KY Study Researching Women Offenders
As a young social worker, Seana Golder said she was profoundly influenced by her work with women inmates in a Louisiana prison — many of whom had experienced abuse, poverty, addiction or mental illness. “I would go home at night and those women were staying there,” said Golder, now an associate professor at the University of Louisville’s Kent School of Social Work. “To me, it’s how do we keep those women from ending up in prison?” Story from the Courier Journal.
Golder and three colleagues hope to answer that question through a $1.5 million, federally funded study aimed at developing research to better understand why women end up in the criminal justice system and how to help them stay out.
Within the next few weeks, the team will begin recruiting women in the Louisville area for the study, which eventually will examine circumstances of more than 400 women on probation and parole.
Other researchers on the team are Linda Bledsoe, an associate professor at the Kent School; George Higgins, an associate professor in justice administration at U of L; and TK Logan, an associate professor of behavioral science at the University of Kentucky.
The goal is to develop information that corrections officials and other researchers can use to help women avoid prison, a poorly researched area where most of the focus has been on male offenders, they said.
“This is a big study, but it’s going to give us a lot of information that we just don’t have,” Higgins said.
The project is called “The Women’s Health Research Study” and will focus on how participants were affected by victimization, a characteristic of many female offenders who were subject to physical or sexual abuse as children and violence from partners as adults, Golder said.
The researchers said they aren’t aware of any other similar research on the scale of their project, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“It really is a unique opportunity,” Golder said. “It will form so much policy and practice in corrections.”
Officials with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, which is assisting by providing information and data, said they are delighted researchers are undertaking the project at a time when the state is seeking to contain corrections costs and reduce its growing offender population.
“We are thrilled to see that develop,” said Lee VanHoose, the department’s director of probation and parole. “It’s going to be such a benefit to us.”
The number of women offenders in Kentucky is growing rapidly — about 2,200 are incarcerated and another 15,000 are on probation and parole. VanHoose said she’s especially pleased the research project aims to produce specific findings corrections officials can use to try to steer women out of the criminal justice system.
“Statistics are good, but it’s also good to have some real-world opportunities and direction,” she said.
Researchers plan to collect a detailed history from women who agree to participate and then check in with them twice more over five years to see how they have fared while on probation and parole. Golder said all information from interviews will be confidential and will not be shared with the Corrections Department.
To increase the comfort of the subjects, only females will conduct the interviews. Golder said that’s particularly important when subjects have a history of abuse or sexual exploitation. Participants will be paid a small stipend for their help.
Not only could the findings help corrections officials save money, researchers said, but it could reduce the terrible costs to families when a woman is incarcerated. While the costs are always high, incarceration of women tends to have a more severe impact because they often are the primary caregivers for children, Bledsoe said.
In a previous career as a social worker, Bledsoe said she sometimes had to take children to visit their mothers incarcerated at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women at Pewee Valley. Often, the children were in foster care and couldn’t understand why, or why their mothers couldn’t come home.
“It was very hard,” she said. “It was very emotional for both parties.”
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