prison

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

gwen — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

As a feminist concerned with social justice, in the past year or so I’ve become convinced that dismantling the prison-industrial complex should be a top priority amongst feminists.

This anthology, Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex, edited by Stephen John Hartnett, argues as much, stressing that this very goal “should be at the head of a new human rights agenda for the twenty-first century.” In making this argument, the anthology is comprised of two sections of essays: “Diagnosing the Crisis” and “Practical Solutions, Visionary Alternatives.” The anthology further incorporates artwork and poetry by those who know the dehumanization and injustice of the system firsthand – those incarcerated – in an attempt to “remind readers that the prison-industrial complex does not house monsters but humans.”

The first section addresses how the United States of America has become a “punishing democracy.” That is, a democracy that spends more on prisons than on public education and spends more on punishment than on rehabilitation. In “Diagnosing the Crisis,” the authors note how we became a country with countless prisons and a swelling prison population. Several authors cite the “war on drugs” as a historical policy shift, one which paved the way for zero-tolerance policies which heavily affect – and actually target – communities comprised of poor and working class people of color.

Other essays in this section address how the defunding of public education and social programs works to benefit the prison-industrial complex. I especially appreciated Rose Braz’s and Myesha Williams’ essay “Diagnosing the Schools-to-Prisons Pipeline: Maximum Security, Minimum Learning,” which clarifies how the term high school “dropout” is misleading. They suggest replacing it with “pushout” – a term that more accurately conveys how the current public education system (due to issues of defunding and racism) betrays students of color from at-risk communities and practically ensures their entry into the criminal justice system.

The second half of Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex offers hope and ideas for change through activism and the arts. Essays underscore the need for educational opportunities in prisons, as university professors take it upon themselves to offer college-level courses, GED preparation courses, and college entry exam courses to inmates. Several essays also demonstrate the empowering effects of offering creative workshops and classes to inmates.

These essays detail the hard work, tribulations, and results of providing playwriting workshops in prisons as well as enlisting inmates to stage Shakespearean plays. Such activism provides opportunities for inmates to reclaim their humanity and their voices, as well as provides communities a glimpse into the prison-industrial complex and the people caught up in the system.

The inmates’ artwork and poetry are powerful additions to this anthology. As with any academic text related to social justice, there is the possibility of elevating so-called experts’ thoughts and voices on an issue while simultaneously silencing or absenting the voices of the very people affected the most. Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex seeks to create a balance between the two, in which voices of those both inside and outside the system work in tandem to convey a greater realization of what is happening in our schools, in our communities, and in our prisons.

Ultimately, the conversation surrounding dismantling the prison-industrial complex needs to be happening outside the walls of academia. This is an issue that relates to racism, classism, immigration reform, youth, budget spending, the militarization of our police forces, racist and inaccurate media coverage, the privatization of prisons, physical as well as sexual violence within our prisons, and the disenfranchisement of entire communities across the country – just to name a few. Feminists should be taking an active role in this fight. Abolishing the prison-industrial complex should be routinely discussed and debated on feminist blogs and in feminist publications alongside our efforts to end sexual violence and our fight for reproductive rights.

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex provides a framework for this discussion as well as steps to dismantle the system. We should all heed the authors’ warnings and advice and work together to reimagine a new democracy.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, April 27th 2011

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

brittany — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Kay Whitlock, Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie

Beacon Press

In their near-exhaustive catalogue of violence, discrimination, and systematic abuse of LGBT people in the United States, Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock outline the specific ways that the criminalization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered people has perpetuated inequalities not only based on sexual identity but also within the complex interplay of race, class, and gender. While many leading texts in LGBT studies have argued that the policing of gender leads to toxic consequences for all members of society, this book reveals just how pervasive such policing of gender is and just how complicit we are in maintaining these systems of inequality. Most centrally, Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock argue that decriminalizing queerness has been sidelined by efforts to merely remove legal sanctions—a problem that fails to address the basic assumptions of queer deviance at play in our legal system.

