I hadn’t even heard the stories that forced sterilization
of women (often PoC) go on in prisons, especially California’s, but Erika Cohn
laid it all out in a documentary, filled with interviews, aired Monday Nov. 23,
2020 on PBS Independent Lens, called “Belly of the Beast”m PBS link.
NPR has a useful historical link on the practice, which continued until at least 2010.
The women talked unashameably about their prospects for love again. And they describe not knowing they will be sterilized, for “eugenics”.
You could imagine connecting this to Bryan Stevenson’s
work on wrongful convictions (“Just Mercy”).
The film seems to be related to or inspired by the
book “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison” from Vintage Books by Jack Henry
Abbott (1991).
The prison is located near Chowchilla, in the Central
Valley along I-5. I’ve been in the area
twice, in 2002 and 2018.
The film was followed by a brief QA where the director
talks with several former prisoners.
Wikipedia embed shows the prison from the air (click
for attribution). The film shows
various shots of downtown Sacramento (visited 2018) and the Capitol (my pic at night).
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