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food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of
“untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their
children.
Marsha wandered through her first days at Tutwiler in a state of disbelief. She met other
women like herself who had been imprisoned after having given birth to stillborn babies.
Efernia McClendon, a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama, got pregnant in high
school and didn’t tell her parents. She delivered at just over five months and left the stillborn
baby’s remains in a drainage ditch. When they were discovered, she was interrogated by
police until she acknowledged that she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the infant hadn’t moved
before death, even though the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely.
Threatened with the death penalty, she joined a growing community of women imprisoned
for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment.
The lives and the suffering of the women got tangled together at Tutwiler. For Marsha, it
was impossible not to notice that some women never got visits. She tried at first but couldn’t
remain indifferent to the people around her who seemed in acute distress—those who cried
more than usual or who suffered the greatest anxiety about the children or parents they’d left
behind or who seemed especially down or depressed. Knitted together as they were, a
horrible day for one woman would inevitably become a horrible day for everyone. The only
consolation in such an arrangement was that joyous moments were shared as well. A grant of
parole, the arrival of a hoped-for letter, a visit from a long-absent family member would lift
everyone’s spirits.
If the struggles of the other women had been Marsha’s biggest challenge at Tutwiler, her
years there would have been difficult but manageable. But there were bigger problems,
coming from the correctional staff itself. Women at Tutwiler were being raped by prison
guards. Women were being sexually harassed, exploited, abused, and assaulted by male
officers in countless ways. The male warden allowed the male guards entry into the showers
during prison counts. Officers leered at the naked women and made crude comments and
suggestive threats. Women had no privacy in the bathrooms, where male officers could watch
them use the toilet. There were dark corners and hallways—terrifying spaces at Tutwiler
where women could be beaten or sexually assaulted. EJI had asked the Department of
Corrections to install security cameras in the dorms, but they refused. The culture of sexual
violence was so pervasive that even the prison chaplain was sexually assaulting women when
they came to the chapel.
Shortly after Marsha arrived at Tutwiler, we won the release of Diane Jones, who had been
wrongly convicted and sentenced to die in prison for a crime she had not committed. Diane
had been wrongly implicated in a drug-trafficking operation that involved her former
boyfriend. She was convicted of multiple charges that triggered a sentence of mandatory life
imprisonment without parole. We challenged her conviction and sentence and ultimately won
her release. The release of Diane Jones, a condemned lifer, gave hope to all of the other lifers
at Tutwiler. I received letters from women I’d never met thanking me for helping her. While
working on her case, I’d go to Tutwiler to meet with Diane, who would tell me how the
women were desperate for help.
“Bryan, I have about nine notes people want me to pass to you. It was too many to get past
the guards so I didn’t bring them, but these women want your help.”