Back from Visit with D.C. Incarcerated Women, Norton Will Seek Hearing and New Drug Program

Press Release

Following her meeting with the 50 women from the District incarcerated at the Secured Female Facility (SFF) in Hazelton, West Virginia, during a visit on Friday, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) suggested that if the women organize a group, she would regularly correspond with the group to help prepare them for their transition back to D.C., sending them her news letter and news releases, and sending books often sent to her as a member of Congress, and other things to assist their re-entry. The women enthusiastically greeted the idea, which capped an hour long meeting with them following a tour of the entire facility. Norton will seek a hearing on the 350 women inmates from the District confined throughout the United States early in the 111th Congress. The Congresswoman also will hold a video conference between the women inmates and D.C. residents as she did after her trip to Rivers Correctional Institute (RCI), a private contracted Bureau of Prison (BOP) facility in North Carolina, last October.

Hazelton is the only low security women's prison without the valued 500 hour residential drug treatment program, which allows a one-year reduction in sentence upon successful completion. The women expressed a great need for the residential program, and Warden Jim Cross and Susan Folk, the Administrator for women at Hazelton are trying to bring the residential program there. Norton said she will seek the program at Hazelton, as she did in getting the program for all D.C. prisoners in BOP facilities for men last year. She told the women that "helping them come home clean" was her first priority.

Norton, who toured the facility with staff, was impressed with the physical facility at the two-year women's prison, as well as the personnel, but she said that the prison was crowded and under staffed. The BOP is building another prison in the Midwest to reduce overcrowding at the West Virginia prison. Staffing shortages that result from the overcrowding has led to practical, but not always effective innovations, such as having inmates help each other, but the women said that this form of staffing and the lack of trained personnel to supervise was inadequate and deprived them of G.E.D. preparation, which is required by law for all BOP inmates. The women said that the G.E.D. also was a necessary pre-requisite for other programs, but G.E.D. programs were so crowded that the women often could not get the G.E.D. Therefore, they said, some were deprived of many of the most useful programs since the G.E.D. has been made a pre-requisite for vocational training programs. These, and many other issues raised by the women, will be raised at the BOP hearing on women's facilities for D.C. women inmates next year.

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