After the Epilogue — Saturday's spoiler chat

And Kat and Gabe lived happily ever after

Howdy!

Sorry to have vanished. I typically like to reply to each and every one of you, but this week has been a madhouse. I might still get a chance to go back to my previous post and reply. If not, please know that I’ve read your posts and really appreciate them.

Also, please know that if you’ve sent me e-mail, I'm behind on that, too.

First the news: I have a senator willing to carry the bill about the shackling of inmates in labor. I’m meeting with her on Tuesday afternoon to help write it. Now, that’s something I've never done before. Draft a bill. OK, sure.

“And there shall be cookies and milk for all at precisely 3 p.m., followed by nap time. Bedtime stories shall consist of romance novels with heroines who present positive role models for inmates. Sexy man posters shall be posted in all cells so that all female inmates get their recommended daily allowance of man-chest and six-packs. Chocolate shall be included with each evening meal. And there shall be absolutely no shackling of pregnant inmates in labor! Duh! What were you people thinking?”

Hmm... Probably needs some work.

Some other folks have connected with me hoping to be a part of pushing this forward. But, typically I guess, there are people who want this bill but want it on their own time. As in, “How about we do this next year?”

Call me naïve. Really, call me anything you want. I don’t care. I want to do what I can while I can, not next year. There are inmates who will be having babies this summer whose experience will be different if we pass a bill before the session recesses in May. So I remain undeterred.

Less interesting news: I want a new back! I‘m taking steroids and narcotics, and every day is an exercise in endurance. I am not enjoying this. Obviously, as I'm whining about it in public.

And now on to the fun stuff!

On Saturday, I’m inviting any of you who’ve read Naked Edge and want to talk about it — but don’t want to spoil it for your friends — to join me for an After the Epilogue chat where you don’t have to worry about spoilers.

Here’s how it will work:

I will put up a new blog post tomorrow at about 7 Eastern/6 Central/5 Mountain/4 Pacific time right here on this blog with a link to a Chatzy chatroom. These are just chatrooms you can create and sign into on Chatzy.com. Registration is minimal.

You’ll just follow that link to the chat, register and pop in.

The chat itself will begin at 9 E/8 C/ 7 M/ 6 P and continue as long as you like. This is for you, and I want it to be fun for you.

During the chat, I'll take down the names of participants and someone will win a signed copy of Naked Edge, plus a $25 gift card to Borders.

Spread the word. Bring your friends.

I’ll be having another one in a couple of weeks because there are people who want to participate but who can’t.

If you have questions, post them here or e-mail me: pamelaclare @ earthlink.net (remove spaces). Also, feel free to propose discussion topics, but if please be careful not to post spoilers or at least to warn people before you do.

This is the first time I’ve done anything like this, so I’m very excited!

See you tomorrow night!

Giving birth in chains — my day at the state capitol

This shouldn’t be part of any woman's prison sentence.

What a day. It started with a really awful night.

Y'all know that my body has been through the wringer. There’s the whole falling-of-the-cliff gig. There’s the broken neck thing. And then there’s the gave-birth-to-a-baby-with-a-15-inch-head incident, which tore my cervix, caused permanent damage to my lower spine and even made my hips hemorrhage internally. (Can they really do that? Yes. TMI? Sorry, I’m a journalist. There's never any such thing as TMI.)

Somehow yesterday I did violence to myself and set off the lower spine problem. I’ve had physical therapy, massage, steroid injections and every other thing that can be done short of that special Klingon spine replacement surgery they do for Worf on Star Trek. I would sign up for trials for that, but no one’s doing them yet...

To make a boring story shorter, I couldn’t even lie down last night without serious pain. I finally took narcotics and got maybe four hours. What does a newspaper E-in-C do she's been awake all night? She gets up and goes to work.

Today was our press day — and we made our deadline — but it was also the day I was supposed to meet the president of Colorado’s Senate to see whether there was any chance of getting legislation going to make it illegal to put women inmates in chains when they're in labor.

And... It went really, really well. I took the packet of materials I had put together out of my own research on the topic, met with him privately in his office, and gave him my impassioned plea to end this practice. He got a funny look on his face and said, “Do you mean to say that they actually shackle a woman by her wrist or ankle to a hospital bed even though she’s already under armed guard?” And I said, “Yes."

He read through the materials I’d brought and told me that he’d give his approval for the introduction of this as a late bill — we are past the legislative deadline for new bills for 2010 — provided I can find a senator willing to introduce it. Too bad there isn’t really a Reece Sheridan for me to turn to... (for this and other reasons)

The photo I had in mind for Megan when I wrote Unlawful Contact.

Elated, I left his office and got lost. Then I got on the elevator and meant to go to a different floor and wondered why the elevator wasn’t moving. Then I realized I kept pushing the button for the second floor... and I was on the second floor. And that explained why the lobbyist in the elevator was giving me strange looks.

The Colorado State Capitol in downtown Denver

So there’s a lot more to do to get this effort underway, but I feel things are converging. When I got back to the office — which entailed driving through a short blizzard — I found I had a message from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) saying that they had hoped to get legislation rolling about this for next year but that if I already had something underway they’d throw their weight behind it. And so it’s on!

