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Mothers among the fastest growing prison population

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

Mothers among the fastest growing prison population by Cat Mayin Koo March 11, 2010 She squared her posture and with a piercing, straight-ahead look, the 49-year-old grandmother of six said, ?Crack. I was ad­dicted to crack for over 20 years.? Darlene Horton, now an advocate at Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, paid the price for her addiction. The Peoria native went to prison twice, the first for most of a year in 1997 and the second for two and a half years less than a decade later. Both were nonviolent offenses that left her four children without a parent. Horton?s tale is emblematic of one of the fastest growing prison populations in the state and county: mothers. Between 1990 and 2005, the number of women in Illinois prisons quadrupled, according to the state Department of Corrections...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on March 12, 2010 (boomark / email).