Advocacy for equitable access to period products is talked about a lot when it comes to schools, colleges, and government buildings, but what about our prison systems? For a lot of people, including myself before this blog, our knowledge of how women function with their periods in prisons is slim to none. There are nearly 180,000 women in our prison system in 2024. Of those women, ninety percent of them are under the age of fifty-five, meaning nearly ninety percent of these women get their periods. These women are dehumanized when it comes to having access to menstrual products and how they are treated within our prison systems.
A woman in a Texas state prison was interviewed and claimed that the women there are “assigned one pack of pads and five regular-size tampons monthly.” She also went on to say that women who have heavier cycles or are premenopausal do not get any extra items and that they must be purchased. The women also are not paid to work in prison, so if they are in need of more menstrual products or even a clean pair of underwear, they must purchase them with money received from their families. This means that many women are ruining their clothes and bleeding everywhere because of the lack of resources provided. It is also important to note that even if women who need more menstrual items get them, they often have to go through strip searches and have their products searched, causing them to no longer be sterile and therefore unusable.
Women who cannot afford to buy more menstrual products (which many do not have funds from their families and rely entirely on the prison system for their resources) are forced to use mattress stuffing, used pads and tampons, or rip up their bedsheets to create their own menstrual products. This is not humane and not justifiable under any circumstance. These women are using survival instincts and harming their own personal items (and possibly themselves) just to make sure they do not bleed everywhere. In the interview, the woman said that during strip searches, the officers instruct all the women to remove their menstrual products, causing there to be blood dripping down women’s legs and it to be all over the floor.
Even if these women do manage to have access to necessary resources, they could be denied access to a trash can to throw away their menstrual items. This is just one example of how women in our prison systems are dehumanized and are treated more like animals than people.
Although there has been an attempt to stop this embarrassing and dehumanizing cycle to stop. In 2017, Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren proposed a bill named, “Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act” which aims to treat women in prison with dignity and requires women in federal prisons to be supplied menstrual products. This is a step in the right direction, but it does not apply to state prisons, where the majority of women imprisoned are located. Most states do not have any protective orders or structures set in place to help women when in need.
Linked below is an article that I recommend reading more about this is as it goes into depth about how the prison systems are indifferent to women’s reproductive health and how that impacts those women inside the prison systems. It is important to advocate for women no matter who they are. We should fight for ALL women to have access to reproductive healthcare and for ALL women to have menstrual equity.
https://time.com/6265653/prison-menstruation-punishment
Below is another blog about this topic, go check it out!