Oklahoma Incarcerates More Women Than Any State. What It’s Doing to Stop Moms From Going to Prison
Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than any other state, at a rate of 142 per 100,000
On Sept. 25, 2015, Lacie Maytubby, 35, came into Women in Recovery on a lesser charge—drug possession, not trafficking—and without ever experiencing prison, but her addiction to heroin and opioids was at its worst.
Maytubby had just learned her father was in the late stages of cancer. Her mother called and urged her to visit him at the hospital. Maytubby had not been there for her parents during most of her adult life, too blinded by addiction, but she certainly couldn’t miss the last moments of her father’s.
While she vowed to be present this time, the only way she could bear it, she says, was to numb the experience with drugs. So on the drive to the hospital, Maytubby says, she pulled over to the side of the road for a quick high.
By the time she was ready to face her father, and had arrived, he was already dead.
“My addiction just took the last precious moment I had with my father, and I felt like I didn’t even have a choice,” Maytubby tells The Daily Signal in one of a series of interviews. “It was what I had to do. That was the true moment I got scared. Wow, this is bigger than me.”
Maytubby’s father previously had been a drug addict himself, but she learned this only after he died. Her parents had never told her, although Maytubby had always suspected something was different about her father, a car salesman by trade, who seemed to empathize more with her struggles.
Yet her parents were private and sheltering, having homeschooled her in an environment where religion was practiced—her mother was a Jehovah’s Witness minister—and formal education was not.
As a curious 15-year-old, Maytubby snuck away to a Tulsa skating rink to try cocaine with some boys.
“I was so sheltered that I was willing to do anything to give me a sense of freedom,” Maytubby says. “It just so happened drugs were what was presented to me. That’s the first thing I was choosing to do on my own. Whether it was the right decision or not, it was my decision.”
When Maytubby’s parents discovered she was using drugs, they kicked her out of the house at 16.
She never attended college, and was first arrested in 2001 when she totaled her car after passing out while driving high.
As the police applied handcuffs to haul Maytubby away, her then 2-year-old eldest daughter, Emma, cried in her car seat.
http://dailysignal.com/2016/10/04/oklahoma-incarcerates-more-women-than-any-state-what-its-doing-to-stop-moms-from-going-to-prison