Queer (In)Justice dispenses a legal history of LGBT oppression that spans hundreds of years, beginning with a sweeping review of the history of gender policing—indigenous abuse, constructions of African people as hypersexual, “contaminating” immigrant bodies, and even Biblical ideas about sodomy—and moving through a range of topics that collectively provide the most complete picture of LGBT criminalization I have ever encountered. Addressing queer criminal archetypes (e.g., the queer killer, sexually degraded predator, disease spreader, and queer security threat) early in the book, the authors then move to three stellar chapters on legal policing of gender in clubs and public spaces, courtroom battles about queer identity (where gender bending and violence are discursively linked), and, finally, the queering of prisons. This last chapter on prisons provides a haunting account of prison guards ignoring sexual identity-based violence, refusing care for HIV/AIDS prisoners, and constructing queer inmates as perverse. The authors conclude (in one of only a few hopeful moments of the book) that anti-police-brutality, the building of safe communities, prison solidarity, and community organizing must occur in order to tease apart the conflation of queerness and criminality.

At times devastating, provocative, explicit, and horrifying, this book will make you deeply sad, deeply angry, and more fully aware of how far we really are from full equality for sexual minorities. The authors argue, essentially, that cases like Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena are not isolated incidents of violent, hateful oppression, but rather, engendered by the very system that supposedly protects queer subjects. From senseless police brutality to justifying death penalty sentences based on sexual identity, from the fetishization of “lesbian killer” Aileen Wuornos to prison guards who allow continued sexual assault against “willing” gay men in prison, hatred of queerness exists at the heart of our criminal justice system. The question becomes: What legal, discursive, social, and institutional changes can we enact that more radically and permanently divides queerness from criminality? What stories must we tell (or learn) to communicate and understand the histories of violence lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people have endured? And, finally, what kind of queer justice should we seek?

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 12th 2011

So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

brittany — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Patrick Anderson

Duke University Press

Traversing critical theory, body studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and performance studies, Patrick Anderson’s So Much Wasted captures the “politics of morbidity” embedded in the act of self-starvation. Anderson focuses on three settings—the hospital/clinic, a gallery, and a prison—to consider the way people who refuse food remain subject both to institutional means of force and control along with ideological constraints and mechanisms of discipline. What can these emaciated figures, hurling themselves toward death (or, as Heidegger calls it, “being-toward-death”), teach us about subjectivity, political resistance, and the production of power through everyday disciplinary practices?

Anderson’s central claim—that self-starvation both refuses and reproduces the power of the state, and as such produces bodies and subjects capable of radically unsettling the status quo—weaves itself through many seemingly disparate moments: the political resistance of Turkish prison hunger strikes, the state’s imposition that Terri Schiavo must live despite her husband’s wishes, the life-threatening starvation performance art of Chris Burden (who, after staging his own shooting, street death, and near electrocution, asked others to watch as he wasted away for twenty-two days in a Venice Beach, CA art gallery), and Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, and Marina Abromovic’s staging of self-starvation as provocative, artistic disappearance. Perhaps most compelling is Anderson’s reimagining of leading feminist theorizing about anorexia as the internalization of misogyny (e.g., Susan Bordo, Susie Orbach); instead, he argues that anorexics may cultivate a “taste for power” that subverts dominant ideas about women, gender, and queerness as they dramatically rebel against state intervention.

Playful and sharp, astute and extraordinarily sympathetic, Anderson captures the inherent tragedy, power, and radical potential in this seemingly “powerless” act of self-starvation. Not only does he write with breathtaking clarity, at times frolicking between mother-child psychoanalytic theories of feeding and sexuality only to later arrive in the world of masochistic performance art, but he also genuinely extends the leading critical theories of the body, performance, power, and subjectivity (e.g., Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, and the like). Anderson insists that self-starvation is not simply perversion, but rather, a mechanism that produces troubled reactions from other bodies (individual or the state). Thus, he subtly asks whether psychological treatments, historiographies of starving bodies, force feeding, extensive monitoring, and even photographs might serve an even more perverse purpose: investing the state with the authority to say “who must live and who may die.”

Suitable for numerous audiences—graduate courses in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and performance; scholarly audiences interested in bioethics, fatness studies, prisons, and the philosophy of selfhood; and those practitioners who work with self-starving or self-mutilating clients—this book carefully outlines a politics of resistance through dying, near-death, and “wasting away.” Even if it sometimes floats above its subjects a bit—for example, I kept wanting more content directly from those who have survived their self-starvation attempts—Anderson has written a book worthy of attention and study. By imagining rebellion as a refusal to consume, he forges new and powerful links between gender, sexuality, the body, and the ideological apparatus of the state as it faces the many rebellions of its subjects.

