Pregnant in chains: Bipartisan push grows to end shackling of NC inmates during labor
In the summer of 2019, a pregnant woman started going into labor in jail. Guards chained her up, put her in a transport van and sent her to Vidant Medical Center in Greenville.
But they weren’t quite fast enough. She partially delivered her baby on the way to the hospital. Its head broke through to the outside world, but not the rest of its body.
When she got to the hospital, said one of the doctors there, the deputy escorting her wouldn’t take off her shackles due to jail policy. So hospital workers had to cut off her clothes. She remained shackled while she finished delivering her baby, who was rushed into intensive care while the mom was whisked to the emergency room. The baby did not survive.
When they brought the baby’s body back to its mother, she reached out to hold it and grieve — but was jerked back, away from her baby, by the chains still holding her down onto her bloody stretcher.
Dr. Kerianne Crockett, the OBGYN who helped deliver the baby, cries when she tells the story.
“It was truly horrific,” she said.
She’s channeling her own grief and anger about that day into an effort to convince state lawmakers to stop shackling pregnant inmates.
The practice already is banned in federal prisons, due to a criminal justice reform law that then-President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018.
But state prisons and county jails hold far more inmates than federal prisons.
In North Carolina, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is expected to file a bill within the coming days to ban the practice in those facilities, too.
“My caucus is a pro-life caucus, and pro-life means supporting babies in development,” said Sen. Amy Galey, a Republican from Alamance County, who plans to back the bill in the Senate.
State prisons technically have a ban on shackling when women are actively in labor, similar to the federal ban, through a 2018 internal policy. But supporters of this bill say the current policy is often ignored, hence the need for a law to give it more teeth and mandate training for corrections employees.
“They have an internal policy that’s similar to this, though anecdotal stories are showing there are frequent incidents where some of those policies are not being implemented,” said Rep. Ashton Clemmons, a Democrat from Guilford County, who plans to sponsor the anti-shackling bill in the House.
Draft versions of the anti-shackling bill show it would apply throughout the women’s second and third trimesters, plus their postpartum recovery, not just during labor, which is covered by the current state prison policy. And unlike state prisons, the state’s 100 county sheriffs have no uniform policy for their jails — something this bill would change.
As part of Crockett’s advocacy, she reached out to her former patient and received permission to tell her story to The News & Observer. Crockett is withholding certain details, including the woman’s name and the county she was jailed in.
Vidant Medical Center, located on ECU’s campus, handles high-risk pregnancies in 29 counties around Eastern North Carolina. Crockett said she knows at least one of those counties’ jails changed its shackling policy after the baby’s death 18 months ago. She has since helped an inmate give birth — unshackled. She said she never felt threatened, and the woman never tried to escape, nor could Crockett imagine how that would even be physically possible.
Puts baby’s health at risk
Shackles can be used to give guards extra control when inmates are being moved — when they travel to court or the hospital, or even just from their cell to the showers.
Inmates who are shackled typically have their ankles cuffed together and their wrists chained to their waist. For pregnant women, activists say that puts the baby’s health at risk because the ankle chains make them more likely to trip, and the wrist chains make them unable to break a fall by sticking out their arms.
Galey said there’s an emotional side to it, too.
“The dignity of the mother is the same as the health of the baby,” she said. “We have learned so much in the last 20, 30 years about the development of unborn children, and the effect of stress on mothers. And the effect that can be had on the baby’s brain development, and physical development, intellectual development, mental health.”
In Greenville, in the case of the woman whose baby died, Crockett said deputies eventually allowed the mom to be unshackled so she could hold her baby’s body. But it took Crockett demanding to go up the chain of command and call bosses at the jail and sheriff’s office. And even that depended entirely on the attitude of those individuals, she said, to solve a problem that never should have existed.
“There’s kind of two parts to the tragicness of her story,” she said. “One is the loss of her baby and whether or not anything that happened in detention contributed to that. And then the other piece is how the indiscriminate use of restraints added to the horror of it.”
Most jail inmates not convicted
In jails, unlike prisons, the vast majority of inmates have not been found guilty of their charges and are awaiting trial and either weren’t given bail or can’t afford it.
So ending shackling there could have a domino effect for pregnant women deciding whether to fight their charges, like Kristie Puckett-Williams.
A little over 12 years ago, she was in the Mecklenburg County Jail facing drug charges for cocaine. She spent most of her second and third trimesters in the jail, holding out for her right to a trial. Until, that is, some fellow inmates told her horror stories of other women who had given birth in jail.
“You will be shackled to that bed when you deliver it,” she said they told her. “Then you will have less than 24 hours with that baby before they come and put it into foster care, unless you have somebody here to take it.”
She decided having a record would be better than that. Nine months pregnant, and after six months behind bars, she pleaded guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a schedule II drug, a felony.
Since jail officials never let her have an ultrasound or see a doctor during the months she was in jail, Puckett-Williams told The News & Observer, she didn’t know she was having twins until she was giving birth.
“I received no prenatal care while I was there,” Puckett-Williams said. “No doctor, no ultrasound. So I took a plea deal so I could get out. And five days later I had my twin girls.”
Bipartisan support for changes
Puckett-Williams went on to college and then graduate school. Now 41, she still lives in Charlotte and works with the American Civil Liberties Union, advocating for criminal justice reform as the director of the N.C. Campaign for Smart Justice.
A draft version of the bill provided to The N&O shows it would still let jail and prison guards shackle women if they’re an escape risk, or are threatening violence to themselves or their baby. Puckett-Williams said she can understand the shackles in extreme circumstances in cases where medical professionals determine the woman might pose a harm to herself or her baby. But she questions why shackling pregnant inmates is as common as it currently is.
“They were just choosing to be cruel to me,” she said. “I posed no threat. I had never tried to escape. But they had me locked down like I was Hannibal Lecter, just without the facemask.”
The issue has such broad support that it’s backed by both the liberal-leaning ACLU and the American Conservative Union, plus nonpartisan groups like the North Carolina OBGYN Society, who Crockett is working with.
The draft version of the bill has some additional rules for pregnant inmates, like guarantees that they get “sufficient food and dietary supplements” and wouldn’t be put into solitary confinement unless “an important circumstance exists.”
Puckett-Williams said those are important considerations. Pregnant women need to eat well to help their unborn babies and to avoid getting gestational diabetes, and they need to be able to walk around to avoid dangerous blood clots in their legs.
But mostly, she’s looking forward to a time when pregnant women no longer will be held in chains if they’ve been convicted or even just accused of a crime.
“Where am I going to go when I’m laboring?” she said. “I’m going to get up and run while I’ve got the umbilical cord hanging out of me? Come on.”
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This story was originally published April 5, 2021 at 12:47 PM.
