Below is an article from the December 3, 2018 Charlotte Sun newspaper that touches on the insanely high rates of incarcerated women in Charlotte County, Florida who have been impacted by trauma (100% have a history of trauma, 90% have a history of sexual abuse, 90% have witnessed domestic violence or were a victim of domestic violence, and 90% have a history of mental health and substance abuse issues.). 

By ANNE EASKER Staff Writer

Nicole Williams has been arrested nine times since 2016. At 24 years old, she has a 5-year-old daughter who she says is the reason she’s fighting to change things this time.

“She just has this smile and these eyes that will melt you,” Williams said. “She has these beautiful eyes, but I don’t want her to have troubled eyes ... when you look at somebody, and you can tell that they’ve been through so much, you can just see it in her eyes ... I can’t do that to her.”

Williams was recently released after serving an eight month stay at the Charlotte County Jail, where the average daily female population was 149.3 in September, according to the most recent quarterly report. In 2008, the average daily female population was 92.9, more than 57 percent lower than last year’s average of 146.5.

Comparatively, the total average daily population for the entire jail last year was only around 15 percent higher than 2008.

According to jail Capt. Melissa Turney, a big factor in the rise in female inmates is substance abuse.

“Whether it’s illegal drugs, or whether it’s events that are occurring like possibly thefts or burglaries trying to get money to purchase the illegal substances, or even just the batteries or incidents that occurred because they were under the influence of something — it’s all kind of interrelated,” she said.

The problem

Dr. Faezah Andrews works for Charlotte County Human Services and is a part of a new re-entry program to help inmates better navigate life after incarceration and find resources to address addiction, poverty, homelessness, mental health, and more. The program also allows her to collect data on inmates’ backgrounds and needs.

Though her first class is a small sampling of the total population, with just six females and seven males, the numbers are stark. For females, 100 percent have a history of trauma and 90 percent have a history of sexual abuse. Ninety percent have witnessed domestic violence or were a victim of domestic violence, and 90 percent have a history of mental health and substance abuse issues.

“We can speculate from the stats that we have a lot of work to do as a community,” Andrews said. “We can do a lot of prevention. We have programs in the community that do education and prevention in regard to substance abuse... But first we have to recognize that there is a problem.”

More female inmates means more female housing pods and more mandatory female officers. It can also mean more pregnant inmates, many who will give birth to babies addicted to substances.

“Many of them do not have any type of prenatal care, so we try to get them to the doctor as quick as we can,” Capt. Turney said. “We have to bottle a lot of the substances.

We can’t just stop giving them the methadone.

While they’re pregnant, they have to continue the methadone. Then you’re going to have an infant who is addicted.

So lots of really high risk pregnancies.”

Where does it start?

Williams’ first arrest was at 13 for marijuana possession.

“My mom went to prison, and I didn’t get the fact that she messed up,” she said. “I had kind of a resentment against (law enforcement) because they took my mom. I was there when she got arrested, so it kind of traumatized me a little bit. So I was kind of rebellious, and then I went to school, and I had some weed at school.”

At 15, she ran away from home to the house of the boy who is now the father of her daughter.

When deputies found her, she had weed on her again. At 18, she had her first arrest for possession of a controlled substance in Sarasota County and was put on probation. A few weeks later, she got caught walking down Gibralter Avenue at midnight “with a backpack full of drugs.”

Addiction to drugs, fast money, and chaos make her lose sight of what’s important outside of jail, she said.

“When I get out of jail, I don’t ever have a plan,” she said. “I just wing it...

It all starts with me, you know what I mean? If I really want to change, and I really want to do it — well, it’s not that hard to say no. Usually the people I’m around, if I tell them no, they respect it. But at the same time if I’m like, ‘Yo, hit them up,’ they’ll be real quick to do it.”

This time, though, things are different because of the involvement of the Department of Children and Families.

If Williams doesn’t complete her case plan, her rights to see her daughter may be threatened. The jail’s classes on substance abuse, parenting, anger management, and others have helped her get started and “get real” with herself, she said.

“I abuse Xanax on the outs, and now when I’m in jail, I get the craziest anxiety over dumb stuff,” she said. “I don’t really like to feel that feeling, so being here this time has really helped me manage that feeling. Managing feelings is a lot when it comes to getting high, because that’s what a lot of people get high for, because they don’t like that feeling.”

Addressing trauma

Jamie Walton, a survivor of human trafficking and founder of the Wayne Foundation, teaches a class for female inmates called ‘Survivors,’ which aims to address any type of abuse, which she believes is one of the root causes of the “sky high” drug use.

“If you look at the female population of the jail, it’s obvious that a lot of it is drug use or crimes related to drug use,” she said. “So where does that begin is my question and what has the county done to answer that to provide support to these people?

Because the reality is, it’s not just becoming sober.

It’s a question of why did they start using in the first place, and if they never address that, then they’re always going to relapse.”

The class introduces inmates to the idea of what trauma is and how it might affect them.

