Tina Torrez

From watching the film, I understand that women who are incarcerated do not receive the proper prenatal care in order to give birth to children. I feel that shackling an incarcerated mother to a hospital bed, when in labor, is cruel and unnecessary. Doing so has the potential to increase the risk of a child and/or mother to experience problems during birth. After hearing Tina Torrez’s experience when giving birth to her daughter as an inmate, it was clear the care inmate mothers receive is unacceptable when compared to the care mothers who are not labeled as inmates receive. Hearing her experience bothered me because of the fact that even though she was pregnant and giving birth, she was still treated as if she were not a human with physical and emotional feelings. The fact that officers shackled both her legs and an arm to her bed while she was giving birth was heartbreaking, but after hearing that officers reapplied the shackles to her ankles after they found they were causing her to bleed shows how unfair inmates can be treated. In the video Tina stated that, “everybody is just rough with you and there is just no compassion because of the title that is on you...you’re a prisoner.” …show more content…
With many women in prison not being aware of the rules and regulations and not knowing how to reconnect with their children, feeds the issue of foster homes being overpopulated. This is so because often times these women are notified after it is too late that they no longer have custody of their children, losing any connection they may have with their children. The amount of time it takes just for these mothers to become aware of any information involving their children torture. Mothers who are incarcerated need to be able to have more options than what they do now in order to reconnect with their