Emily Widra and Emmett Sanders at the Prison Policy Initiative have produced this notable briefing digging into this new Bureau of Justice Statistics publication titled “Maternal Healthcare and Pregnancy Prevalence and Outcomes in Prisons, 2023.” This briefing’s title provides its nuanced themes: “New data on pregnancy prevalence, outcomes, and programs in prisons are welcome additions, but raise new questions.” Here is part of the introduction of the briefing, with links from the original:
A new Bureau of Justice Statistics report offers updated data on pregnancy among people in state and federal prisons. This important new dataset includes the prevalence of pregnancy among incarcerated people, pregnancy outcomes, and some limited data on the types of services, medical care, and support offered to incarcerated pregnant people. The findings from Maternal Healthcare and Pregnancy Prevalence and Outcomes in Prisons, 2023 are based on data collected for the first time in 2024 as a supplement to the annual National Prisoner Statistics survey. While this report is a welcome contribution to a shamefully understudied experience during incarceration, the data it provides raises almost as many questions as it answers.
Women’s incarceration has grown at twice the pace of men’s incarceration in recent decades but there is often too little data to explain this growth or to elaborate the specific effects incarceration has on women and their health, including their experience of pregnancy….
Yet the data raises a series of new questions. There are unexplained differences in the prevalence of pregnancy behind bars compared to the PIPS report, as well as a lack of basic data on the outcomes of live births, and a failure to report how often pregnancy-related services and accommodations are actually used. The report also helpfully touches on services like prison nursery programs; however, crucial details about their implementation are left out — a gap we attempt to fill in this briefing using our own research. This new report is a step in the right direction, but much more work needs to be done to provide an accurate and useful portrait of pregnancy in prison.