Cold bars, blue eye shadow, and the price of not snitching

This story broke my heart: In one of those “heartwarming” Mother’s Day stories, a reporter went to a Southern California youth prison to cover a special visiting day for the inmates from their children. A nonprofit had even provided free transportation for families. “The eager moms pulled their hair into neat pony tails, borrowed their favorite blue eye shadow and ironed the only clothes they own as they primped for a visit from their young children.” But only one child showed up.

It gets worse: Father’s Day is always more crowded than Mother’s Day.

The imprisonment of women is skyrocketing, up 775 percent since 1977, rising at double the rate of men. The single biggest factor in that rise, according to Silja Talvi, author of Women Behind Bars is the drug war, with its mandatory minimum sentencing, the resulting pressure to snitch to avoid those sentences, and the fact that women are less likely to snitch than men. “Prosecutors will come to them and say they will go to prison unless they give up the names of three higher-ups, but women usually either say they don't know those people or will simply decline. Men will snitch and, unfortunately, they often get less time in prison than women who don't,” Talvi says. And then men get visits from their kids and women don’t.

Just in case you weren’t already totally bummed:

Nearly every woman I interviewed (around 100) had a serious history of trauma or abuse in her life, emotional abuse or sexual abuse or domestic violence. Many had been raped. More than a third of the women entering the prison system were homeless.

God, this world is unfair. But there are people like Talvi in it. Talvi scraped and fundraised and spent her own money to get the stories of these women out to the world. And she found women beaten but unbowed:

I also didn't expect the women to be as tremendously resilient as they are. I expected to hear "Help me!" or "I can't take it anymore!" or "I'm going to kill myself!" They didn't do that. ... Instead, they often said, "This isn't just about me" ... they have a real sense of responsibility for each other.