“You didn’t wake up at 14 years old and stick a needle in your arm,” she tells them. “Nobody does that. You did it for a reason, and you might not even realize what that reason is.”

Inmates in the class can share confidentially about past and current experiences. Walton believes many are willing to open up because she herself is honest about her experiences as a survivor of human trafficking, coming from a difficult home life.

“One of the things I say as my opening all the time is, ‘I could have been sitting here as easily as you,’” she said. “The only difference is I figured out around 18 years old that I didn’t want to be addicted to drugs, and I became addicted to going to therapy. And I was lucky enough that I had insurance where I could go to therapy.”

She introduces the idea of therapy and teaches on topics including positive coping skills, identifying toxic relationships, and building barriers. For coping skills, she focuses on techniques the women can use while in jail, like basic breathing exercises, relaxing their muscles, or focusing on an object in the room and then rebuilding it in their minds.

“They do complain a lot about just getting stuck in their head and not being able to get it to stop, lack of sleep, all the stressors that we know for trauma are negative stressors,” she said.

Healing

For Ashley Stanton, the Survivors class has been life-changing. Molested and raped by a family member as a child, Stanton, now 30, said she was always drawn to “bad boys” she believed could protect her — often ending up with men who dealt drugs and wanted to control her every move. Her ex-boyfriend had cameras inside and outside the house, tracking her every move, she said.

“Every time I would leave, it would send messages to his phone,” Stanton said. “He always had to know where I was at all times.”

When she got arrested with him, she enrolled in the Survivors class, where she began realizing many of her actions stemmed from the pain of her past.

Not only sexually abused at home, in foster care, Stanton said her foster family would give her medicine to make her fall asleep, and her foster brother would come in and molest her in the middle of the night — often without her even realizing it had happened. “I started smoking weed at a young age, and I was doing benzoids like Xanax and things like that so I could sleep at night, because I have PTSD,” she said. “So for the longest time, I’ve just been numbing myself and my feelings.”

For many women in the class, Stanton said the story was the same.

“Ninety to 95 percent of the women in jail have been raped, molested, and abused, and you see it,” she said. “This one girl in jail, she used to wake up — she had really bad PTSD — and she would wake up screaming, ‘No, get off me, get off me,’ super loud, and it would wake up the whole pod, and everyone was just saying we all felt it.

We could feel her pain, because we’d all been there before.”

For Stanton, the Survivors class opened her eyes, and for the first time, she began to address those past traumas. She learned meditation to help sleep better and created goal sheets each month, gradually shifting her focus from goals surrounding men to goals about herself.

“I’ve been clean for like four months, no pot, no nothing, no alcohol,” Stanton said. “I feel the best I’ve ever felt in my whole life, because I can finally feel things again.

I know right from wrong.

I’m not with anybody. I’m just with myself. I haven’t been not in a relationship since elementary school.

It’s so surreal, but it’s so exciting at the same time to finally just be with myself and start to learn who I am and what I like.” Stanton recently got hired at PGT and said she’s on track to get her three daughters back, who have been staying with their aunt since her arrest.

Reducing recidivism

For some inmates, the door to the jail becomes a revolving door.

“Unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of the inmates that leave have really good intentions and then when they get back into the real world, the support system is not there,” she said. “Even if they spend a year in jail getting sober and they take all these classes and have all these plans, they’re going to do when they get out, it kind of falls apart on them, because they don’t have the proper structures in the county.”

For Williams, she said jail isn’t threatening to her anymore, because it’s a place that’s predictable.

“It’s just the same every single day, and it sucks, but it’s unpredictable out on the streets,” she said.

“Your car breaks down.

I don’t have a car here. I don’t have to worry about gas prices or going to buy milk, because they bring it to me every Tuesday.

Little stuff like that.”

Amber Sevenack, 32, had a similar experience the first time she got out of jail.

“I didn’t know really where to turn or what to do,” she said. “I tried to get a job. I did like 102 applications all online. It was crazy.”

After a second arrest, Sevenack enrolled in the jail’s re-entry program, led by Dr. Andrews and the Homeless Coalition.

She started the class while in jail, learning about finances and budgeting, which she’s now continuing at the Homeless Coalition, and she meets with Dr.

Andrews on a regular basis.

“When I first got out of jail, she helped get me a bed at the Homeless Coalition,” she said.

“She’s helped me stay on track. She’s helped me stay focused. She’s helped point me in the right direction for resources.

This program opened up doors that I wouldn’t have been able to just coming off the street.”

Sevenack now has a stable job at Home Goods and is grateful for the support the program has provided and will continue to provide in the future.

The class is open to 10 inmates, though Dr. Andrews said the jail may not always have 10 sign up, and some who sign up initially stop coming.

For inmates who are released, Andrews biggest gap in services is housing, as well as follow-ups throughout the community. One person can’t follow-up with nearly 700 inmates.

But for those who are involved, the program can be life changing.

“I feel like I’m being retaught how to live a normal life,” Sevenack said. “I really couldn’t have done it without her. The support, the guidance, the positive, the resources. The support, the support, the support.”