Shackled into cycles of trauma

Last week the Cap Times published an article about the fact that Wisconsin is one of only ten states that does not have a law on the books “strictly limiting” the shackling of pregnant people who are incarcerated, despite the high risk of complications such as potentially fatal blood clots and slower response times for emergency procedures. You know, because the medical professionals treating the person actively in labor have to wait for a guard to remove the shackles before they can perform an emergency Cesarean section.

As if all this weren’t horrific enough, the opening anecdote of reporter Erin McGroarty's piece tells the story of Cheri Branham, whose parole was revoked because “she sought medical treatment for substance use upon learning she was pregnant.” Which begs the question: Why on earth was she in jail for that? Don’t we want pregnant people to seek treatment for substance abuse?

The way this country handles substance use gets even darker when we take a few steps back. We don’t know if this pertains to Branham’s story, but there are more than enough studies showing a high correlation between childhood traumatic experiences, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorders. So when we’re talking about people with substance use disorders, it’s fair to assume that we are talking about an abused and deeply traumatized population, generally.

This traumatized population is living in a country where we have chosen to make mental health services nearly impossible to access. Even if someone has decent insurance and disposable income to cover the prohibitively expensive mental healthcare in this country, there is a shortage of therapists. So people self-medicate with substances. Then, at least in Branham’s case, at some point they seek treatment. Which is good! Particularly while pregnant. While the details of how drug use affects fetuses vary, we can generally agree it’s better not to ingest drugs while pregnant. I’m sure there’s people who judge her for doing so, but we as a society need to understand that people who have reached the limits of what they can handle on their own are going to seek relief as best they can with their limited options. And people who make decisions we disagree with are still worthy of compassion. 

What does Branham get for seeking treatment? Jail. Literally, jail. And shackles while she’s giving birth. Also a grand total of 48 hours with her baby before it was taken from her, an act we know is deeply traumatizing for both parents and children. For a week, she didn’t know where her baby was. The cycle of trauma keeps spinning. 

And for what? (The cynical answer is that big businesses and consumers are benefiting from cheaper goods produced by prison labor, but I’m posing this question for people who haven’t completely lost their moral compass.) Why are we, as a state, imposing more trauma in response to actions that stem from trauma? 

Of course Branham’s case is an easy one to use in an essay on the failures of our incarceration system. A lot of the conversation about incarceration is focused on nonviolent crime because, frankly, that’s the low-hanging fruit. Four Democrats in the statehouse have introduced a bill that would limit shackling of pregnant people, but it’s been scaled back from previous proposals. Instead of limiting shackling from six months of pregnancy onward, the current bill only limits shackles during birth and up to three days postpartum. It’s embarrassing that we are still having this conversation when locking up people for low-level, nonviolent crime does nothing to benefit society (unless you’re law enforcement trying to justify a shiny new overpriced jail). 

(It’s also darkly funny to me that some politicians are convinced that someone who is very pregnant, in labor, or immediately postpartum is going to make a run for it. With what body? Tell me you’ve never known a pregnant person without telling me.)

The harder conversation is about people who are not sympathetic. Out of all the options for treating trauma, no one is saying substance abuse is the wisest, or even wise. And the reality is that people who abuse substances often harm others. We as a society need to understand that people in crisis are not going to act the way we think they should. We need to confront the examples that push the limits of our sympathy. 

Before you accuse me of being a soft-on-crime liberal who doesn’t care about victims: I’ve been the victim of crime. People I love have been the victims of crimes. I’ve had close friends with intimate partners who were violent and I witnessed some of that violence. So I understand, intimately, the visceral desire to lock someone away, to punish. 

But how could anyone possibly look at our incarceration system for the past (at least) five decades and see anything other than abject failure? Too many times we see people exit our carceral system an even greater danger to their community. Instead of giving people access to their basic needs, mental health care, and education so they could become a better version of themselves and re-enter society, we subject them to more trauma, put a mark on their record so it’s harder to access work and housing, and call it justice. None of this is making us any safer. 

I think one big driver is the seething anger and hatred that gets released via this “eye-for-an-eye” style of handling conflict. Another is the weaponization of empathy, or the weaponization of what people think empathy is. We like to think of ourselves as empathetic, as understanding what people are going through. But then we also assume we know how we would feel and behave in their situation. We would never take drugs while pregnant, we tell ourselves, so then we feel justified enacting punishment instead of showing compassion. 

Chris Rufo’s villain origin story is that he used to be a liberal documentary filmmaker. He worked on a film on poverty in American cities and “became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in ‘social, familial, even psychological’ dynamics.” 

(Of course, every other country in the OECD has “social, familial, even psychological” dynamics but somehow the United States’ poverty rate is higher and its poverty gap (the distance between the poverty line and average income of those in poverty) is greater than all 25 OECD countries except for Italy.)

Rufo then decided to run for Seattle city council with one of the most incoherent takes on homelessness I’ve ever heard. He said the problem is broken relationships, but also we need to let police just lock people up, but then we’ll get them into mental healthcare and housing. I heard someone say that if you scratch a liberal, you get a fascist. A great way to scratch a liberal is for someone they wanted to “save” to not play their role as the perfect victim. By their logic, an imperfect human apparently does not deserve sympathy nor to live in dignity. Rufo weaponized the language of liberalism to justify throwing homeless people in jail, because the people he observed made choices he didn’t agree with.

If someone doesn’t behave in ways we expect or perform emotions we recognize, weaponized empathy allows us to see them as culpable for their situation, and worthy of punishment, not compassion. The reality is that people are complicated. One component of true empathy is knowing that there are limits to our understanding. When people make choices beyond our understanding, choices we tell ourselves that we would never make, we can justify all kinds of cruelty. Such as jailing and shackling someone giving birth, because she wanted some help.