'Nightline' spends a week in prisons for women

Ted Koppel has long been fascinated by the American criminal justice system. It's easy to see why. Compare incarceration and execution rates in the United States with other Western nations, and the contrast is stark (some would say appallingly so). Beginning tonight, "ABC News Nightline" (12:05 a.m., Channel 9), which has extensively covered issues of crime and punishment in the past, begins a six-night investigation of America's singular achievement in locking up more women than any other country in the world. Not only that, Koppel asserts, women are the fastest-growing category of prisoner in the United States. But are America's prisons - built traditionally and predominantly to handle male offenders - adequate for women? Once again, Koppel has chosen to find out more by spending some quality time on location, in this case at the California Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, Calif. (On a similar assignment a few years ago, Koppel spent the night at a North Carolina men's prison.) The six shows will air consecutively through next Friday. I've watched three and they show "Nightline" at its conscientious best. Koppel remains neutral on whether all of these women deserve to be behind bars - although he does keep bringing up, with some disdain in his voice, California's "three strikes" law that sends women to prison for life after three felony convictions. Rather, "Nightline" focuses on the conditions inside this women's prison - a 4-year-old facility that is already filled to nearly twice its supposed capacity - and lays bare how abysmal those conditions are. This raises two questions: If things are this bad here, how much worse are they at other women's prisons? And if so, are we doing these women a grave injustice sending them to these facilities in record numbers? In tonight's episode viewers learn 80 percent of the Chowchilla residents are there on drug-related offenses; 80 percent have been physically or sexually abused; 80 percent of them will be back in prison after release. We also learn about some of the differences between male and female prisoners, which will be drawn out on later nights. Next Tuesday's broadcast looks at the appalling state of health care inside the prison. One woman's breast cancer was allowed to metastasize because it took the prison's medical officers half a year to get her in for an examination. Also troubling is a pattern of sexual harassment by medical staff that, until "Nightline" began looking into it, had either not been reported to prison officials or was ignored by them. "The women here have been sentenced to forfeit their freedom," Koppel says. "Not their dignity, or their self-respect, or their health." The same, he need hardly have added, should apply to the nation's male prisoners as well. Just because you're not married to a county 4-H bread-baking champion (like I am) doesn't mean you have to miss out on the joys of creating your own loaves from scratch - without bread machines and without tears. Now you can invite a genuine Benedectine monk into your house on Saturdays and have him show you how. "Breaking Bread With Father Dominic," which debuts 10 a.m. Saturday on Channel 19, borrows from "The Frugal Gourmet" in its emphasis on the spirituality of creating wholesome things to eat. Despite the uncanny resemblance (see photo), Father Dominic is not my brother. >>>