'Bad moms' or women in need of help? Oklahoma rethinks view of female inmates.
It was late at night and Laura Richards was behind the wheel, drunk and unhappy, arguing with her husband over who should drive. She was in her late 20s and a mother of two, married to a man who she says abused her.
Finally he got out of the car. “I don’t know what happened, but something snapped,” she says.
Ms. Richards later told police that she had tried to run over her husband – that when she drove the car toward him in her alcoholic haze and he jumped out of the way, it was intentional. She was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
It was her fourth arrest and it put her on the road to prison in a state that locks up more people per capita than nearly every other. For women, it’s even more of an outlier: Oklahoma’s female rate is the nation’s highest and more than double the average. Both rates are the result of tough sentencing laws, zealous prosecutors, and a lack of alternatives to prisons.
In other states, policies to reduce prison rolls have won bipartisan backing and led to lower overall rates of incarceration, particularly of drug offenders. Oklahoma has tacked the opposite way, taking a punitive approach that echoes that of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has blamed lenient sentencing of drug dealers for an uptick in violent crime.
The US is second only
An off-ramp before prisonDoor-to-door lawyersForging a new path for families'I miss my mom'
