In 1992 Barbara Echols was working as a medical biller in Chicago when she walked into a department store, took some clothing, and left without paying. Convicted of shoplifting, she was sentenced to two years and sent downstate to Dwight Correctional Center. Though Echols was in prison for only six months, after her release she attended a meeting of the Prison Action Committee, an advocacy group fighting for prison reform. She joined the group as a volunteer, and this January she became its director.
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Prison Action Committee, with nearly a third of its board members still in jail, receives about 65 letters a week and 20 calls a day from inmates and their families. Currently the group is conducting a study on medical care for women in Dwight. “We know that women are getting very, very poor medical care,” she says. “It takes forever to see a doctor, and women are not entitled to second opinions. There are active TB cases, and the gynecological care is very poor.”
Women also have less access to activities and education, Echols says, especially at coed institutions like Dixon Correctional Center. “When women were put there [five years ago] they cut down on programs and recreation time. It’s overcrowded, and women are treated like second-class citizens. They have less of everything. We had to file suit to gain access to the law library. And women are the last ones to get the higher-paying industry jobs, because the men don’t want to give them up.
“We said no way,” says Josefina, who didn’t want to have her daughters so far from each other. “So the lawyers sent letters, people called, and we put enough pressure on them that we were able to change their position.”
