Pregnant in Prison: Comparing National Standards to the Policies and Programs of State Prisons

The population in women’s prisons in the United States has been rapidly increasing. This increase has also brought attention to the number of pregnancies and births that occur in a prison setting each year. In the United States, national standards have been developed by experts in obstetrics and gynecology, but currently, state prisons have varying policies and programs for pregnant, birthing, and postpartum people which leads to a vast difference in experiences and a disparity in treatment. To better understand what the policies and programs for maternity in prison are and how they measure up to national standards, the present study aims to identify the policies and programs state prisons are adopting, in reference to pregnancy and compare them to the national and international standards. Data were collected from ten state prisons using their Department of Corrections’ websites and evaluated through qualitative coding to identify what United States prisons are doing to care for pregnant, birthing, and postpartum people in prison and compare to the national standards set by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. More than three-quarters of the data were missing from these websites and the recommendations of the ACOG that were not specifically about pregnancy had more data than the recommendations that were specific to pregnancy. Policies must be created that address the unique nuances of pregnancy in prison as the health and safety of prisoners is the responsibility of these facilities that house pregnant people

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data