It’s a headline you’d expect to find on microfiche, or maybe in an online archive—not at the top of a post with a 2018 date: “Lawmakers pass bill to forbid judges from sterilizing inmates in exchange for reduced jail time.” In White County, Tennessee, a sheriff and judge have allegedly been making inmates choose between sterilization or longer sentences.
White County Judge Sam Benningfield agreed to let inmates out of jail 30 days early if they got procedures to prevent them from having children — vasectomies for men or birth control implants for women.
Benningfield was reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct after he issued his order. Multiple lawsuits have been filed challenging the deals.
Judge Benningfield, by the way, considers himself as a real benevolent force.
Benningfield has explained that his program is voluntary and well intentioned. “I hope to encourage them to take personal responsibility and give them a chance, when they do get out, to not to be burdened with children,” he told local reporters. “This gives them a chance to get on their feet and make something of themselves.”
Multiple lawsuits have been filed in response to Benningfield’s actions, the latest of which targeted both the judge and sheriff.
Lawyers on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit in Nashville alleging a White County, Tennessee, sheriff and judge who allowed inmates to get out of jail early in exchange for undergoing birth control procedures operated a scheme that was inherently coercive and unconstitutional.
The law was clear enough—you’re not allowed to coerce people into sterilization, as the ACLU of Tennessee has pointed out—but state legislators have now made it explicit.
The House voted on Tuesday to approve a bill that would forbid judges from approving a sentence "that is based in whole or in part on the defendant’s consent or refusal to consent to any form of temporary or permanent birth control, sterilization, or family planning services."
The Senate approved the bill in March.
The legislation has ended the debate—at least in Tennessee. Unfortunately, Tennessee isn’t the only state in which officials have abused their office to effect eugenics-driven schemes. In 2009, a 21-year-old woman underwent tubal ligation as a condition of her plea deal. Her crime? Possession with intent to distribute marijuana. Five years later, a Virginia prosecutor offered one man a plea deal contingent on his obtaining a vasectomy.
Coercive sterilization isn’t just a state-level problem, either. This February, a federal judge in Oklahoma strongly suggested that a woman awaiting sentencing get sterilized beforehand. She did. In exchange, he shortened her sentence.
The judge, Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen P. Friot of Oklahoma City, had taken a guilty plea from Creel for making and cashing a counterfeit check in January 2017, but had to postpone subsequent sentencing hearings because Creel was either in jail or testing positive for drug use, court records show. When Creel didn’t show up for her sentencing last June, the judge looked at her pre-sentence report and observed that Creel was a user of both crack cocaine and methamphetamine.
“It appears highly likely,” Friot wrote, “that some of Ms. Creel’s children were conceived, carried and born while Ms. Creel was a habitual user of these illicit substances.” He noted that she had relinquished custody of six of her seven children in 2012, with the seventh born in 2016. And so the judge concluded that, at the sentencing, “Ms. Creel may, if (and only if) she chooses to do so, present medical evidence to the court establishing that she has been rendered incapable of procreation.”
It wasn’t lost on prosecutors that Friot’s suggestion was, to put it lightly, problematic.
Federal prosecutors argued that the judge should not consider that fact in determining a sentence for Creel, because she “not only has a fundamental constitutional right to procreate,” but also because her decisions to do so are “irrelevant to determining a sentence.”
Judge Friot, much like Benningfield, viewed his actions as sound, even magnanimous.
Friot issued findings Thursday in which he said “Ms. Creel will get the benefit of her decision to be sterilized. She will receive a shorter sentence because she made that decision.” Responding to the prosecution’s argument against such a consideration, Friot said, “the Supreme Court has yet to recognize a constitutional right to bring crack or methamphetamine addicted babies into this world.”
These most recent, high-profile cases have generally occurred in isolation, or as the result of one twisted official.
The Marshall Project’s rundown on sterilization scandals offers a sobering reminder of how recently the practice was in wider use. At one point, more than 30 states had passed legislation authorizing forcible sterilization.
Eugenics laws remained on the books in many states until the 1970s. But while laws were repealed, eugenic practices continue — especially in our nation’s prisons and jails.
Reporting by the Center for Investigative Reporting exposed that nearly 150 women underwent tubal ligations in California prisons between 2004 and 2013. According to CIR, medical staffers at two prisons that housed pregnant women targeted individuals for sterilization who they deemed likely to return to prison. The medical staff had many of the women sign consent forms, causing a debate about the limitations of consent for incarcerated people once the practice was exposed.
These laws weren’t just passively extant into the 1970s: They were actively applied.
The states of North Carolina, Virginia and California have apologized in recent years for state-run sterilization programs, which happened as recently as 1974 in North Carolina.
It’s obscene that some officials have devoted more effort, and greater resources, to coercive sterilization than to ensuring access to family planning. As David M. Perry points out:
[M]arginalized people do in fact need access to reproductive choices. Indeed, everyone should have affordable or free birth control and education about how and why to use it. No one, however, should be compelled to trade their reproductive freedom for corporal freedom.