Orobator was arrested at Wattay Airport in Laos on August 6th, 2008 with 680g of heroin. In Laos, smuggling over 500g of heroin across national borders carries a mandatory death sentence. She goes on trial this week.

Orobator has been held in the notorious Phonthong prison for the past nine months. She has not yet met with her lawyer, and British diplomats only heard of her detention months after she was arrested. Orobator claimed that she was forced to carry drugs for a third party, and there is no evidence she was anything more than just a drug mule. The human rights group Reprieve says that Orobator will meet with her lawyer, Anna Morris, on Tuesday, but by then it may be too late. Reprieve reported that Orobator contacted them recently with the information that the trial had been moved up to Tuesday morning. The charity claims that Laotian authorities have brought the trial forward in attempts to stop Orobator from accessing adequate legal representation. Morris told Sky News:

"That has been our concern from the outset, that she has had no access to legal counsel before this week.

"We don't know that she is going to have any before any trial takes place and we are deeply concerned about the implications of that for her given her vulnerability, given her age and given her lack of familiarity with the system."

To make matters worse, the Independent reports that Orobator's pregnancy may be the result of sexual assault. (She is five months pregnant, and due to give birth in September.) Friends worry that since Orobator is being held in a women's prison, does not speak the language, and should have had no contact with men, her pregnancy may be evidence of abuse. Reprieve said: "The prison where she is being held in Phonthong is meant to be all-female, but this is apparently not the case.''

Laos prisons are famous for their lack of medical care and mistreatment of prisoners, which has led to the deaths of at least two foreign nationals in the last decade. The daily ration apparently consists of two bowls of pig fat water soup and 500g of sticky rice. Phonthong prison has also been the site of several reported instances of torture, with some inmates having their genitals burnt, the Guardian reports. It is unknown whether Orobator has suffered from mistreatment while behind held in prison, but since she is only allowed to speak to British officials for twenty minutes, once a month, and always in the presence of a guard, the conditions of her arrest and possible rape may never come to light.

Pregnant Briton Samantha Orobator To Face Drug Smuggling Trial In Laos On Monday [Guardian]
Pregnant British Woman Faces Firing Squad Over Drug Charges [Independent]
Pregnant British Woman In Laos To Go On Trial On Monday [Telegraph]

One incarcerated woman says this:

"Above all in this life, I am a mother," says [Andrea Virginia] Tapia, who is in her 30s and is the mother of seven kids, four of whom live in the prison with her. (The others live with her mother.) "They are best with me," she adds, as her three-year-old snuggles into her lap, "regardless of where that is."

The director of the penal system agrees.

"We've seen that this is best for mother, or father, and child," says Jorge Lopez, Director of Bolivia's Penitentiary System. "It's important not to rip those bonds between parent and child."

Altruistic sentiments about mother-child boding aside, there are some practical reasons as well.

In Bolivia, South America's poorest country, it's often financially impossible for family members on the outside to take on more mouths to feed. Orphanages aren't feasible, either: "Children live in worse conditions there than in the prisons - and without their moms and dads," says Rene Estensorro, a psychologist at Semilla de Vida (Seed of Life), a non-governmental organization that works with imprisoned mothers and their children. Lopez agrees. Releasing the kids from the prisons, he says, "means [their] direct entryway onto the street."

Like with the children staying with their mothers in both Mexican and American prisons, people worry about the effects incarceration can have on the children.

The equally important question, of course, is what prison time does to the children. Estensorro acknowledges that "we see a lot of repression in the children." Kids inside the Women's Correctional Facility are punished for normal behavior like waking up in the middle of the night - because they end up waking up everyone else inside the cramped sleeping quarters. School age kids leave the prison each day to attend regular schools but nonetheless suffer isolation from their peers. Another problem: the lack of 24-hour medical care inside the prison. Worse, kids must sometimes share mom's punishment for bad behavior, like solitary confinement.

And that doesn't even include the well-being of 200 children stuck with their incarcerated parents during a prison riot that resulted in the tear-gassing of the facility. But in a society with few social services to offer children whose parents are incarcerated, maybe the occasional prison riot is less dangerous than a few years spent caring for themselves on the streets.

In Bolivia, Keeping Kids And Moms Together - In Prison [Time]

Earlier: Baby Girls Add Touch Of Pink, Peace To Mexico's Prison System
Moms Behind Bars: How To Make The Best Of A Bad Situation

It probably goes without saying that many of the women in prison are minorities, locked up under mandatory-sentencing provisions of our War on Drugs. So, what is being done for the children that are increasingly turning into a lost generation?

Like in everything else, there are good and bad things. In New York, Washington and Nebraska, prisons are opening up nursery facilities where children can stay with their mothers until they are between 12 and 18 months old. In California, some non-violent female offenders might be sentenced to a residential drug treatment program where children up to the age of six are welcome. Both programs show a much lower recidivism rate among participants compared to the national 52% recidivism rate. Other states have more piecemeal programs, in which non-profits use webcams to help incarcerated women read to their children or the Girl Scouts bus children to the facilities in which their mothers are incarcerated for meetings. In Michigan, the state has a program to teach incarcerated women parenting skills and help them reconnect with their often older children. Most agree that continued contact between non-abusive mothers and their children can be helpful in both keeping the children from entering the criminal justice system and keeping the mothers from re-entering it after their release.

