Here is the first draft work I did for the Historical Conversations Project. I knew that I wanted to write about the incarcerated female population, especially pregnant inmates, but I was unsure of which aspect I wanted to write about, whether it was the process of giving birth behind bars, the separation between the mother and child, or the overall health care in women's prisons. I was off to a good start in terms of research, and was especially happy when you commented "fantastic!" on my first submission, as you can see at the very end of the page. I put a lot of effort into the initial stages of the HCP, but the work I did here did not translate properly into my first draft because I was confused as to which aspect of women in prison I was trying to focus on. I let your comment get to my head and did not work on clarifying my argument like I should have. In fact, I didn't even have a proper argument on my first submission, located on the sidebar to the right.

Parenthood in Prison: Incarcerated Mothers Who Give Birth Behind Bars

1. - Since the HCP is a multi-modal project, will we be required to do presentations in class?
   - How many visual pieces of evidence do you recommend we use in our HCP?
   
   
2. Yager, Sarah. "Prison Born." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, July 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
   
   The Editorial Board. "Women Behind Bars." The New York Times. The New York Times, 29 Nov. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
   
   Law Library - American Law and Legal Information. "Prisons: Prisons for Women - Problems And Unmet Needs In The Contemporary Women's Prison." - Children, Abuse, Health, and Offenders. Net Industries, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
   
   Parenting from Prison. Investigation Discovery. Discovery Communications, LLC, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
   
   Fritz, Stephanie, and Kevin Whiteacre. "Prison Nurseries: Experiences of Incarcerated Women during Pregnancy."Taylor & Francis Online. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 07 Nov. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
   
   Ahrens, Deborah. "Incarcerated Childbirth And Broader "Birth Control": Autonomy, Regulation, And The State."Missouri Law Review 80.1 (2015): 1-51. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.
   
   

1. Answer the following questions in complete paragraphs and please quote from your source material at least once in each paragraph:
1. What are your sources and what did you find in those sources that was compelling (or not: you should also explain when a source didn't work and why you think that source was problematic).
   
   I started with newspaper and magazine articles from The Atlantic and New York Times to introduce myself to the topic and learn about facts and background information about the social issue I chose. To further my research, I looked into a law encyclopedia, watched a short video clip from a TV series called Women in Prison, and skimmed through two scholarly journals I found in the Academic Search Complete library database. Both scholarly sources were published in the last couple of months during the winter of 2015, so they are fairly recent pieces of evidence that I can use to support historical contexts of the problem for the present. I found the personal testimonies of incarcerated mothers to be the most compelling-- when people are able to tell their side of the story, it helps the audience to relate and emotionally connect with the person, not only providing solid evidence but allowing us to identify ourselves from their point of view. If we want to know the core of a problem, we should ask those who are mainly being affected. I’m a very empathetic person; I feel others’ emotional pain quite easily, and to read about the struggles that pregnant women face in prison had a significant impact on me, especially when I learned about the inadequate prison healthcare system and how most women’s medical demands are often ignored and not taken seriously. In one of the scholarly articles I read, one inmate who was restrained with handcuffs during child birth claimed that she was not viewed as “a lady having a baby but some type of criminal monster” (Fritz & Whiteacre). This demonstrates the highly punitive nature of the American criminal justice system and shows how criminals are treated like animals. Though inmates are serving time for crimes they may have committed, it is unconstitutional to  dehumanize criminals, for it is a fundamental right to be treated with human dignity, no matter the circumstances and especially for incarcerated mothers who are fostering life behind bars.
   
   
2. What topic did you finally settle on? What was/were the source(s) that led you to settle on this topic? What sorts of specific social, economic, legal and/or ethical problems have you found that warrant our attention to this issue? (In other words, who is suffering as a result of this problem and how?) What, as far as you have been able to find, is the cause of this problem? (In other words, who or what caused the suffering and why?)
   
   At first I was interested in women behind bars, and as I began to research more on the topic I narrowed it down to incarcerated mothers who give birth in prison. The source that led me to choose this subject was the article from The Atlantic called “Prison Born”, which introduced the topic of prison nursuries and discussed the effects of such programs on women who raise their children while in custody. I learned that women who participate in these nursuries are “significantly less likely to return to prison than inmates in the general population” and that there is a considerable lack of rehabilitative community prison programs to support women with children (Yager). Moreover, pregnant inmates are treated inhumanely in prison and are “routinely shackled during labor and recovery”, which reflects and reinforces complicated ideas about health care in the United States (Yager). These pregnancy specific patterns of social control offer important insights into our culture’s values and preoccupations when it comes to the American criminal justice system. While I haven’t done enough research to figure out who the main players are for this issue, what I assume has caused this problem in the prison healthcare system is perhaps a large failure to enforce certain medical care prison procedures and the apathy of prison administrators and staff when it comes to the well being and health of female inmates, who are viewed as “bad mothers” undeserving to be pregnant or give birth in the first place.
   
   
3. Did you find out anything about the historical underpinnings of your topic? Would you characterize those causes as policy-related? Cultural? Both? Please explain.
   
   Since my topic deals with the criminal justice system, there were many policy related underpinnings. Most of my sources provided background information on the War on Drugs and mandatory sentencing sentencing minimums, as well as court litigation cases related to children born in prison. Apgar v. Beauter (1937), ruled that “the constant care and attention of its natural mother” is vital for raising a child, even if the mother was an accused murderer, and continues to describe the negative impact on young children who are deprived of maternal care (Ahrens). I also read that many women in prison were convicted for low-level drug offenses rather than violent crimes, and a significant amount were caught up in “larger conspiracy prosecutions targeted primarily at drug dealers they were living with” (Editorial Board, New York Times). Less than half of all incarcerated women have been convicted of a violent offense, indicating that many of these incarcerated women were serving time under mandatory sentences for drug related crimes. This further indicates the kind of “tough on crime” policies that pervade the American criminal justice system, and ultimately criminalizes drug addiction rather than treating it as a public health concern. While incarceration rates have soared in the last 50 years, the growth in the incarceration rate for women has outpaced that for men, and approximately 4 to 9 percent of women in prison are pregnant. Though this is a relatively low number, it does not disguise the fact that pregnancy and reproductive health needs are a highly neglected area of health care.
   
   
4. Based on the information you found, have you come up with a possible argument? (e.g., "I noticed that Obama's Race to the Top program uses some of the same punishments as Bush's No Child Left Behind does. I wonder if there is any really relevant difference between the two, or if it is all just smoke and mirrors, a political language game that may actually hurt someone or some group--probably the children who receive public education") 
   
   While pregnancy and reproductive health needs are a neglected area of prison healthcare, there is a universal lack of competent healthcare staff workers to fulfill the demanding medical needs of women in prison as a whole. However, the distinct and specific needs of pregnant inmates have been widely elided and ignored, illustrating that the American criminal justice system is ill-equipped to deal with these issues as they are better managed outside the punitive environment of a prison.
   
   
   
   

Figure 1 shows your comment on my draft work.