A highlight of the year with RWC Criminal Justice Professor Marilyn Simon and her students is a planned visit to Marysville Prison, also known as the Ohio Reformatory for Women. The class will be making a trip up to the facility on May 28. Built in 1916, the Reformatory is the only all-female prison in the Ohio State Prison system. It has over 2,400 inmates, including women who are on death row.
The Ohio Reformatory for Women is unique because it is the only facility in the state to have an active nursery within the institution. This nursery was setup in 2001. The major program that the nursery has is Achieving Baby Care Success (ABC’S). The ABC’S Program allows incarcerated pregnant inmates to maintain custody of their infants after they are born. Each participant has an individualized treatment plan so that the problems that resulted in her incarceration are thoroughly addressed.
Hands-on parenting instruction is available for every mother in the program. Eligible mothers for the program are screened and must be serving a short-term sentence for a non-violent crime. The criteria for the program ensures that the mothers and infants leave the institution together. There are currently nine babies in the nursery.
In 2000, former Ohio First Lady Hope Taft was instrumental in establishing a reading room for the children who visited their incarcerated parent at the Pickaway Correctional Institution. Due to her efforts, and the cooperation of the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Administration, all thirty-two state correctional facilities maintain children’s reading. The purpose behind the reading rooms is to encourage family literacy by providing a pleasant and comfortable setting for both child and incarcerated parent. Each room is stocked with a wide variety of children’s books and has an inmate narrator, who reads to the visiting children twice a day. The role of the inmate narrator is to read picture books to the children in much the same manner that children’s hour would be done at a public library. The inmate narrators worked over 32,000 hours in reading to and with the children.
Professor Simon said that there is an average of aboout 35-40 students that participate each year. When asked how the students have felt about their experiences in the past, she explained that most of them were first shocked to hear about the nursery but as they observed, those shocked feelings were turned to ones of understanding. Many of the students learn from the conversations that they have with the inmates. Most of the inmates are frank, open, and honest about the reason why they were there, Professor Simon said. “The students will probably remember the experience for the rest of their lives,” she said.
On another interesting note, Professor Simon funds these trips by writing grants. The grants make it possible for her students to get this neat experience.
Some of the information in this article was obtained from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Website, http://www.drc.ohio.gov/Public/orw.htm.