Tagged: Prison

When he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and other charges in 2005, Stephen Slevin had no way of knowing that an opinion about his mental state would put him on a path to spend more than 22 months of solitary confinement in a New Mexico county jail, despite never having his day in court. This week, he reached a $15.5 million settlement with Dona Ana County.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News, I'm Scott Simon. Jeffrey Beard has watched America's prisons grow larger and larger every year adding prisoner after prisoner. He began working in the Pennsylvania Corrections system in the early 1970s when there were about 8,000 prisoners. He was secretary of corrections by the time he left in 2010 and by that time Pennsylvania had more than 50,000 people in its prisons.

When Rowena Gore-Simmons went to prison, her daughter, Kenya, was just 4 years old. On her first night behind bars, Rowena recalls, her hands and feet were shackled.

"I was disappointed in myself, and I was scared for you guys," she told Kenya during a visit to StoryCorps in Baltimore.

During the year Rowena was incarcerated, people would often ask Kenya, 'Where's your mother?'

'I didn't tell them nothing," recalls Kenya, now 16. But all the questions, she says, made her feel like an outsider.