This is obviously why Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which allows states to terminate the parental rights of parents who spend 15 of the last 22 months in prison — even though, in some states, a person could spend that long awaiting trial and be acquitted. Ellen Barry of Prisoners with Children says of that brilliant idea, "We're creating a monster," by shunting more children — especially older children, and especially the children of minorities — into an already strained foster care and adoption system. But, like everything else, it comes down to the age-old American question: do we use our criminal justice system to rehabilitate those criminals that fall into it, or do we simply use it as a means punishment? And who aren't we willing to punish? Because, when it comes to separating mothers from children and sending more and more kids into foster care, we might be punishing the mother with the loss of her freedom, but we're punishing plenty of children with the loss of their mother — and, in too many cases, creating new future participants in both systems.

Mothers In Prison [Time]

"It makes it harder that they’re women," says Rhonda Cobb, a control center sergeant who always dreamed of being a corrections officer. "Because you don’t expect it from a woman. If a woman goes and butchers somebody, it makes us all look bad. As women."

According to the Times, half of the women on death row are there for killing those close to them — their partners, their children, or both. Many — the figure for all inmates at Muncy is 86% — have themselves been abused. Cobb is also an abuse victim, so she empathizes with her charges to some degree. But she can no longer read their files. "“We had a girl who had just come in – had killed her two-year-old baby," she says, "She had burnt it, starved it to death, and my son was two years old at the time. [...] With that particular inmate, it was never the same. You just don’t want to know the person’s details."

Debra Schaefer displays a similar mix of understanding and detachment:

Have I been angry enough when I think I could have killed someone? Sure. But at that moment – in a sane, sensible person – lurks the question: what’s going to happen if I do this?

Whereas these women… they dropped off the deep edge. Either they didn’t care or they didn’t think what the repercussions would be. I can’t answer for them. I wasn’t in their shoes. But no, I can’t sympathise. When you walk into that environment, you can’t cry for them. We have 1,200 inmates – that’s too many tears.

It would be too easy to say that being a female warden among women is categorically different from being a male one among men. Some men probably also feel the sense that criminals have let their gender down — and that, were it not for luck and good judgment, they might have done so too. But there is a culture at SCI Muncy that may be unique to women's prisons: a culture of conversation. The Times writes, a little crudely, that there are fewer fights at Muncy than at men's prisons, "because the female inmates can’t keep a secret. They talk, they don’t harbour malice, so incidents are prevented." And the whole piece, with the almost familial relationships between officers and inmates, the difficulties of getting too close or too angry, reminds me of a joke Sigrid Nunez tells in her novel, The Last of Her Kind:

Two women who are imprisoned in the same cell together for twenty-five years are released on the same day. Before they go their separate ways, they hang around outside the prison gate and talk for an hour.

It's reductive, and it reinforces some of the stereotypes about gabby women that ordinarily make me angry. But it does speak to the way that women are raised to live with one another, to engage in a kind of constant communication that can be as restrictive as it is reassuring — and that must make life for a warden or a prisoner all the more harrowing for the understanding that one could so easily be in the other's shoes.

The Pink Mile: Women On Death Row [Times of London]
Muncys 3 Amigos [Muncy 3 Amigos]

Ms. Rendon, explains writer James C. McKinley Jr., makes a living selling snacks to visitors so that she can then buy food for her fragile, often-ailing daughter from the prison grocery (she considers the food at the prison cafeteria unhealthy.) "I think the best thing for my daughter would be for her to be outside with her grandmother," Rendon admits. "But the truth is I need her. She is something special."

Interestingly, the majority of the women interviewed seem to be mothers to daughters. In addition to Ms. Rendon, there is Diane Merlos Espericueta, also with a toddler daughter, Jacqueline, and Victoria Jaramillo (pictured above), mother to a 3-month-old girl, Frida. And, despite the constant threat of violence in the prison, the prison's warden explains that the children enjoy a protective cloak offered by the other prisoners, even the motherless ones, tapping into what the Times describes as "the collective maternal instinct of the 1,680 women locked up here." "The minors are highly respected by the population," says warden Margarita Malo. "The fact we have children here creates a mind-set of solidarity. I have never seen aggression on the part of the inmates toward the children. Everyone acts as if they could be their children, and they don't want anything to happen to them."

Behind Prison Bars, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom [NY Times]

• Women who dress conservatively may win the affections of men like Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Iranian clerics, but they're also at more risk of a Vitamin D deficiency because their skin rarely sees the sun. [Salon]
  
• Potatoes: Not too great for the waistline but fantastic for the immune system! [Telegraph]
  
• Okay, so women are going to buy the $600 iPhone in droves but they also are the least confident segment of the population when it comes to the economy? Get your stories straight, people. [MediaPost]

• Use of SSRIs like Prozac may increase risk of osteoporosis in the elderly. [Telegraph]
• Only 1 in 20 rapes reported in the UK leads to an actual conviction. [TheSun]
• Feministing points out that, amid the media brouhaha over Paris Hilton's incarceration, what got lost is the disturbing aside that women of color are the fasting growing population (male or female) in U.S. prisons. [Feministing]