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 10th 2011

Sin by Silence

mandy — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Olivia Klaus

Women Make Movies

There are not many US citizens who do not recognize a pink ribbon as the rallying fight against breast cancer. Even more so for the red ribbon, as it raises the voices of the AIDS epidemic. However, most faces would not correctly identify the cause of the purple ribbon: domestic violence. A purple ribbon is probably a little too uncomfortably similar to the purple bruises a women suffers every nine seconds, according to the film Sin by Silence, which documents the heart-twisting story of incarcerated, battered women serving maximum sentences for killing their abusive partners.

Sin by Silence chronicles the movement of the Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), who unexpectedly find a healing sisterhood in the isolating walls of prison and used their collective strength to bring personal, familial, and judicial change in their lives. Uncontrived and starkly original, the moving narratives are enough to leave the viewer in near distress. The preliminary question of how each woman survived quickly turns into arrows targeting the legal system that punishes already beaten, raped, and tortured women with hefty prison sentences. Their crime? Battered person syndrome and refusing to be killed by their spouses.

Throughout the film, these women prove much more than mishandled, husband-killers. They are emotional, insightful human beings caught in a frighteningly narrow judicial system that fails to comprehend the effects of repeated and brutal intimate partner violence. It will be impossible to view the prison industry and its supposed rehabilitation efforts the same way again.

What will most move viewers is the unwavering support and courage these women lend each other in their collective cry for freedom. Their commitment to education and truth telling transcends their own pain and the bars that ostracize them from society. Sin by Silence is a deeply important film that will leave a probing mark of disturbance on the conscience of anyone who watches it.

Written by: Lisa Factora-Borchers, January 4th 2011

Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran’s 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:05:00 +0000

By Afsaneh Moqadam

Sarah Crichton Books

Less than one year after Iranian demonstrators took to the streets to protest the fraudulent re-election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic, writer Afsaneh Moqadam tells the true story of Mohsen Abbaspour, a man in his early twenties who votes for the Reformist party and its leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Swept up in the euphoria of possible change, the once politically apathetic Mohsen finds himself alongside his friends and fellow reformists in the streets posing the greatest challenge to Iranian authorities since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Presidential Guard, Basijis and police eventually suppress the demonstrators through brutal force and mass arrests. Like many fellow citizens, Mohsen is arrested, taken to the notorious Evin prison and then to Kahrizak. He is repeatedly interrogated, tortured, and raped until he is finally released on August 29, 2009.

In the letter that accompanied this book, the publisher vouches for the truthfulness of this account and informs us that a pseudonym has been used to protect the author’s identity. Given the relatively short period since the events of June 2009, the requisite anonymity is unsurprising, especially since Moqadam could well be Abbaspour. This book offers an insider account of what transpired in June 2009 from the perspective of a twenty-something secular protester and gives the reader a rare glimpse into how a young Iranian views the ruling party, his parents’ generation of revolutionaries and the shift in power from the mullahs to the neo-fascist Revolutionary Guard and its protector, Ahmadinejad. This perspective is particularly significant when we consider that Mohsen and his generation are largely the result of a pronatalist policy implemented in the 1980s in order to create an Islamic army of twenty million. This policy backfired producing a baby boom made up of individuals similar to Mohsen: educated with bleak employment opportunities and little if any interest in military service.

Another interesting aspect of the story is the speed at which change apparently occurred. Shadi, a veteran of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, tells Mohsen that it took them a year or two to get as far as the reformists had in just two weeks. Moreover, just ten days after the stolen election, brazen and fearless protesters began chanting the previously inconceivable, “Death to Kamenei!” The story sheds light on how technology acted as a catalyst in this revolt. In spite of using spy-ware provided by a major cellphone maker and slowing Internet speed to a snail’s pace, the authorities were unable to keep up with the transfer of information and images through new technology and social media.

Although many readers will find the rape and torture difficult to stomach, this part of the story must nevertheless be told. The more people become aware of rape and torture, the greater the likelihood that one day they will take a stand against these acts. Death to the Dictator! reads like a true account; however, in addition to a few structural problems, the English was somewhat stilted, which did interfere with the flow of the story and led me to believe that this book was released prematurely. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in knowing more about one Iranian’s experience during this tumultuous time then you will enjoy this book.

Written by: Heather Leighton, August 30th 2010

Troubled Water

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by Erik Poppe

Film Movement

Last night, I watched a really great film by Norwegian director Erik Poppe: Troubled Water. I don't really like movies and I don't watch them a lot. And now I know why. The simple reason is that very few movies are as good as this one.

