destiny: And those are things that they don't look for in there. They don't stop and think that, "Hey, this could possibly be going on," until you press the issue. And the medical there, they're so negligent that they don't pay attention to these things. They blow you off.
Mathewes: Destiny had been on antidepressants since she was a child. She was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder and PTSD while in prison. She says her diagnosis didn't center talk therapy or ensure that she even understood her conditions.
Destiny: I wasn't really able to ask questions in there because they find the diagnosis for you and they just prescribe medication. There's no one-on-one counseling or try to figure out the route to the problem. It's just like medicate you and I'll see you next month. Every month. You see them every 30 days. There's really no asking questions. The only time that you will find any information is if you do your own research in the library.
Mathewes: Destiny says she was prescribed a medication called carbamazepine, which is also used to treat seizures and nerve issues. She said she had to do her own research to really understand the negative side effects like abdominal pain, dizziness, unusual bleeding and bruising, and irregular breathing.
Destiny: And it's not good because if you take it for so long, there's so many side effects like hair loss, short-term memory loss.
Mathewes: Prescribing practices are also more complicated for women in prison. They're more likely to have comorbidities or be on multiple medications like contraceptives. So doctors need to be especially aware of potential drug interactions, according to a commentary in the Journal of the American Academy for Psychiatry and the Law.
As a practice, it's common to recommend talk therapy or counseling alongside psychiatric medication for treating bipolar disorder, something Destiny didn't have access to while in prison.
Destiny: It shouldn't just be medication, but rather one-on-one to get through that and get past that because eventually you can manage without medication. But in there it's just like give you medication, put you out to sleep, and that's just where it ends, and that's just how it goes.
Mathewes: Sixty percent of people in prisons who have a mental illness go without treatment. Fifty percent of those who enter while on psychiatric medication are not able to stay on them once incarcerated. That's according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Melissa has also seen the way that medication is mismanaged in prisons through her work. This was the case for Destiny whose medication was switched in prison.
Dr. Zielinski: The medications that are on the formulary in prisons don't necessarily match the medications that people maybe even have been stable on for a really long time when they come incarceration. And so we've also heard women who have said, "My medications all got changed when I first even came into jail, and then they were changed again when I came into prison."
Mathewes: Destiny's experience underscores just how difficult it can be to break cycles of abuse and trauma in an environment that disregards one's sense of personhood and physical wellbeing. Melissa heard this from women in her research too.
Dr. Zielinski: In our studies, they've voiced just a need for more compassion, like the need to be treated like a human, the need to be believed, that when I say something is wrong with me, that I really am experiencing that.
Mathewes: Things are also complicated, once on the outside.
Diana: The first three months was a little hard to adjust. I had to really focus on God, my prayer closet. It was like me and my emotion, my spirit and my body, my judgment, together. These are the battles that we're going to learn how to fight together, which is me and myself and God, right? Yeah, it was just a little overwhelming for the first three months.
Mathewes: When Diana was released on April 6th, 2015, she spent the first three months on house arrest, living with a best friend. She felt overwhelmed by so many things.
The world and all of the technology in it had changed a lot in 17 years. When she left Little Village, she was a teenager. When she returned, she was 32. She felt thrown into a crash course on adult life. Driving, navigating the city, finding health insurance and a job were just a few of the practical adjustments she faced.
Diana: I had to overcome the anxiety and how fast everything was going. I had to catch on to that. That was a little for me, not the cooking, because I went to culinary arts in there. I took my classes for that, so I learned how to boil water.
Mathewes: Her best friend eventually helped her connect with a non-profit organization where she works now doing street level outreach with youth in the neighborhood. She works with girls ages 16 to 18 and teaches them the basics of adulthood. Things like how to jumpstart a car, what a credit score is, and how to cook for themselves.
Two years after leaving prison, she had her daughter, Lexi, who has been a main source of strength and inspiration in healing emotionally.
Diana: My daughter too, she's six, and I be like, she has a feeling, and I'm like, "What is she feeling?” I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how to name my feelings. Diana, why don't you know how to name your feelings? Oh, you were like that for a while, so let's learn that. Let's see what feeling this is. “Lexi, baby, we're trying to learn this together. What are you feeling right now? Okay. Okay, gotcha." So a little by little we're learning, we are exploring the world together.
Mathewes: Destiny was released on December 14th, 2023. In the months since she's reunited with her son, now 26 years old, she's currently looking for a job and studying business through virtual courses at South University in Savannah, Georgia.
Diana and Destiny still struggle with how years of incarceration have impacted their ability to communicate and regulate their emotions. Right before her release, Destiny worked as a peer educator and was supporting other incarcerated women trying to relearn how to communicate outside of a carceral environment.
Destiny: I was actually able to help other people in the communication and I had to learn active listening and being able to listen to not everything that's said, but not being said, and being able to communicate assertively instead of aggressively or passively because there's a fine line in between.
Mathewes: Reintegrating as a Latina can prompt specific cultural challenges.
Jorge: We don't allow our women to come back from incarceration and let the great networks of support for other women and glorify that. We say miráte eso.
Mathewes: Jorge, from Latino Justice, says that particularly in more conservative Latino communities, women are expected to stand by their husbands and their families, even if that means getting involved in illegal activities, but they can also be judged by their community if that leads to incarceration.
Jorge: But Lord, help if they get locked away or if they get incarcerated for anything because we feel that they've brought shame on our families and our communities and we ostracize them and cast them out.
