Reproductive Justice For US Prisons
Since 1980, the number of women in prison has tripled, leading to a high incidence of serious health concerns, including HIV, Hepatitis C, and reproductive diseases. The rate of HIV is higher among women prisoners than men prisoners and can be as much as one hundred times higher among prisoners than in the general population, depending on the prison group. The trend towards longer and heavier sentences have also lead to greater health concerns as many prisons offer little accessibility to adequate medical care. Also, prisons are increasingly being built on rural land, isolated from major resources for medical care. Two major areas of concern for reproductive justice in prisons lies in medical neglect in the form of little to no reproductive health care and nonconsensual prison intervention on a woman’s right to reproduce.
Read more about this topic: Reproductive Justice
Famous quotes containing the words reproductive, justice and/or prisons:
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yes, it is the hour at which, long ago, I felt happy. What always awaited me then was a light and dreamless sleep. But something had changed because, with the wait for tomorrow, it is my cell that I have found. As if the familiar paths traced in the summer skies could lead to prisons as well as innocent slumbers.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)