This is definitely not one of those sad Hollywood monstrosities that aim to prevent you from having a single thought by any means possible. This film does not attempt to benumb the spectators by an endless assault of noises, colors, flashes, explosions, colorful images, etc. It actually leaves the viewers some space to think, analyze, and simply to exist. Troubled Water does not attempt to rob me of my humanity and my human agency, unlike the stupid Hollywood productions.

This is the kind of film that works through powerful acting and great directing. There are no cheap thrills in Troubled Water. No special effects, no monsters or vampires, no explosions, 3D effects, unrealistic car chases, etc. There is just life, human existence, normal people trying to figure out important stuff.

Instead of silicone-inflated cyborg-like individuals who pass for actors in Hollywood, this film has actors who actually look like real, normal people. We are so used to the assembly-line faces and bodies of Hollywood characters, that the actors in Troubled Water look refreshingly attractive. As attractive as only real human beings can be. And these actors even know how to act.

I'm not going to retell the plot of the movie here. Because great art is not about the plot. The story is never as important as the artistic means employed to transmit it. I will only say that Troubled Water is a film that makes you want to come back to it over and over.

Written by: Clarissa @ Clarissa's Blog, June 9th 2010

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Piper Kerman

Spiegel & Grau

Piper Kerman recounts the nightmare that is the judicial system in her memoir Orange Is the New Black. This is a gentle introduction to life behind bars compared to the stories of other less fortunate prisoners. Kerman spent one year of her life in a minimum-security federal women's prison in Connecticut for money laundering. Surprisingly, the worst events didn't even happen within the prison itself. She was indicted on a minor drug charge committed ten years prior; she then had to wait another five years to even be sentenced.

Her jail experience wasn't as bad as she thought it would be, though it was no vacation. Piper was subjected to humiliating strip searches, strict rules, nonsensical regulations, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment by her boss while she was working hard as a prison electrician. She later had to finish her yearlong sentence by traveling via the notorious Con Air, and staying at other worse prisons in order to testify. On the (very slim) bright side, she learned vital life lessons from other prisoners. Kerman recalls these women and her friendships with them through tender sentimentality and brutally succinct detail.

I felt very touched by the solidarity of prisoners, as well as the descriptions of holidays and birthdays spent in prison. The women found joy doing one another's hair and nails. They also enjoyed craft projects, such as tailoring their prison uniforms, creating blankets for family, and (on one funny occasion) a crocheted yarn replica of a penis as a gag gift for another prisoner. They also cooked with the few resources they had, and a recipe for Prison Cheesecake is included in the book.

Most importantly, the author owns up to her own personal privilege. Piper is a self-described "blond-haired, blue-eyed, bohemian WASP," and a Smith College graduate. She realizes how infuriating the treatment from the system was for her, and how it wasted years of her life. However, she often proclaims how much worse it would have been if she were not a privileged white person with a private lawyer. She feels for her fellow prisoners, most of whom face dismal options and impossible challenges. Prison does little to educate offenders of their crimes and does not prepare them for the outside world once they are finally released.

In reality, prison does little to rehabilitate those who commit non-violent crimes, and there seems to be little distinction between the treatment of non-violent and violent offenders. In this memoir, it is noted that the minimum and maximum security prisons were within close proximity of each other and often traded inmates back and forth. I agree with Kerman that those who commit non-violent crimes would be better remedied, and more beneficial to the community, if they were ordered to do multiple years of community service instead of traumatic and expensive ($30,000 per year per inmate) prison time.

Orange Is the New Black is engaging, educational, moving, irritating, funny, morose, and extremely hard to put down.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, May 4th 2010

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:55:00 +0000

By Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, Ruby C. Tapia

University of California Press

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types. There are poems, reflections, and essays; there are excerpts from research, a Bill of Rights, a United Nations Report; there are journal entries, excerpts from interviews, vocabulary lists, and letters to lovers. There are so many perspectives, experiences, reflections, assertions, and expressions that no one point of view is easily privileged, and the reader who may try to do so would have to try very hard to lump everything in this book into one picture of the "standard" incarcerated woman. This, of course, is one of the goals of this book: to resist readers' attempts to maintain a generalized view of who the incarcerated woman is or what she is like.

