Withholding menstrual products leads to life-threatening conditions.
Have you ever wondered how women handle their periods in prison? Based on my research this summer, many of the people who design prison systems definitely have not.
When period products are not adequately supplied, incarcerated women are forced to live in unsanitary, life-threatening conditions. They must take desperate measures to meet their basic needs— from creating do-it-yourself tampons to sacrificing stamp and phone call money to buy supplies at the overpriced commissary. This is basically a small store in the prison where inmates can buy hygiene products and other essentials.
The more I researched this manufactured period poverty, the more I felt it is being weaponized against women to torture and humiliate them. The lack of necessary menstrual products for incarcerated women is a social justice, human dignity, and public health crisis. With the third highest female incarceration rate in the US, Oklahomans must address this problem.
To find out more about period poverty in Oklahoma prisons, I interviewed April Wilkens, who is currently incarcerated at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. She described the many, predominantly financial, barriers inmates face in accessing period and other hygiene products essential to health and dignity.
As Wilkens put it, the prison system “takes everything away from someone, and makes them buy it back.”
Inmates receive one small roll of toilet paper per week and 30 tampons or pads per month. These products are of such low quality, that Wilkens has heard of women with heavier flows having to wear four pads at a time. For some women, the supply only lasts a day. When you run out of the provisioned pads and tampons, the only way to acquire more is through the commissary. For Oklahoma’s incarcerated women making pitiful wages at prison jobs, the prices are astronomical. Wilkens says there are women who spend their entire incomes on period products. But that is only an option when period product shipments are on time and available. When there are delays in orders or lockdowns, women may be left with no access to period products at all.
Prisoners must also buy other necessary toiletries like shampoo, soap, toothbrushes, and toothpaste from the commissary. “Indigent” (or impoverished) inmates, who have less than $10.50 a month in their trust accounts, and who cannot afford the commissary prices have to make do with the hotel-sized personal care products provided by the state each month.
While the OK Department of Corrections technically requires the provision of pads, tampons and other personal hygiene products for indigent inmates, the carceral facility only has to provide “the minimum amount needed to accommodate [the inmate’s] need.” Furthermore, Oklahoma is one of 25 states that has no law mandating period products be provided. This means that OK DOC could easily change their policy. What is available to women is largely dependent on bureaucratic decision making processes with little public oversight. Soap, pads and other items required to maintain personal hygiene are essentials, not luxuries, and withholding them leads to the human dignity and health crises exemplified by the stories Wilkens recounts.
Particularly excruciating for menstruators is the transportation process, whether that is being shuttled to another prison, going to court or seeing a doctor. While she was able to bring menstrual products along with her when being escorted between facilities, Wilkens has heard horror stories of women who started menstruating in transport and were forced to bleed on themselves.
Wilkens describes being forced to live in these inhumane and “filthy” conditions as an “extremely traumatic” level of oppression. It is not difficult to see why. When I stain my clothes, I am able to clean myself and change. I can hardly imagine the shame, dehumanization, physical pain and denial of dignity incarcerated women suffer, on top of all the other trauma associated with incarceration. I struggle to understand how giving someone — incarcerated or not — no choice but to sit in their blood can be understood as anything other than mental and physical torture.
The experiences of dehumanization and abuse Wilkens shared with me are echoed around the nation. Other incarcerated women have told gruesome stories about the strip searches mandatory for visitation, during which period products must be removed and are not reissued. Running the risk of bleeding onto themselves, many refuse visits from family and attorneys while on their periods exacerbating the challenges navigating the legal system and overall social isolation incarcerated individuals often experience.
Taken together, these individual experiences demonstrate a pervasive health and abuse crisis. In the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law Amy Fettig explores how menstruation is weaponized in the prison system more broadly. She describes how women must beg guards for period products in some states, creating “a hierarchy of control and oppression that promotes safety and security risks for people in institutions.”