I feel very happy about this. It’s something I’ve tried to make happen for a long time, but I haven’t been able to persuade a lawmaker to take up the challenge. Now I’ve done the research they’ll need to pass the bill, and I’m willing to throw the newspaper behind it. Is that objective journalism? Do I care?

Back when the Founders created the First Amendment, newspapers played an advocacy role on behalf of things they believed were important issues. Nowadays “advocacy” is saved for the editorial pages. But sometimes that’s not enough.

Too many people don’t care about women, and especially about women in prison. I have to change that somehow. I can’t exactly say why this became so important to me, but it is. When my mother told a friend what I was working on, her friend said, “Well, I guess they shouldn't have landed in prison.”

But birth impacts the baby, too. And no prison sentence should include being chained while doing that uniquely beautiful thing that only women can do — bringing a new life into the world.

I am staking myself to this one.

I know it has nothing to do with fiction or Naked Edge, which I’m supposed to be promoting now with tireless zeal. And though it was mentioned in Unlawful Contact through the character of Megan, it really has nothing to do with my novels. But it has to do with what’s important to me on a soul-deep level. And so here it is.

If you’re interested in checking on or changing the policies in your state, please let me know! I’ll hook you up. If you want me to blog on this topic, baby, I’m all yours.

Time for more percocet... If only I had some chocolate!

Now back to your regularly

Behind bars again

Like a habitual offender, I found myself behind bars again.

Today, I went to the state’s women’s prison to interview pregnant inmates. As anyone who’s read Unlawful Contact knows, women in prison has been a topic of interest for me for a very long time.

Back in 1997, I spent 24 hours as an inmate in the county jail in an effort to learn more about the experience women face while incarcerated. You can read all about that here.

Since then, I’ve covered incarcerated women's issues from lots of different viewpoints, including reporting on a woman who lost her baby after guards neglected her when she went into labor. (Unlawful Contact is dedicated to the memory of her baby.)

This time, my focus was strictly on the health care pregnant women receive while in state prison. (Note: "Prison" and "jail" are not interchangeable terms. Prisons are run by the federal government or the state, while jails are run by cities and counties. Long sentences are served in prison, while minor sentences are served in jails, generally speaking. Lifers go to prison, not jail.)

When I first arrived, the guard at the front desk didn’t have me listed in his computer as being approved for a visit — a mistake that took about 20 minutes to correct. I know from experience what to bring and what not to bring to prison, so they searched my purse and had to remove nothing. Then I was escorted back to the medical unit, which was very busy.

While there, I was able to interview several pregnant inmates — one who is only three weeks away from her due date — and an inmate who gave birth to a little boy last Thursday.

Most of the women I spoke with were in prison for drug offenses — possession and use of illegal drugs, including meth. One was there for having gone joy riding in a stolen car after a drinking binge with friends. Yeah, not a good decision.

For all of them, the worst part of having a baby in prison was (or will be) having to give up the baby shortly after birth. The woman who'd had her baby last week got to hold her son for five hours and was then taken down to a locked ward, where she stayed overnight. The next day she was brought back to prison. She hasn't seen her baby since the day he was born.

Personally, I can’t imagine enduring that. I could barely let go of my babies when they were newborn, even to let their grandparents hold them. Having to give them up... Well, that’s one good reason to stay out of prison.

One of the pregnant women hoped to give her baby into the care of a community of Mennonites, who have taken on the very selfless and loving task of raising the children of female inmates while the children’s mothers do time. State law allows people to seek to adopt children who are in foster care for more than a year, so a woman with kids who is sentenced to a few years behind bars is probably going to lose custody of her kids forever — a situation that causes extreme depression and heartache for these women. The Mennonites, however, take these babies and children into their families, raise them as their own, bring them to visit their mothers and do everything they can to support bonding between mothers and children. They even help mothers get jobs and help them transition into parenting.

God bless the Mennonites!

But for all the difficulties and discomfort, there are sometimes positive aspects to being pregnant in prison. For women who's lives are in shambles, prison can be a shelter from the more horrible aspects of their lives — drugs, prostitution, boyfriends and husbands who abuse them and so on. One pregnant mother told me that she'd used drugs during a previous pregnancy but that because she was in prison, she's been clean and feels for the first time that she's bonding with her baby.

The practitioners I met — nurses, assistants, and others — were extremely caring and kind. It reminded me why some woman inmates deliberately try to find reasons to go to the medical unit — they feel cared for there.

Any time I interview offenders or visit a prison or jail, I am amazed at how off-track some people’s lives can get. The lives of women in prison are a mix of tragedies and very bad choices. A night of drinking. Hooking up with the wrong boyfriend. Turning to drugs to deal with the pain of past violence. The inability or unwillingness to see to take responsibility for one’s life.

You'd be surprised — astonished, really — to see the connection between childhood violence, including incest and sexual assault, and criminality in women. There’s also a big connection between women’s boyfriends/husbands and criminality. Men tend to drag the women in their lives into their criminal actions. For example, a man might beat someone up on a drug deal gone bad while his girlfriend sits in the car... And then she’s also charged.

Wow, I'm really rambling here, aren’t I?

All of the interviews today are going to be part of an article focused on pregnant women in prison. I still have additional interviews to do, but after months (and months) of trying to schedule this prison visit, I’m happy to have gotten this far.