It can be easy to think of prisoners within a vacuum of punitive justice, as criminals doing time and not as mothers and fathers.

It's especially easy if you're a California Democrat looking at a big fat wad of cash from the state prison guards' union.

All you have to do is torpedo any effort by the state government to hold guards legally accountable for acts that are crimes even if they are done to prisoners.

Perhaps Salon could mention in the upcoming election coverage that Arnold has stuck his thick Republican neck out for prison reform, and not received much in the way of appreciation from the post-Gray Davis left.

As a labor and delivery nurse at a large public hospital I've assisted at many births of incarcerated women.

I don't really take a position on the rights of felons, other than to assume that they need to be abrogated somehow, to give incarceration meaning.

But as for hospital staff... I'm grateful for the concern about violence to staff, but in my experience there was at least as much of a risk of violence from many of our patients (or their family members) who were *not* incarcerated. They were more likely to have a weapon, at least, and to be unattended.

I'm concerned about making hospital staff into prison guards, and the hospital into a prison. It violates our respective professional oaths to include us as punishers, e.g., if we can't offer a woman pain medication, or can't move and position her as we see fit for her medical needs. If she's in my labor room, I'm in charge in there, not the guards. What do they know about birth? I'll handle the nursing care, they can handle the punishment, on their own time and somewhere else.

Also, the shackles sound medically unsafe, for the woman and for the baby. I won't go into the details for the squeamish but you're asking for an emergency, which even the most hard-hearted, hard-nosed person would have to acknowledge drives up the cost of her health care (billed to the taxpayer).

I'm pretty sure I tried to hurt people during delivery and no one batted an eye!

If 5% of women who enter prison are pregnant, what percentage of those are violent? Seems that we often hear statistics about most women being in prison for non-violent offenses.

for anyone interested in reading more about this, go to the BBC website.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4766218.stm

I have given birth three times. Each time, I was in unbearable agony. And I always had loving support nearby. I always knew that the people in the room with me wanted the best for me and my baby.

I read the full New York Times article. Most of the shackled women were not even guilty of violent crimes. They were convicted of nonviolent offenses like writing bad checks.

From what I've read of the prison system in this country (or any country- there have been several psychological experiments on the affects ofincarceration of both inmates and jailors), it encourages dehumanization of the convict. Not only do prisoners lose many of their rights of citizenship, they also lose many human rights as well.

Horror stories from American prisons are abundant. Not only are pregnant female prisoners in labor shackled for all but the actual delivery of the baby, but in many prisons female prisoners have male guards. If you take a moment to think of the extreme power imbalance of that situation and the opportunities for rape and abuse that occur when men have the keys and women are locked into cells- cells without any privacy at all- you begin to get a sense of the magnitude of the problems that female prisoners face. And most female prisoners in this country are incarecerated for non-violent offenses.

Everyone has heard the stories of male upon male rape that is common in American prisons, not to mention the extreme violence and race hatred that is commonly present in our prisons, as well. But how many of us realize that many mentally ill convicts are given little to no psychiatric care and inmates afflicted with cancer and AIDS are often given inadequate medical care.

I studied criminology a bit in college, and it turns out that juveniles leave state facilities more violent and crime-prone than when they went in, on average. This is also often the case for adult offenders.

I'm not sayingt we shouldn't have prisons. It is also a well documented fact that the best way to keep violent offenders from reoffending is to keep them away from potential victims. But there has got to be a humane way to do this. Whatever their crimes, they are still human beings.