Mathewes: Jorge says that changing the way formerly incarcerated Latinas are received and supported by their community is connected to larger cultural shifts that he thinks are needed in the community. And a lot of this, he says, begins with centering women and girls empowerment and uplifting their individual dreams and desires.
Jorge: And I think that if one starts doing that, then one can move on into the political arena or any other, the professional arena and be seen as how individual's capable of changing.
Mathewes: The sort of cultural shift that Jorge is talking about often comes down to conversations within families and communities about healing, vulnerability and breaking generational cycles of trauma. That's something Destiny's focused on now with her son and his growing family.
Destiny: It's kind of difficult having to tell them that in this generation because everybody feels like they have to be strong, and I explained that to them, not just to him but to my nephew, because the biggest mistake that I made as a child was not asking for help, and I don't want them to go through that same thing because it's not a sign of weakness. It's showing that you're strong enough to admit that you don't have all the answers.
Mathewes: For Melissa, correcting the failures of the women's prison system requires radical change.
Dr. Zielinski: I do think it starts with getting women out of prison. Period. I don't think that the systems are really structured to succeed in meeting women's health needs, and if we are not prepared to do that as a country and as a system, then we have to move towards options that can.
Mathewes: She says that there are ways that the current system could be held more accountable.
Dr. Zielinski: External oversight is the other piece, and I don't have a good answer for exactly how that would happen. People may not realize how fragmented sort of oversight is. Like jails operate at the county level. Prisons typically operate at the state level, but there are also federal prisons. In terms of legislative kinds of things, there may be mandates that come out nationally, but those only really apply to federal facilities and not to state prisons and not to jails. And so there really aren't a unified body or bodies to do that oversight.
Mathewes: In addition to oversight, she says opening up more ways for people and organizations on the outside to work with incarcerated women could also potentially improve outcomes.
Dr. Zielinski: I've seen a lot of success in my research with community partnerships. So there are a lot of people that want to help on this issue and recognize that prisons, one thing that they are up against is that there are these tremendous health needs and there often isn't the resources to meet them all. And so partnerships with groups in the community that want to help, I think offers a lot of promise.
Mathewes: According to Melissa, this could look like creating groups where women with the lived experience of being incarcerated can work regularly with women on the inside.
Dr. Zielinski: This can be training programs in the community where students who want to make a difference are able to offer health education groups, are able to offer sometimes even therapeutic groups under supervision of a licensed person or with a licensed person present. So I think partnerships can be a big piece when you don't have a lot of resources, going to and partnering with people that have more resources and kind of to meet that need.
Mathewes: In Pilsen, also historically Latino neighborhood, not far from Little Village, Elizabeth and the Women's Justice Institute are creating safe spaces for women like Diana and Destiny to come together and work through the challenges and traumas of incarceration.
Elizabeth says that cultural disconnection and isolation are indeed a large part of what can make re-entries so challenging for Latinas. That's part of why her organization named the Community Center, the Reclamation Project.
The Women's Justice Institute hosts a variety of programming at the Reclamation Center, including film screenings and panel discussions. It's a space for formerly incarcerated women to connect with one another and build community.
Cruz: You have this community of women who are just silenced, in silos right by themselves not reaching out, which is part of the reason why we have a Reclamation Center at the Institute, is to have a space for women who are formerly incarcerated to come and share space with each other and talk about the challenges they have because there wasn't anyone that could say like, "Hey, I'm formerly incarcerated, want to be cool?" There wasn't like a space where you could actually do that. So now we have a space and I'm so grateful for that.
Mathewes: For Diana, special occasions, like celebrating a birthday, can invite the most reflection. Her birthday is July 7th, and this year she celebrated with her daughter in California at Disneyland, relishing in her freedom.
Diana: I stop sometimes and be like, "Wow, I get to do this." Even this, I mean, not birthday parties, but the smallest things that we take for granted. So it's like every little thing, when I see myself, "Why I got to do this?" I'm like, "Man, at one point I couldn't do this. I couldn't go to the laundrymat."
Mathewes: But what she relishes most is waking up, every day, joyful.
Diana: It's just not birthdays that you want to be like, "Oh, I celebrate the most." Oh, every day, every day, you better celebrate, you're free. You know what I'm saying? Alive. Still breathing.
Lora: 100 Latina Birthdays is an original production of LWC Studios. It's made possible by grants from Healthy Communities Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Woods Fund Chicago, the Field Foundation of Illinois, Pritzker Foundation, and the Chicago Foundation for Women. Mujeres Latinas En Acción is a series fiscal sponsor.
This episode was reported by Francesca Matthewes. Juleyka Lantigua is a show's creator, executive producer and editor. Virginia Lora is a senior producer. Fact checking by Jennifer Goren, mixing by Anne Lim, and mixing and sound design by Trent Lightburn. Michelle Baker is our photo editor. Kori Doran is our marketing associate. Cover art by Reyna Noriega.
For more information, resources, photos, annotated transcripts of all episodes and Spanish translations, visit 100latinabirthdays.com. That's the number 100latinabirthdays.com. Follow us on Instagram, X, and Facebook at 100latinabirthdays.
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CITATION:
Mathewes, Francesca, reporter. “Caring for Latina Mothers in Prison, Part 2.” 100 Latina Birthdays. LWC Studios, October 28,, 2024. 100latinabirthdays.com.