Babies Behind Bars : In 3 New York prisons, inmates who give birth may keep their babies with them. Dr. Spock endorsed the idea, but critics are queasy.

BEDFORD HILLS, N.Y. — Tammy Taylor is worried. It’s the day before her release from the maximum-security prison here, and the thought of freedom weighs on her mind.

She’s been here before. But as Taylor smoothes her green prison-issue skirt and ticks off a list of things to do--reapply for welfare, visit her probation officer--a new item crops up: arrange day care.

“I’m nervous,” she says. “I’ve been here before, but it’s different going home with a baby. There’s all this responsibility.”

Taylor, 24, entered jail alone, but she’s not leaving that way. During her prison term, her son, James Carter, was born. Now a chubby 13-month-old gnawing on an Oreo cookie, James is going home to a world he’s never known. Except for his birth at a nearby hospital, this smiling toddler has never been outside the razor-ribbon fences of Bedford Hills.

In most states, James would have been taken from his mother’s arms within hours after his birth and placed in foster care if there were no relatives to care for him.

Instead, he has been raised in a prison nursery--one of only three such facilities in the United States.

While these programs--all in New York state--are considered by advocates to be models for the rest of the country, corrections officials still get queasy at the thought of allowing babies to be raised behind bars. When Florida closed its nursery in 1981, one legislator applauded the action, saying: “Jail babies never smile.”

That type of talk is heresy to Sister Elaine Roulet, the driving force behind New York’s nurseries. A member of Sisters of St. Joseph, Roulet has been working within the confines of Bedford Hills for 22 years.

Her philosophy is simple: “Babies belong with their mothers whether they’re in prison or out on the streets. . . . What better person could (they) be with than their mothers?”

Bedford’s nursery opened in 1901, but Roulet has brought it into the 20th Century. Very little is left to chance; mothers here are taught to be mothers. These women, many of whom come from dysfunctional families, are required to attend classes where they are taught how to meet the physical and emotional needs of their children. One of the parenting teachers is Bedford’s most infamous inmate, Jean Harris, who is serving a 15-year sentence for killing her lover, Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower.

Despite being the state’s only maximum-security prison for women, Bedford Hills looks like a well-worn college that happens to be surrounded by guard towers. The prison nursery, which can hold as many as 27 mothers and babies, is located in the jail’s former psychiatric hospital, built in 1935. It looks in desperate need of a refurbishment. The inmates complain of the peeling paint, roaches and bad plumbing.

Using a time-tested formula, Roulet has deemed that it’s best for mothers with newborns to double up with another mother and infant. At six months, baby and mother move to a single cell.

The cells are ugly rectangular boxes with bars on the windows, but mothers do what they can to offset the institutional setting. Homey touches--from candy canes to photographs to Palm Sunday crosses--abound. But nothing can erase the fact that it’s jail with rules and regulations: Posted notices on the nursery floor warn mothers not to allow their babies to sleep in their beds or “a ticket will be written--no more excuses.”

But these are small things, really. The chance to be with one’s baby is what matters to the mothers.

“I think this has been a wonderful experience because it gives you a sense of responsibility and a special bonding with your baby,” says Tammy Taylor, of Rochester, N.Y. who was convicted of the armed robbery of a yogurt store. “It makes you better when you hit the streets, ‘cause you already got a regular routine.

“My son is my main objective,” says Taylor, a former cocaine abuser, “but I can’t say I’ll never get high again.”

Whatever the outcome of her release, prison officials are convinced they’ve done right by Taylor and James.

Prison nurseries were commonplace around the turn of the century but, over time, they were eliminated. The reasons vary from society’s desire to be more punitive, to a twisted backlash of the women’s movement, which caused judges to treat women as harshly as men.

“We are developing a more and more inhumane system of punishment,” says Ellen Barry, director of the San Francisco-based Legal Services for Prisoners With Children. “Taking infants from their mothers reflects the correctional system’s attitude. It should be shocking, but it’s not.”

Over the past 15 years, the growth in the number of incarcerated females has exploded, due in large part to drug-related offenses. As recently as 1975, there were about 8,500 women in the nation’s jails; today there are more than 43,000, according to federal statistics. (New York has more than 2,500, while California leads the nation with 6,000.)

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track how many inmates give birth behind bars but “The Female Offender,” a 1990 study published by the American Correctional Assn., estimates that 6% of the women going to jail in any one year are pregnant.

Yet, correction officials have been slow to change their policies.

