The Netflix show “Orange Is The New Black” told the stories of inmates at a women’s prison.
A lot of the show was about the situations they faced within the prison walls — but it was lauded for the way it also explored the lives of its characters before they arrived in prison.
By showing the abuses and injustices they faced in their lives before they committed the crimes that landed them behind bars, the characters became more three-dimensional and human.
A recently-published new survey is doing something similar with real-life prisoners in Arizona. The project was a collaboration between therapist and Arizona State University professor Dominique Roe-Sepowitz and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
The team collected biographical information about hundreds of women at the Estrella Jail, seeking to understand what experiences they’d had prior to being arrested.
This was a continuation of work that Roe-Sepowitz has been doing for some time. She’s been running programs with small groups of women at Estrella since 2018. But she'd been feeling like there was more they could be doing.
And as she told The Show recently, when Jerry Sheridan was elected sheriff of Maricopa County, an opportunity arrived.
Full conversation
DOMINIQUE ROE-SEPOWITZ: I partnered with his wife, her name is Stacie Sheridan. And she was really interested in this idea of learning more about the female inmates. So as we talked about what's next, what's our next part of this work, it was how could we ask questions to all the women who live there at this moment, see what happened to them in their lives, and see what kind of programming we could create to prevent lots of things. Recidivism, further exploitation, better relationships with their kids and their partners and their parents. So how could we be the most helpful?
SAM DINGMAN: So am I understanding correctly that you were hearing anecdotal accounts that suggested that it would be worth doing a broader formal inquiry into their experience?
ROE-SEPOWITZ: Over the last six years, we've been asking similar questions to very small groups of women at Estrella. So we would survey 14 women who came to our therapeutic group. We'd survey 20 women; the next quarter, another 15. And what we were seeing were these incredibly high rates of violence and victimization, but it only captured this tiny group that was going through a specific substance abuse treatment program.
So when we asked to broaden it and say, really, we don't know this anywhere in the country — this study hasn't happened before. And so when we got a very quick yes from the new sheriff, this idea that we could really enhance programming for women based on data is so remarkable and really speaks to this forward thinking.
DINGMAN: And it's also remarkable that, as you just said, you got a "quick yes." You mentioned the size of the sample was 408 participants, if I'm not mistaken. How did the survey work at a logistical level? How did the women encounter the questions and what questions were they answering?
ROE-SEPOWITZ: We had a very structured approach. We went in with mental health staff with us, with MCSO staff who are partners on this work. We introduced the survey to them. We read the consent form and they were handed a form, whether it was in English or in Spanish. Took them about 15 minutes to complete it.
We had pencils with us, and we made sure that every single one came back. On this survey, it's an eight-page survey. It includes the adverse childhood experiences, lots of questions about their life, their childhoods, the experiences they've had with victimization and violence. It was anonymous. Nothing on their survey linked it back to them. We were very, very careful. And the surveys, of course, came with me and my staff. It didn't stay at the Sheriff's Office.
DINGMAN: And so they were opting in to participating.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: Absolutely. It was totally voluntary. There was no coercion. They were not in trouble if they didn't, and they didn't get any benefit if they did. Which is also really important with these very specific, high-risk populations we want to study.
DINGMAN: So let's talk about the findings, which are very striking. Over 80% of the women who responded said that they had been victims of domestic violence; 62.2% victims of sexual assault as an adult; over 50% victims of sex trafficking.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: The levels of violence and victimization was striking. It's something to really think about, that there's a group of people in our community living together who have so much shared victimization. And the fact that we invest so little in their rehabilitation and recovery that we really protect the community from them. And I really think this leads — this study leads us to this place where we need to reach in and take good care of them and really help them change the way things have gone for them.
People have done things to them who should have protected them and cared about them and loved them and nurtured them, and they did not. It is our job as a community to lend a hand and do something, to take this data and create programming that directly speaks to their needs — not just what we think they might need — but this speaks directly to what we think can help them heal from these experiences.
DINGMAN: But one of the challenges of that, of course, is that this is importantly jail, not prison that we're talking about. So the vast majority of the women at Estrella are there for a relatively short amount of time. .. What is it, about —
ROE-SEPOWITZ: So the average length of stay at Estrella is nine days.
DINGMAN: I realize this might be theoretical at this point, but what do you imagine those resources being during ... this brief nine-day window? Is this discussion groups, what does it look like?
ROE-SEPOWITZ: So we've created a new program. It's called the Becoming Collaborative based on the Michelle Obama book. The idea that people are continuing to grow and become. And so we're working together. We've collaborate with 11 different agencies in our community. We're working with Sojourner Center on creating a domestic violence and relationship safety group. So using this data as the foundation to create things that we believe to be really strong.
What it's going to look like though is it's going to be a one-event opportunity. So reaching out to those clients, meeting with them once, but if they come back, we'll see them again. They know we're there, they know we care, we see them, we hear them.
And then of course when they leave, they can make that contact when they get out.
DINGMAN: And you're saying, just to be clear, it's going to be a one event because they're probably not going to be there for very long.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: Right.
DINGMAN: OK.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: So lots of good topics, but at the beginning of each group and the end of each group, it's going to be the same thing. And it's really about connecting out into the community.
DINGMAN: Yeah, it seems like one of the elements of this that is intriguing — but also potentially like somewhat fraught — is when they're in jail, their time is not their own, right. So it might be more likely that they would seek out a conversation like this, an interaction like this about these subjects. Whereas many times people have been through intense trauma, you're trying to avoid engaging with it rather than seeking out opportunities to engage with it.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: I think working with incarcerated people is an incredible opportunity — a pause in their life to message, to connect, to feel worthwhile. There's a couple of things. One, in our interactions with incarcerated women, they didn't have the language of their life.
They didn't know what had happened to them, in some cases was what it was. So was this sexual abuse, was this sex trafficking? What does that mean for me if that is what it was? So, A, giving them that information and helping them just have some more power about their own experiences.
B, there's two perspectives on trauma-informed work. One is let clients come to you when they're ready. The other side, the converse with really complex trauma survivors is they have to be reminded each day that they're worthwhile, that we care about them, that we see them. And that means knocking on their door every day to say, "I see you, I hear you. Maybe today you'll come to group or maybe today you'll meet with me. And I'm a mentor, and I survived this or that, and I see you, I hear you."
And I think that is what we need to shift towards. Another thing to consider, one of the conversations we've had about this was these are people who have maybe hurt other people. Maybe these are people who are committing crimes. And the realization that most of the women that we found in Estrella were there for drug charges and for probation violations. So very few violent offenders and lots of self-harmers — people doing things that are endangering their own safety.
DINGMAN: Yes. Just to say 76.3%, according to the survey, had experience with self-harm.
ROE-SEPOWITZ: I love it when you refer from my survey.
DINGMAN: What, if any, conversations have you had with the Sheriff's Office about this? What was their reaction to this survey, and where are those conversations headed?
ROE-SEPOWITZ: We got together earlier this month and started putting the Becoming Collaborative together. And we've got our agencies, we have MCSO staff support and we should be starting in March.
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