Although she had been teaching women’s history classes for years at the San Joaquín campus, in a municipality in the southern area of Santiago, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago, a prestigious Chilean institution, Ana María Stuven (1951, Santiago) had not I noticed that there was a women’s prison in front. She then decided to cross the path, she touched the large iron gate on her own initiative, presented herself to the gendarmes and began to visit the prison permanently. Nearly 25 years have passed since then, in which Stuven, who later created the Abriendo Puertas Corporation, has undertaken a public campaign, increasingly systematic and insistent – and which sometimes feels like a line in the water – to improve the conditions of those detained and promote measures other than deprivation of liberty, especially for those who are mothers, in crimes that are not bloody.
Stuven, PhD in history from Stanford University and co-author of History of Women in Chile Together with Joaquín Fermandois, she is currently working on research with the Catholic University on Crime, prison and the reintegration of women in Chile. Her letters in the Chilean press, including the newspaper The Mercury, are common. But with his proposal he has encountered an increasingly higher wall given the security crisis that Chile is experiencing: “Why do you work with those people? Dedicate yourself to history,” are the responses he receives.
Ask. How did you feel when you found out that there was a prison in front of the Catholic University?
Answer. It proved to me the separation between two worlds that were facing each other without one knowing or knowing about the other. And he spoke to me a lot about Chilean education and the elitism that existed in the culture, in the sense that the San Joaquín campus, which is a place where people have the privilege of studying at a very good university, was so separated, but at the same time at the same time so close to a women’s prison.
Q. What was your first approach to prison like?
R. This was around the end of 1999. At that time there were around 2,000 women for a space that could hold no more than 500. It was a situation of overcrowding and deep pain that challenged me not only in my role as a women’s historian, but also in my role as a privileged woman within Chilean society, which could be teaching at an elite university and facing this world of pain. I started doing some workshops to establish a connection with women, so that I could detect where I could do something more concrete. And so the Abriendo Puertas Corporation emerged a few years later, with volunteer work, training, job readiness and micro-entrepreneurship.
Q. What is the reality of women when they leave prison?
R. That has been a learning experience. In 2018 we carried out a pilot project of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in conjunction with the State Bank and the Gendarmerie that contemplated accompaniment for six months to those who were going to obtain their freedom, and then six months after freedom, in such a way to see how recidivism and crime decreased in people who were accompanied in their post-penitentiary period. And the result, in a population of more than 100 women, was that recidivism decreased by 50%. So, what we have verified is that a woman’s weakest moment, that is, when she is most vulnerable to re-offending, is the first month after she leaves prison.
Q. Because?
R. It must be taken into account that their partners and husbands abandoned them during the course of their sentence and they are alone, since their mother is going to visit them with difficulties. This is different from what happens in the male prison, where the women bring them food, are in charge of taking care of them and giving them the best conditions they can. But in the case of women, men immediately disappear.
Q. In that sense, is it harder for a woman than for a man to be in prison?
R. Yes, and also because of the situation of the children. Because the women who enter prison are mostly heads of households. Therefore, the children are left in a situation of total abandonment. So, when the door is opened for women at midnight to go free, who is outside to wait for her? The same person who took them to jail by giving them drugs for them to sell from their home so that they can accompany their children from home. Because the other reality is that in Chile there are no daycare centers where they can leave their children to go to work. Then, microtrafficking becomes an economic resource that they see as a job they can do from home.
Q. What profile do these women have?
R. Women are approximately 8% of the total population of a total of about 55,000 people deprived of liberty. In the research project I am carrying out, sponsored by the Catholic University, we have interviewed 35 women who are in the post-prison programs of the Abriendo Puertas Corporation. And the pattern that has emerged is copied for all: violence in childhood, sexual abuse or abuse of another type, teenage pregnancy, dysfunctional families, that is, absence of the father or mother. Many times a street situation, with couples who involve them, as they say, for love in crime, in addition to poverty, marginality, school dropouts and an average of three children per woman.
Q. What happens to children in Chile when their mother goes to prison?
R. That is one of the most serious problems in Chilean legislation. When the Investigative Police (PDI), as they say, burst a house, that is, he enters because he knows that drugs are being trafficked there, they take the mother and father and the children are left in the care of the person who is available, who could be a neighbor, with all the risk that that can cause. lead to your well-being. They can also be left in the care of the family and in many cases they go to the Better Childhood program, with all the consequences that this has in terms of the loss of emotional networks, care work, the impoverishment of families and the loss mother’s contact with her children. I have women who don’t know where their children are, and when they get out of prison they just start looking for them because they don’t know where they are.
Q. Why don’t they know?
R. Because their children entered one home and from there they left and entered another, and they lose contact. And because, furthermore, there are many women who prefer that their children not see them while they are in prison because it causes them a lot of guilt to appear in front of them while they are in prison. For these women, motherhood is fundamental. If you ask them, who are you? Before they say ‘I am a woman’, they answer: ‘I am the mother of’. Her identity is built from being a mother.
Q. What does that reflect for you?
R. The pain and inconvenience of separating a woman from her children, when they are minor crimes. I’m not talking about women who have committed blood crimes, but about women who 60% are there for micro-trafficking. So, they are criminals, of course, but very small in terms of their replicability as such. I have become a bit of a spokesperson for this problem in the public space. And when they ask me, what are you after? Obviously, prison conditions should improve, but I also want to rethink the problem of female prison for a woman who has committed minor crimes and is a mother.
Q. Is it an unpopular position given the security crisis in Chile? Have you come across that?
R. Obviously, I find it everywhere. And we have horrible financing problems because of that. It is very easy to ask for money [para corporaciones] for children and the elderly, but go ask for money for a private woman and freedom. They tell you ‘let her rot in jail’. I have heard those phrases as many times as you want. They tell you: why do you work with those people? Dedicate yourself to history.’
Q. And what does he answer?
R. I answer that this is the path that life set me on. And I took this challenge because I believe in the cause, because now I am older, I have stopped taking classes and because I believe that this gives meaning even to my academic career. I’ve always had the feeling that the academic world is a bit self-referential. I believe that it is essential for a person to complement your work with insertion into the real world. And poverty, marginalization and pain have also become a way of thinking about my relationship with the world.
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