Some states, like California, have developed halfway houses where mothers who meet a host of conditions--including the nature of the crime, the availability of space and an inmates behavior--can live with their babies in small residential settings. The problem is that there are only 100 beds for the estimated 600 babies that are born annually to California’s jailed mothers, Barry says.

Typically, infants born behind bars are placed with relatives; children of mothers who do not have that option generally are placed in foster care and, if the mother is not released within a year, proceedings are begun to terminate parental rights.

The situation is radically different in New York, where jailed mothers can keep their children until they are 18 months old.

Still, the question remains whether being raised in such a setting is good for the babies.

Florida had a prison nursery at Lowell until 1981 when state legislators decided it was “inappropriate.”

According to Bob MacMaster, a corrections spokesman, “There was concern about the well-being of the child. We wanted to make sure they had a proper nutritional and emotional environment as well as a safe and secure environment. A women’s prison does not provide all those factors to an optimum degree.”

Says D. Jacqueline Fleming, superintendent of the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Shakopee, which dropped its program years ago, “I have a real problem with raising kids in prison. It’s not a real good environment for the child.”

The program even has its doubters among the mothers.

“When my son is big, how will he feel about growing up here? Will people make fun of him?” asks Nellie Perez, mother of 2-month-old Carlos Morillo.

Some years ago, Elaine Lord, the superintendent at Bedford Hills, invited Dr. Benjamin Spock to examine the program. “He told us the ideal would be to keep the child with mother through the preschool years,” Lord says.

On Rikers Island--where mothers await trial; when they are sentenced they go to the women’s prisons at Bedford Hills or Taconic--Patricia Gleaton rules with an iron fist. She is known for her strictness, and many mothers resent her at first.

“One mother reported me for harassing her,” snorts Gleaton, director of the nursery at the Rose M. Singer Center. “She said I wasn’t running a program for mothers, and I said, ‘That’s right, I’m running a program for babies.’ ”

Gleaton, like Roulet, firmly believes that babies belong with their mothers. “Some people say jail is not a place for babies, and I say, ‘Why?’ They don’t have any answers. I’ll tell you, this is the best place for these babies, given the backgrounds these women have.”

This city nursery also has room for about 25 mothers and babies, but it is far different from its state counterpart. Opened in 1988, it looks just like a hospital nursery.

Unlike Bedford, there is a central nursery that sits in the middle of a large, airy room; several skylights fill the space with natural light. Next to the nursery is the living room, where women spend their days listening to music, talking and rocking their babies to sleep.

Surrounding those two large areas are cells where the mothers sleep alone. Should a baby begin to cry during the night, the officer on duty informs the mother, who is expected to quiet the baby--quickly. A source of much irritation among the mothers is the lackadaisical movements some mothers exhibit when awakened at 3 a.m.

Indeed, the mothers complain almost nonstop about each other.

“You see what I got to deal with? She’s always like that,” says Addie Demetrice Beathea, a 31-year-old mother who has a 6-month-old as well as older children, ages 19, 18, 17 and 16.

For many of the mothers, the toughest part is often the birth. Mothers do not have their babies in prison; when they go into labor, they’re transported to local hospitals. But when they go, so do handcuffs and shackles.

Sabrina Qualls, a 35-year-old mother of three who was arrested carrying 12 bags of heroin, vividly remembers the 10-minute ambulance ride from Rikers Island to City Hospital at Elmhurst. What she recalls most clearly is the way she was handcuffed to her stretcher. After going through the birth with only her corrections officer and doctor as labor coaches, she was placed in a public ward.

At all New York’s nurseries, everything is provided to the mothers for free: diapers, strollers, baby food, formula, health care.

It costs taxpayers $65,000 to house one inmate for a year at Rikers Island; the cost of a mother and infant is $131,000, according to Gleaton; two years ago the prison nursery at Taconic was opened at a cost of $667,000.

While many of the women complain about each other, few have arguments with the nursery itself. “Mothers and babies in jail sounds harsh, but this don’t look like a jail. It looks like a community center or something. Very pleasant,” says Yvette Hopkins, 29, who is in jail for drug possession. “The babies are so little, they don’t see the barbed wire.”

With home lives that are barely manageable and neighborhoods steeped in drugs, the question of what will happen to these jail babies when they finally go home is a troubling one.

Gleaton, however, believes the structure they’ve learned in jail will be of great value.

“The future for these babies will be just as good, if not better, than their peers,” Gleaton says. “These babies will have mothers more attuned to their needs and temperaments. If they were at home, these mothers would be busy on the street doing other things. The babies would be pushed off to other people. Believe me, in the long run, society will benefit.”