Maria Gasca beams while describing her one-year-old daughter.
“De Maya is a very demanding little girl. She is very girly, she loves pretty things. She also loves to draw, paint, she loves music, she loves playing outside. She is something else I tell you.”
DeMaya is like every other toddler. But Gasca is not like other mothers. She is an inmate at the Decatur Correctional Centre for Women outside Chicago.
DeMaya lives with her mother on E-Wing, a special unit of the facility that houses incarcerated mothers and their children, up to two years old.
But some question whether such programs are ethical and argue that prison is no place for a baby.
“She’s not in prison, I am,” says Gasca. “She has as much freedom as she wants, she never gets treated as an inmate at all.”
Decatur is one of the dozens of prisons in 22 countries around the world, including Canada, that has a mother-baby program meant to help a woman rehabilitate through mothering.
It also has health benefits for the baby by allowing breastfeeding and maternal bonding, both shown to affect a baby’s emotional and physical development.
But there are a lot of misconceptions about these programs, says Decatur warden Shelith Hansbro.
“…People think that these infants are behind bars, that they’re living in jail… we’re far from that.”
Hansbro describes E-Wing as a nursery, with pink walls, cartoon murals, toys and rocking chairs. There is even an outdoor playground that children have access to at all times.
Access to the wing is restricted; women are carefully screened before they can enter. The babies are not brought into the general population.
In 2013, Gasca was sent to Decatur for drug possession. She was also three months pregnant.
Gasca saw the program as a chance to spend time with her daughter. “…I want to … show her another side of life, not the life that I had been leading for awhile,” she says. Her husband is also incarcerated and her mother is raising her other two children.
“This is a privilege; this is a blessing for me to be here with my baby.”
Hansbro stresses that guaranteeing a baby’s safety is paramount.
Mothers must qualify to be admitted into the program. They are screened by child welfare services and the facility. No one convicted of a violent offence will get in.
There are also cameras in each cell, as well as parenting rules. Guards closely monitor the wing.
“Its child abuse in my opinion to raise children in a jail,” says Grant Wilson of the Canadian Children’s Right Council.
Canada introduced a mother-baby program in its federal prisons in 1997.
“They can excuse this as infantile amnesia, that the child won’t remember most of this or all of this, but it’s still unethical,” he says.
Wilson argues that other options, like foster care or being raised by the father, should be considered first.
WATCH BELOW: Howard Sapers is Canada’s correctional investigator. While he thinks keeping mother and child together is the best start, Grant Wilson of the Canadian children’s rights council doesn’t buy it. He says better options are available.
Howard Sapers, Canada’s Correctional Investigator, says those options are considered, but if a woman was able to keep her baby on the outside, the same rule should apply on the inside.
“The default should really be to keep them together and then look at the reasons why that isn’t possible.”
Gasca says it doesn’t matter what other people think about her being a mother, she is not going to be coming back to prison thanks to the program.
“I can’t come back here,” she says.
“I love my kids, so I can’t take the chance of being away from them.”
16×9’s “Babies Behind Bars” airs this Saturday at 7pm.
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