For some incarcerated women, getting ahold of menstrual products is a nightmare

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-02/for-some-incarcerated-women-getting-ahold-of-menstrual-products-isnt-easy

One of the things Alissa Moore remembers clearly from her time in prison is how the guards taunted her when she asked for a tampon. Sometimes they’d outright refuse. Other times they’d ask her to come to a closet or a back room, where she said, on several occasions, she was sexually assaulted.

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In New York, jail officials admitted last year that they’d stopped giving out free supplies. In Texas, women say that sometimes they get challenged by guards when they ask for more tampons or pads. And in California, after passing one bill to address the problem in 2020, several reports have surfaced where women were still denied menstrual products.

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Now California is trying to fix it for good. State lawmakers are considering proposed legislation, Assembly Bill 1810, to require jails, prisons and juvenile lock-ups to make tampons and pads readily accessible so that women don’t have to beg prison officials for menstrual supplies.

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As a teenager in a California prison, Moore said her period became a monthly anxiety. She was given about a dozen tampons and a dozen pads each month, though the exact number varied based on supply and was up to the discretion of the guards. When the law passed in 2020, she said during that year, until she was released a year later, officers tried to make it “appear as if they were available” to the administration and any outside visitors. “But it was all facade,” she said. Because of a medical condition, she experienced long periods of bleeding that required her to need more.

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She remembers clearly the first time she bought tampons from Walmart — something she’d never done before.

“It was almost like a surreal experience,” she said. “I didn’t need to stand there and be sexualized for getting a tampon. It took a while for things like that to sink in.”

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“One of the big problems in addition to limits on the supplies is that in many places they have to request the supplies — and sometimes have to show their bloody clothes to an officer as proof that they need them,” she said. “Any time you put women in a position where they have to request something from staff, it makes them vulnerable to the staff wanting something in return, including sexual favors.”

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But Kwaneta Harris, a 51-year-old doing time in another central Texas prison, said guards have grilled her about why someone her age still needs pads and tampons.

“If one more guard says to me when I ask for them, ‘Ain’t you too old to still be having a cycle?’ It ain’t gonna be pretty,” she wrote. “I’m sick of explaining that perimenopause means hot flashes AND heavy periods to guards the same age as my kids.”