NPR's 'Weekend Edition Saturday' Profiles Prenatal Care Program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York

NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" profiled the prenatal care program for female inmates at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. The state sends all of its pregnant inmates to Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison, where they receive prenatal care and parenting classes and are permitted to keep their infants at an in-house nursery for up to 18 months after birth. The program is meant to foster relationships between women and their newborns, which provides the infants a "better start" and incentives for women to "stay straight," according to NPR. Mary Byrne of Columbia University, who is evaluating the success of the nursery program, said the infants at Bedford Hills "do as well as babies in any other setting" and are "not challenged at all in any negative way." Her research is expected to be completed in 2007. Critics of the program say it is "soft on crime" and that inmates should lose their parental rights, NPR reports. The U.S. is one of four countries that routinely takes infants away from their incarcerated mothers (Wertheimer, "Weekend Edition Saturday," NPR, 11/5).

The complete segment is available online in RealPlayer.


"Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.