(Legal) Drugs And Women Behind Bars

Men and women face very different realities when they are sent to prison. For one thing, women are far more likely to be medicated. Last year, in Massachusetts, 56 percent of women inmates were treated with psychotropic medication while in prison, compared with only 17 percent of male inmates.

Our guest says that medicating inmates comes with serious medical side effects, restricts their autonomy, and could even interfere with prisoners' ability to participate in their own defense.

But it is a reality in this state and across a country that medicates and incarcerates more than any other in the world.

Susan Sered, professor of sociology at Suffolk University in Boston, she wrote a recent op-ed in Salon.

Dee Dee, a former prisoner in Massachusetts