'Punishment for being pregnant': Report details poor care for pregnant people in county jails

Alliyah Thomas was 19 when she was taken to Will County Jail in early 2020. She was also four weeks pregnant with her first child.

She spent the entirety of her pregnancy in custody, where she said she was regularly mistreated and neglected.

She was often handcuffed, including roughly 20 times when she was shackled to a chain around her belly for court dates and doctor’s appointments. She lost 67 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter was born underweight. She was put in solitary confinement for months despite the state outlawing that practice for pregnant people.

“They treated me worse while I was pregnant than when I wasn’t,” Thomas told the Chicago Sun-Times.

In one incident, she was handcuffed behind her back and shoved hard against an elevator wall by corrections officers. She kept telling them over and over that she was pregnant.

“But they didn’t care,” she said.

Thomas’ story is one of many shared in a new report detailing how pregnant and postpartum people are treated while they’re in custody in county jails across Illinois.

The report, published Tuesday by the Women’s Justice Institute and the ACLU of Illinois, shared stories from women who were pregnant while in custody and often denied basic medical care, including for prenatal needs like ultrasounds, blood work and regular visits to an OB-GYN.

Researchers also examined the written policies regarding pregnancy, postpartum care and reproductive health care from the 92 county jails. A quarter of Illinois jails don’t have written policies for how to treat pregnant detainees, the report found.

“There’s very little known about people who give birth or who are pregnant or postpartum in the county jails,” said Alexis Mansfield, one of the study’s authors and a senior adviser at the Women’s Justice Institute.

Many of the women, including Thomas, said they didn’t get prenatal vitamins or enough food. Some were regularly ignored by correctional officers when they experienced more serious symptoms, like bleeding and severe cramping. Others had high-risk pregnancies while incarcerated, yet they rarely saw a specialist and later had life-threatening births.

But the hardest experience for most was being separated from their babies immediately after giving birth.

“Being pregnant in jail was super hard, but the worst part came when I had to leave my baby girl and go back,” said Thomas, who was incarcerated in Will County Jail for armed robbery. After giving birth, she spent the first three years of her daughter’s life away.

“Those postpartum years were the hardest in my life.”

The Will County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Jails are fiefdoms’

Because men make up the vast majority of people who are incarcerated, many of the health care policies default to men and don’t take pregnancy into account, Mansfield said.

Jails largely act independently, so it’s up to each to set and enforce policies and procedures, she said. While the Illinois Department of Corrections has a jail and detention standards unit, which oversees county jails, the department does not have policies on reproductive health, the report said.

“The reality is that county jails are fiefdoms,” Mansfield told the Sun-Times. “There’s very little oversight, there’s very little information.”

IDOC did not respond to a request for comment.

“We think of Illinois as a leader in reproductive rights and reproductive justice, and in many ways we are, but this is an area where we still are not doing what we can and should,” Mansfield said.

It’s also heavily stigmatized to be pregnant and incarcerated, said Emily Werth, another author on the report and a senior staff attorney with ACLU of Illinois.

“It’s very easy for folks to shut their eyes to the reality of the fact that these are still people, their children are still children,” Werth told the Sun-Times.

Illinois does have some standards for how pregnant people should be treated in detention. In 2000, Illinois became the first state to ban shackling an incarcerated person while they’re in labor.

Then in 2012, the state banned shackling throughout the entire term of a person’s pregnancy, but only in Cook County. The Illinois Reproductive Health Act does extend protections to people who are incarcerated.

But there’s more that needs to be done as Illinois has fallen behind other states, Mansfield said. The report recommends the state ban shackling pregnant people in all counties, start collecting data on how many people are in jail and pregnant, and establish a reproductive health and pregnancy in detention task force.

A bill to ban the use of leg irons and shackles on pregnant people inside Illinois’ county jails passed a state House committee Friday. The bill would also require that pregnant and lactating people incarcerated in jails get extra rations of food, and it would allow for electronic ankle bracelets to be removed from them during labor and delivery.

‘You can treat people with dignity’

For Shawna Jeanguenat, the humiliation of being restrained while she was pregnant hit hardest on the day she found out she was having a baby boy.

Jeanguenat chronicled her experience of being pregnant inside the Rock Island County Jail in 2019. In an interview with WBEZ, Jeanguenat said she was regularly kept handcuffed throughout her prenatal doctor’s visits, including for the ultrasound when was found out the sex of her baby.

During that appointment, Jeanguenat said she was cuffed in front of her stomach. The nurse asked the officer escorting her to remove the cuffs, Jeanguenat said.

“And he said, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that if I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.’ So I had to put my hands above my head while she did the ultrasound, and it was very, very uncomfortable and it was very humiliating.”

Later, Jeanguenat said there was a time when she had to repeatedly ask the jail guards to take her to the local emergency room because she began bleeding and was in pain. Once there, Jeanguenat said a doctor told her she might have a more serious condition and should see a specialist in Peoria, about 90 minutes away.

But Jeanguenat said the jail refused because she was “only entitled to the minimum level of care.” The office of Rock Island County Sheriff Darren Hart did not respond to requests for comment about Jeanguenat’s account.

Jeanguenat eventually gave birth to her son, who celebrates a birthday next month. But her experience of being pregnant in jail is still difficult for her to talk about.

“They can treat other humans with kindness and still do their jobs,” Jeanguenat said. “I understood that what I did was wrong and that I was in there and I was gonna do time. But you can treat people with dignity.”

Rock Island County and Will County where Thomas was detained were two of the more than two dozen that did not provide the report’s researchers with any written policies about how to handle pregnant and postpartum detainees in jail custody.

For the report, researchers requested that all 102 counties share the written policies their jails have related to prenatal and postpartum care.

The requested policies fell into one of nine categories the report establishes, including prenatal and postpartum care, labor and delivery, lactation, and the use of restraints and solitary confinement.

Of the 98 that responded, not one county shared written policies that fell under all nine categories. Only 11 counties provided a written policy or other information related to at least seven of the nine categories, and 28 counties provided no written policies. Cook County provided information on four of the nine policy categories.

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Thomas, 24, is grateful for the strong bond she shares with her 3-year-old daughter despite her time away.

When Thomas gave birth to her in late summer 2020, she was allowed to briefly leave Will County Jail. She needed to deliver her daughter via a C-section, and since the jail didn’t want to pay for the birth, she was released, Thomas said.

She was let out nine days before her due date. She wasn’t given any notice she’d be released, so she had to wait for hours outside the jail on a hot, late-August day until her family could pick her up.

“People are often kept in throughout their whole pregnancies and then released to go give birth and are trusted to turn themselves back in,” Mansfield said. “So somehow, they’re dangerous for their whole pregnancy, then suddenly, when the jail is faced with paying for the birth, they’re no longer a flight risk or dangerous.

“It’s a punishment for being pregnant.”

Contributing: WBEZ’s Alex Keefe.