USA: women in prison in Florida get some needed attention

Florida legislators, no matter their party — and no matter their gender — have shown a heartening amount of empathy for incarcerated women on an issue that affects them, uniquely.

On Monday, the state Senate Criminal Justice Committee unanimously approve the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act. The legislation would guarantee that women behind bars have free and unlimited access to hygiene products.

It’s not an issue that makes the front pages. However, prison beatings — and murders — sexual assaults and bribery are not the only indignities to which prisoners are subjected. Finding their voices in the era of #MeToo, advocates say that women in jail, prison, holding facilities and even juvenile detention, depend on the whims of prison guards who might withhold sanitary items, giving them a few tissues instead — or nothing at all. Often, the women are forced to buy such basic necessities in the prison store.

The Act would also prohibit male corrections officers from performing strip and cavity searches on women. It’s already a Department of Corrections rule. However, it’s not a law and, advocates say, it’s not enforced.

It shouldn’t take a law to force corrections employees and the administrators who should be holding them accountable to perform their jobs, however stressful and difficult, with a modicum of human decency. Since that seems to be the case, however, lawmakers in subsequent review committees should move this proposal on to the full Legislature where, it is hoped, it would be unanimously approved. This should not still be an issue.

Hopefully, it is just one step toward the criminal justice reforms that in Florida, and across the country, have gotten the attention of lawmakers, law enforcement officials and even President Trump.

In his Feb. 5 State of the Union address, for instance, Trump drew lawmakers’ bipartisan applause when he mentioned the First Step Act, approved by Congress in December. The legislation, among other things, lets judges diverge from unyielding minimum mandatory sentences and allows those imprisoned for non-violent crimes to qualify for early release.

It is long overdue recognition of the costs — human and financial — of blind, mass incarceration in this country.

In Florida, the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, too, is considered a “first step.”

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