Disparities in menstrual product access in Arizona’s prisons could be solved by this bill, but it’s unlikely to pass — again
by
An Arizona House bill hopes to change how female inmates access menstrual products and healthcare, but it’s been unsuccessful. (File photo by Jenna Aronson/Cronkite News)
PHOENIX— Amanda Zaun and Christina Perez tend to talk as one — intertwined in speech and in their lives.
The couple met in the Santa Rosa unit of Arizona State Prison Complex- Perryville in Goodyear. Now on parole and soon to be married, the women said the treatment of menstruating inmates was “barbaric” during their time in prison.
Zaun, who served six years in three states, including Arizona, for fraud, said the conditions for access to menstrual products were selective in Arizona. She said in her time in medium custody, she had to go to “the bubble,” which was the central officer the correctional officers would stay, to ask for products.
Inmates like Zaun and Perez were subjected to arbitrary approaches to how officers in prisons like Perryville give out menstrual products. But, Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, a Democrat, is seeking to change that with HB 2529.
Stahl Hamilton inherited the language of the bill from former Rep. Athena Salaman, who resigned at the end of the year in 2023. Stahl Hamilton sponsored the bill for the first time in 2024. The bill ensures menstrual products are free in prisons and that pregnant inmates are exempt from paying fees related to medical care. Stahl Hamilton said she hopes the bill will see progress if Arizona’s Democratic Party is in the majority next year.
She said she used to hope the officer was having a good day so that she’d get the products she needed.
In contrast, in Perryville’s Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz minimum security units, Zaun said inmates could simply go into the yard’s office and pick out menstrual products.
“It depends on the situation in prison for everything,” she said.
Zaun said other inmates would use the strings from tampons to thread their eyebrows, use pads to clean the floors and make earplugs from menstrual products. She said despite that, the fear of contraband usage “does not justify all these women not getting what they need.”
“There’s nothing they can do about it, and that’s the problem, is that nobody’s helping them on the outfit, nobody’s fighting for them. And in that case, they’re stuck there. You can gripe and yell all you want to. It’s not going to change anything for us, the inmates,” Zaun said.
Perez said she has served time in multiple facilities, from juvenile detention to prisons.
“It was a journey. We’ve come a long way. We’ve changed a lot about ourselves. We did it together,” Zaun said.
When Perez was in her early 20s, she said she was given 12 pads per month along with her other hygiene products, known as state issue. Toothpaste and a small bar of soap is also usually included in the issue.
The average woman uses 25 pads per cycle.
HB 2529
The bill seeks to increase the level of care for pregnant prisoners before, during and after childbirth. Restricting forced labor induction and physical restraints are two of the proposed changes. Hamilton hopes that the bill will make more progress in the next legislative session if Arizona Democrats are in the majority in the next legislative session.
HB 2529 would codify sweeping protections for female and pregnant inmates, including free or lower priced menstrual products such as tampons and sanitary pads. The bill says a “reasonable fee” for products is below $5.
In Arizona, the average inmate makes less than $1 per hour. This means that the average female inmate might have to work an entire shift to pay for one menstrual product. Overall, the sponsors of the bill seek to protect in law the bodily autonomy of women and pregnant inmates, such as refusing to allow labor induction.
“Medical providers have to ask for consent in so many other arenas. And I think it should be the same for incarcerated women. Like, this is a woman’s body, a pregnant person’s body, and there should be consent,” she said.
Hamilton credited Ryan Thornell, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, with innovative new practices to provide better rehabilitation for those incarcerated in Arizona’s prison system.
The representative pointed to Perryville as an example of proper rehabilitation techniques. It’ss Arizona’s sole women’s prison, and incorporates yoga and art therapies in order to rehabilitate the women at the facility. Art of Our Soul opened a studio at Perryville in October 2024, and Hamilton credited this with being one of the techniques the facility is using to encourage wellness and rehabilitation, instead of recidivism.
Disparities in menstrual product access
Miriam Vishniac, founder and director of the Prison Flow Project, studied the topics in HB 2529 in 2015 when she was a public policy student at George Washington University. In her research, she discovered that there weren’t social safety nets in place to help people afford menstrual products.
“You can’t put it on SNAP. It’s not part of the WIC … program. And from there, I started thinking about, like, what are the populations that have issues accessing this stuff?” she said.
Vishniac said that the population she found to be the most “deeply vulnerable” to a deprivation of menstrual products was incarcerated individuals.
“It’s not even a question of like, ‘Oh, you know, there’s these things going on that make it hard to access, and that’s just how the world is,’” she said. “This is a choice. And, just ever since then [I] was like, we don’t treat people this way, like this has an impact on everyone who menstruates. And I think, somebody’s got to talk about this.”
The Prison Flow Project is one of the comprehensive collections of research about menstrual policy when it comes to incarceration in federal and state prisons. But, she said, the concept of imprisonment isn’t a safe practice.
“The institution of prison is absolutely not doing enough, because the way the institution of prison in the U.S. has evolved is into this place where we just stick people, we warehouse them, we dehumanize them,” Vishniac said. “And, when you dehumanize people, you make horrific treatment acceptable. And that’s part of what we’ve done. We’ve done that.”
She said while there has been progress, there is still a lack of transparency about regulating birth care and menstrual product access on a national level. Some states are doing better than others, Vishniac said. According to her, states with prisons that make period products readily available at all times are doing a better job than states without these policies.
“Because when you don’t have those details in the rules, then it just doesn’t happen,” she said.
After being told the inmates weren’t getting enough menstrual products, Vishniac said, the Arizona Department of Corrections they’d handle it internally.
“So, nothing really changed,” she said.
Decades of challenges
Lauren Beall, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said that the Department of Corrections doesn’t do enough for their inmates, let alone pregnant inmates.
ACLU Arizona has been part of a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections since 2012, centered around what Beall called “many horrific things that happen to women in terms of childbirth [and] reproductive health.”
Beall echoed the consistent lack of adequate menstrual products for incarcerated women, and said that menstrual products are on the same level of necessity as obstetric and gynecological care.
“I have talked to a lot of people who are pregnant who aren’t getting enough food. There is a rule that their caloric needs are supposed to be increased. What that generally looks like is an extra little carton of milk or an extra piece of bread or an extra can of tuna. It’s not enough,” she said.
One formerly incarcerated woman, who asked for anonymity due privacy, echoed Beall’s observation.
She was incarcerated multiple times over a decade-long period, beginning in 2016, and said the experience in incarceration wasn’t one of rehabilitation until she made an effort to rehabilitate herself. She called her time incarcerated a “revolving door,” because of the cyclical nature of her time in jails and prison.
“I was tired of ending up in shackles and handcuffs,” the source said.
The formerly incarcerated woman said there weren’t tampons available in county jail.
“And so what we would do is we would take the pads that were provided and we’d strip them, we’d rip them open and, like, pull out the padding in it, and then roll it into the mesh layer and tie it in a knot to make tampons. So very unhygienic, for sure, but that’s what we had to do in there.”
She said her cellmates would often run low on menstrual products at Perryville, and when they asked the officers from the Department of Corrections for assistance, they didn’t receive any.