Prison officials said the post-partum care they provide inmates is equal to that of anyone who has just given birth in the outside world. Women get a check-up a few days after returning to prison from the hospital, and another examination after two weeks. 

Brittany Bass was in the CIW’s medical ward in May for her two-week post-partum check up with Navarro.

“There’s really no after care here, they just handed me a Kotex pad and said have a good day,” said Bass, who was pregnant during most of her one-year sentence for parole violation. Her underlying crime was second-degree robbery.

Bass had been taking Motrin for the pain from standard stiches. Prison officials hadn’t let her bring back the cooling Tucks pads or the squirt bottle hospitals provide new mothers to treat the wound. During this visit, Navarro prescribed a Lydocaine gel.

“You know you’ve been on the street, no care at all - and then suddenly when you come to prison you want a Mercedes Benz treatment and we cannot afford that here in prison,” Navarro said. “But we try to give them as best as we can, based on the standard of care in the community.”

For years, advocates complained about substandard medical care in California prisons and began filing major lawsuits in 1985.

According to Denise Johnston, an advocate for incarcerated women who has spent years inside prisons, the lawsuits resulted in “significant improvements” in obstetrical care.  

“This is not to say the care became optimal or even very good,” she said. Many common complaints, like anxiety, are not really treated, she said.

As for the babies born to women in prison, in almost every case they are sent to live with relatives or the other parent, if the mother can arrange it. When she can’t find someone to take the newborn, he or she goes into foster care. 

Bass found a couple to adopt her newborn daughter, who had been diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero. (Hear the adoptive parents’ story in the audio montage.)

Even though she feels good about the parents she chose for her daughter, Bass described the experience of being separated from her newborn as “heart wrenching.” She wasn’t able to talk to others much about it. Instead, she described herself as being stuck in her head. She would suddenly find herself crying. 

Zodiacal also fell into depression after the birth of her son in May, according to her cousin, Cari Hernandez. 

She had arranged for Hernandez, who she considers a sister, to take Jayden Elijah. Zodiacal’s own mother had been in and out of prison and she was mostly raised by a dear aunt, Hernandez’s mother.

In phone calls from prison, Zodiacal told Hernandez she wanted to see photos of Jayden. But Hernandez didn’t have any extra money to print and mail them. 

Navarro said she commonly sees depression among post-partum inmates separated from their babies.  Academic studies over the years have shown trauma to both mother and baby when they are separated at birth.  

In the 1970’s, women’s advocates began to make a case for keeping mothers and babies together - even if the mother is incarcerated. Feminist scholars were researching the impact of the increasing female prison population. They documented the emotional hardship caused to children. 

If things didn’t change, they predicted “profound harm” to children living without their incarcerated mothers. 

No matter what the studies said, releasing a woman from prison to care for a newborn was a political non-starter. So different states tried different experiments. The most common was nurseries inside prisons. 

California tried something different: the Community Prisoner Mother Program.
In 1985, the state legislature passed a bill, signed into law by Republican Gov. Deukmejian, that created a program for low-level offenders who were pregnant or new mothers to live with their children in a “community setting.”

“This was actually really remarkable,” said Johnston, the advocate who works with children of incarcerated women.

California has operated nine different facilities where mothering inmates could live with their young children. 

Most have closed, in part because the same low-level offenders who are eligible for the program – DUI-convicts, burglars, minor drug offenders - were transferred to county officials to ease prison overcrowding. 

The only prisoner-baby program left is in Pomona. The Department of Corrections rents rooms from a non-profit that runs a residential detox program. The state pays for up to for 24 inmates, but not all the beds were full during visits in July and August.

The complex looks nothing like a prison - groups of dorms surround a large playground. Inside are a nursery, toddler care rooms, a Head Start program and a Kindergarten classroom run by the Pomona Unified School District. There are no bars, no barbed wire and no armed guards. 

“If you have a baby in prison, you have your baby and you hand your baby over to somebody,” said Regina Dotson, the senior corrections officer in charge of the inmates at the Pomona facility.  “If they’re in my program, they have their baby and they come back here and they get to bond with their baby.” 

Zodiacal did not qualify because of her armed robbery conviction. 

But Christina Bray did.

She had researched various programs she thought would get her closer to her family and out of the prison confines – she even completed fire training.

In January, days before she was slated to ship out to fire camp, Bray got word she’d been accepted to the prisoner-baby program.

But as she rode the corrections van to the Pomona facility, she became anxious.
 
“Was it right to bring a baby to prison?” she wondered. 

Despite decades studying California’s prisoner-baby programs, Johnston said she still has questions about whether they are successful. 

“These programs have never actually studied child outcomes,” she said. “Nobody really knows specifically in California what happens to the children that participate in the programs.” 

A year ago, as the van pulled up to a regular looking, cream-colored building where Lola was waiting inside, Bray wondered whether her daughter would even know who she was. They had only seen each other three times in 13 months – and one of those times they’d been separated by glass. 

But during the reunion, she said the toddler reached for her and kissed her happily. 

“I was trying very hard not to cry,” Bray said. “And I could feel my knees getting very weak, but I didn’t want for her to get scared - so I just held on to her.” 

Life at the facility is somewhere between prison life and regular life.

Inmates have daily chores and must attend mandatory parenting and other classes. They’re housed in open barracks – with mother, child pairs sleeping next to each other. 

But inmates can have lunch with their children, take them to the facility’s playground and take them off site for doctors’ appointments.

During a visit several months ago, Bray appeared singularly focused on getting through the day without creating the least ripple. She seemed keenly aware that despite the extra freedoms, she was still in prison.

“All the inmates, we have a time at 5:30 called ‘door knock’, when we have an opportunity to get our mail and sign up for our phone call,” Bray said. Inmates get one 15-minute phone call per day - and only one phone in the row of them is allocated for inmate use.

Santa Clara Deputy District Attorney Cherie Bourlard, the elder fraud prosecutor who handled Bray’s case, didn’t know she’d been transferred to the mother-baby facility. After a pause, Bourlard said it was “good to hear that they allow the bonding to take place.”

Bellane, the elderly victim of Bray’s crimes, died in February 2012, two months after Bray was arrested. Bourlard said he was crushed that someone he trusted stole from him.