“It’s just another reminder that they have no autonomy over themselves, over their bodies, over their lives,” said Alycia Welch, the associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas in Austin, said people in prison “have a constitutional right to receive medical care for their serious medical needs. And dialysis is certainly an example of that.”

Michele Deitch y Alycia Welch, directoras del Laboratorio de Innovación en Prisiones y Cárceles de la Universidad de Texas, se definieron como “un puente” entre la investigación académica, la formulación de políticas y las prácticas correccionales. Lo primero que advirtieron es que el sistema penitenciario uruguayo está “extremadamente hacinado” y, por lo tanto, poner el foco en las mujeres privadas de libertad podría reducir la tasa de prisionización. Lo que han aprendido en su investigación en Estados Unidos es que “muchísimas mujeres que están privadas de libertad no deberían estarlo”, enfatizó Deitch. “Terminan involucradas con el sistema penal por haber pasado por experiencias traumáticas en sus vidas, ya sea porque tienen necesidades no abordadas como la vivienda, la salud mental, o porque son víctimas de violencia doméstica”, ejemplificó.

Al país en el que casi la mitad de los presos están en condiciones “inhumanas, crueles y degradantes”, llegaron Michele Deitch y Alycia Welch, dos expertas de Texas (Estados Unidos) que han dedicado su vida a estudiar cómo pueden hacer las cárceles más seguras y humanas para los reclusos. Proponen la implementación de un programa de viviendas de transición para mujeres.

Gov. Mike Braun announced last summer that the Miami Correctional Facility will house ICE detainees. Left unsaid is a drug crisis behind prison walls.

Idaho is not alone in grappling with widespread sexual abuse by prison staff. One of the biggest challenges to addressing this nationwide crisis is the “iron curtain” that protects prisons from independent and public scrutiny, said Michele Deitch, who runs the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight. “When an institution has total control over people’s lives, abuse can happen,” Deitch said. “Independent oversight is critical as a way to alert the public to what’s going on inside and provide a vehicle for people inside to share their concerns about what’s happening to them.”

The Miami Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison that recently became an ICE detention facility, is the most violent and one of the deadliest prisons in the state.

“The correctional environment needs to be used as a space for addressing the needs that people are walking into prison and jail with,” said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the LBJ School.

The delays that families experience — whether in getting information, remains or property back — often can be traced back to policy gaps, said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Welch helped lead a 50-state review of prison death policies and found that many agencies don’t clearly outline when families should be notified, what information can be shared, or who is responsible for doing it. Without those details, she noted, the default is for agencies to withhold information.“Families feel like they become the people that are being punished because their loved one was someone who was incarcerated,” she said. “They’re just trying to…honor their loved one.”