The True Cost of Periods in Prison

“On July 13, 2014, I was menstruating and was out of sanitary napkins. During this period, Officer Grieves told me that I was ‘shit out of luck,’ and I better not ‘bleed on the floor.’”

This was the reality for Londora Kitchens and continues to be the reality for over 100,000 other inmates throughout the United States. Prisons are fundamentally failing to provide sufficient sanitary supplies, and what inmates receive does not meet basic needs.

This lack of access isn’t just inconvenient — it endangers inmates’ safety. To retain any modicum of dignity, women stretch and manipulate supplies, including wearing products for far longer than is recommended, to a degree that can have disastrous implications on their reproductive health. Menstrual products are also often used as leverage to establish control and authority over prisoners, who may be forced to grant sexual favors to receive their regular mandated allocation of menstrual products.

Humiliation, as it relates to menstrual stigma, is also used as a weapon of subjugation and control, as prison reform activist Chandra Bozelko attests to. She writes on her blog that “every woman here stains her underwear routinely. The red splotch is the [institutional] logo.” Blood stains are a powerful and constant reminder of one’s helplessness while incarcerated. A basic bodily function becoming a tool of monthly humiliation is an inhumane abuse of power that must be clamped down upon in a country professing to be a modern, progressive democracy.

Even apart from safety, the current model of access leads to major injustices and inequalities among prisoners. Adequate sanitary supplies cost nearly a month’s pay, meaning that inmates must cough up a premium to get supplemental products. In Missouri, inmates earn approximately $7.50 a month ($8.50 with a high school diploma), while a box of 18 maxi pads costs $5.38 in the prison commissary and 20 Tampax tampons cost $5.63. This presents a truly abhorrent dilemma: sacrifice financial prospects, sacrifice health, or sacrifice dignity.

This is still the reality despite the fact that in 2018, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) mandated that menstrual products be free in federal prisons. Access to menstruation supplies is even more limited at the state level, as many states cap the number of sanitary products that convicts can obtain monthly.

Some legislators are trying to address this issue, however. For example, Maine state Rep. Charlotte Warren put forth a bill to ensure that pads and tampons be freely available in Maine jails and prisons. Yet this legislation faced opposition; Republican state Rep. Richard Pickett claimed that detained women had good access to these products. According to journalist Alex Acquisto on Twitter, he said, “quite frankly, and I don’t mean this in any disrespect, the jail system and the correctional system was never meant to be a country club.”

Equating basic menstrual hygiene with the luxury of a country club is patently absurd, but it is true that providing greater access to adequate sanitary products will come at a cost to the taxpayer. Introducing federal and state-level legislation would need to include new allocations in the budget to provide this access which would increase individual taxes. But the fact remains that access to sanitary pads is not an indulgence only to be aspired to in certain fiscal circumstances — it is a fundamental human right.

A number of states agree. New York and Louisiana have passed legislation to mandate free and ample access to adequate products, with Maryland, Colorado, Arizona, and Alabama following suit, showing that there is an appetite among some lawmakers to bring change.

If we’re serious about creating a justice system that encourages both rehabilitation and security, it’s time for basic hygiene provisions to be prioritized. Federal and state lawmakers must feel pressure to move toward providing sufficient menstrual hygiene supplies, and the time to act is now. Your state laws could be part of what’s hurting incarcerated women. Take action now, and make sure your representatives feel what you’re feeling.