One of the things Alissa Moore remembers clearly from her time in prison is how the guards mocked her when she asked for a tampon. Sometimes they flatly refused. At other times they would ask her to go to a closet or a back room, where, according to what she said, she was sexually assaulted on several occasions.
If she wanted to avoid that humiliation, Moore could buy extra tampons at the commissary. But a box cost seven dollars and prisoners earned just 8 cents an hour at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Sometimes that meant Moore had to trade food for tampons. Less fortunate inmates resorted to using towels or handkerchiefs to absorb the blood.
“It was hell,” he told The Times.
Over the past decade, prisons and jails in California and across the country enacted laws and policies providing free menstrual products to female inmates. But problems persist.
In New York, prison officials admitted last year that they had stopped handing out free supplies. In Texas, women say guards sometimes challenge them when they ask for more tampons or pads. And in California, after passing a bill to address the issue in 2020, several reports have emerged in which women were still being denied menstrual products.
Now California is trying to fix it for good. State lawmakers are considering proposed legislation, House Bill 1810, to require jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers to make tampons and pads easily accessible so women don't have to beg officials. prisons for menstrual supplies.
“We know the dynamics of power [in prisons] is ripe for abuse,” said Ruth Dawson, legislative attorney for ACLU California Action. “It seems like a small change in the law, but we believe it will have big implications for incarcerated people who menstruate.”
Last month, the bill passed unanimously in the Assembly. It now heads to the Senate with bipartisan support. If approved and signed by the governor, the measure would go into effect next year.
When California enacted its landmark Reproductive Dignity for Incarcerated People Act in 2020, the measure aimed to remedy a number of problems. In addition to demanding better access to perinatal health care behind bars and banning the use of Tasers and chemical weapons against pregnant inmates, the required legislation jails and prisons to provide free tampons and sanitary pads.
But last year a report issued by California attorney. Gen. Rob Bonta, who authored the 2020 legislation when he was in the Assembly, found that nearly all of the jails in the state's 58 counties didn't even create policies to comply with the law.
Since then, more than 50 of those counties have set their policies. But there are still problems. Since September, the ACLU of Northern California identified eight cases in jails in Los Angeles, Monterey and the Bay Area where women were denied menstrual supplies.
“That's not surprising,” said Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), author of Assembly Bill 1810.
Bryan said some women have reported that officers have withheld menstrual products from them in retaliation for filing complaints. Other women, she said, reported that guards used requests for menstrual products as a means to force them to provide sexual favors.
When asked for comment, a state prison official said menstrual products are free and available to all inmates.
“All incarcerated people receive free basic supplies necessary to maintain personal hygiene, including menstrual products,” said Alia Cruz, spokesperson for the corrections department. “Items are available and restocked weekly or upon request.”
The CDCR said it does not comment on pending legislation, but said inmates can submit complaint forms if they feel they are not being accommodated.
To avoid those situations, Bryan's bill would make menstrual products accessible for women to take as needed, without consulting staff. The estimated cost to the state would be minimal.
The first time Moore got her period she was 11 years old and living at a school for troubled youth in Mendocino. She had been arrested on felony and misdemeanor theft charges and served her three-year sentence at the Catholic reformatory instead of a juvenile detention center. It was still a tough place to go through puberty.
“No one talked to us about our menstrual cycles or sex,” Moore told The Times. “No one talks to us about our bodies at all. Then they jail you and one day you have your period. “That was quite traumatizing.”
At age 17, Moore was arrested again. This time, it was a second-degree murder charge for the murder of her boyfriend, who she claimed had abused her. In 1997, she was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
As a teenager in a California prison, Moore said her period became a monthly anxiety. He was given about a dozen tampons and a dozen sanitary pads each month, although the exact number varied depending on supply and was up to the guards' discretion. When the law was passed in 2020, she said, during that year, until she was released a year later, agents tried to make her “appear like they were available” to the administration and any outside visitors. “But it was all a facade,” she said. Due to a medical condition, she experienced long periods of bleeding that caused her to need more.
“It was happening to a large majority of women,” Moore said. “I couldn't say it was just me.”
After entering the system as a child, Moore dropped out three years ago. She now works as a reentry coordinator at All of Us or None, a nonprofit organization run by formerly incarcerated people.
She clearly remembers the first time she bought tampons at Walmart, something she had never done before.
“It was almost like a surreal experience,” he said. “I didn't need to stand there and be sexualized for getting a tampon. It took a while for things like that to sink in.”
The problem is not limited to state prisons. In Los Angeles jails, inspections show that access to menstrual supplies has been inconsistent, sometimes due to an apparent lack of availability and other times due to officers' unwillingness to hand out supplies. Two years ago, the county's Sybil Brand Commission reported that people living in some dormitories at Century Regional Detention Center, the main women's jail, I couldn't get tampons, for unclear reasons. The following year, the commission discovered that “officers were in charge of deciding whether a woman would receive an extra napkin if she needed it.”
Since then, inspections have generally revealed fewer problems with access to menstrual supplies, although this year commissioners reported that during a visit in April a woman told them she was on her period and didn't know where she would get a sanitary pad for the next day. .
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in a statement said it is “committed to providing free and easy access to sanitary pads, panty liners and tampons” so that women in custody “can focus on their rehabilitation with dignity.”
Officials also said that in most areas of the women's jail, menstrual products are available in common areas. But “based on the challenges” faced by more seriously mentally ill inmates living in “high observation housing,” department officials said women living in those areas have to request menstrual supplies.
Over the past decade, at least two dozen states have passed laws to ensure access to menstrual products, according to the penitentiary flow project. Maryland, Delaware and Florida were among those that passed measures in 2018, and each year since then, a few more states have followed suit.
Most states offer those free supplies only upon request. As a result, many women still face a lack of access that Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, described as “absolutely unacceptable.”
“One of the big problems, besides the limits on supplies, is that in many places they have to request them and sometimes they have to show their bloody clothes to an officer as proof that they need them,” he said. “Any time you put women in a position where they have to ask for something from staff, it makes them vulnerable to staff wanting something in return. including sexual favors.”
Texas prison officials emphasized that menstrual products are free for inmates and that the agency is “serious” about making sure they are available.
“Last year we started a campaign to educate inmates about the availability of these products,” said spokeswoman Amanda Hernandez.
But Kwaneta Harris, a A 51-year-old woman is serving time at another Central Texas prison and said guards have questioned her about why someone her age still needs pads and tampons.
“If one more guard tells me when I ask about them, 'Aren't you too old to still have a cycle?' It’s not going to be pretty,” he wrote. “I'm tired of explaining that perimenopause means hot flashes AND heavy periods for guards the same age as my children.”
