To find out more about period poverty in Oklahoma prisons, I interviewed April Wilkens, who is currently incarcerated at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. She described the many, predominantly financial, barriers inmates face in accessing period and other hygiene products essential to health and dignity.

As Wilkens put it, the prison system “takes everything away from someone, and makes them buy it back.”

Women who are incarcerated receive one small roll of toilet paper per week and 30 tampons or pads per month. These products are of such low quality, that Wilkens has heard of women having to wear four pads at a time. For some, the supply only lasts a day. When you run out of the provisioned pads and tampons, the only way to acquire more is through the commissary. For Oklahoma’s incarcerated women making pitiful wages¹See Table 1 (information provided by Wilkens) at prison jobs, the prices²See Table 2 (information provided by Wilkens) are astronomical. Wilkens tells me some women spend their entire incomes on period products. But that’s only an option when period product shipments are on time and available. During delays in orders or lockdowns, women may be left with no access to period products at all.

Prisoners must also buy other necessary toiletries like shampoo, soap, toothbrushes, and toothpaste from the commissary. “Indigent” inmates, who have less than $10.50 a month in their trust accounts, and who cannot afford the commissary prices have to make do with the hotel-sized products provided by the state each month.

While the OK Department of Corrections (OK DOC) technically requires the provision of pads, tampons and other personal hygiene products for indigent inmates, the carceral facilities only have to provide “the minimum amount needed to accommodate [the inmate’s] need.”³Personal Hygiene and Appearance Code, Section-03 Facility Operations OP-03050, August 21, 2023, 2. Furthermore, Oklahoma is one of 25 states with no law mandating period products be provided. This means that OK DOC could easily change their policy. What’s available to women largely depends on bureaucratic decision-making processes with little public oversight. Soap, pads, and other items required to maintain personal hygiene are essentials, not luxuries, and withholding them leads to the human dignity and health crises exemplified by Wilkens’s stories.

Particularly excruciating for menstruators is the transportation process, whether that’s being shuttled to another prison, going to court, or seeing a doctor. While she was able to bring menstrual products along with her when being escorted between facilities, Wilkens has heard horror stories of women who started menstruating in transport and were forced to bleed on themselves.

Wilkens describes being forced to live in these inhumane and “filthy” conditions as an “extremely traumatic” level of oppression. It’s not difficult to see why. When I stain my clothes, I can clean myself and change. I can hardly imagine the shame, dehumanization, physical pain, and denial of dignity incarcerated women suffer, on top of all the other trauma associated with incarceration . I struggle to understand how giving someone – incarcerated or not – no choice but to sit in their blood can be understood as anything other than mental and physical torture.