I admire the honesty of Ruby Tapia's introduction. She directly admits that any representation of incarcerated women—even of a single incarcerated woman—will necessarily fail to convey fully what her experience means to her and how it feels to her. Likewise, it will also fail to fully show how such a representation relates to the larger social, political, and economic problems of justice, the category of the "criminal," and the overwhelming homogeneity of economic class within prison populations. She insists that creating a representation of incarcerated women—even such a nuanced, heterogeneous representation as the book attempts—is still to reproduce the categorical violence done to incarcerated women by setting up a space in which "we" (non-incarcerated, non-criminal/criminalized readers) can take a leisurely look at "them"—"they" who exist outside of the laws that bind us into a group that can evaluate the criminalized other, who cannot evaluate us in ways that count.

Interrupted Life makes a provocative and accessible (if continually heartbreaking) book for the lay reader. The future professor in me can't help but imagine this book as a text for introductory level courses in philosophy, women's studies, multicultural studies, justice studies, political science, criminal justice, economics, or sociology. The readings are not too difficult for undergraduate students to understand and the many perspectives lend themselves to lessons in critical thinking. For advanced students, the readings in this book could challenge—or confirm—more highly theorized academic studies about justice, prisons, gender, and the experiences of incarceration.

Written by: kristina grob, May 2nd 2010

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Megan Sweeney

University of North Carolina Press

“Sometimes, I think they forget the women.” One seemingly simple statement at the start of this book—spoken by the chief librarian for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction—serves to explain the importance of a text like Reading Is My Window. What began for Megan Sweeney as a dissertation on prisoners’ relationships with true crime books evolved into a years-long study of analyzing the reading patterns of the occupants of several women’s prisons across the country.

In addition to conducting 245 individual interviews with female prisoners, Sweeney also facilitated fifty-one book group discussions. The interviews and interactions with the prisoners make up at least half of the book, so by the second chapter, you’ll find yourself engaging with the prisoners and their individual stories of mental, physical, and sexual abuse, along with drug use. The stories that emerge from these interviews and discussions offer a fascinating insight into how the women manage to regain a kind of humanity through reading while residing in an institution determined to dehumanize them. Solo, Monique, and Denise are among the many who will stay with you long after the last page, and rather than pitying them, Sweeney’s nuanced descriptions of each prisoner’s personality helps you understand that they are actively making their world better through reading, even if their world will never interact with the one outside the prison walls.

Sweeney structures her study through the investigation of three specific genres: urban fiction, narratives of victimization, and self-help books. She also examines the aspect of community building through prison book clubs, and the material comfort that comes from the mere act of holding a book—something that we in the free world take for granted. While those topics make Reading Is My Window an interesting and provocative read, the excerpted interviews are what take the book out of being purely academic and ground it in the personal.

Far too often, it is easy to do just what the chief librarian from Ohio said: forget the women. Prisoners are already a population of people that we often turn away from, so when the modifier of “woman” (and often “African American”) is added to that, remembering them as people who have worth becomes even less of a priority. By telling these women’s stories and taking them out of the institution, Sweeney takes the first step in driving home the point that if we forget these women, we may as well forget ourselves.

Reading Is My Window serves as a call to action. Sweeney spares no detail in describing the shoddy state of penal library systems, pointing out that many prison administrations see books as rewards for good behavior rather than necessary tools for prisoner rehabilitation. It’s safe to say that, after reading this book, you’ll want to consult the list of organizations that provide books to prisoners Sweeney includes at the end of the book to see how you can help advance the worthy cause of prison literacy.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, April 24th 2010

Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:02:00 +0000

By Lynne A. Haney

University of California Press

In Offending Women, ethnographer and sociologist Lynne Haney takes readers on a journey into “a world that few people would otherwise have access to”: the everyday reality of the lives of incarcerated women. She introduces readers to incarcerated mothers who are housed together with their children and serving terms in community-based prisons, a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread in the US. Haney uncovers the complex layers of control and contestation in these institutions, as well as the relationship of dominance and power that characterize them. The book analyzes the practices, programmatic narratives, and effects of two state prisons in the US, and offers ethnographic and theoretical insights into how programs like these work. Haney's primary aim is to explain how the treatment of imprisoned women has changed over the past decade.

Haney finds that these “alternative” prisons, contrary to their stated goals, often disempower women by transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies. She exposes the complex gendered underpinnings of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system and links that system to broader discussions of contemporary government and state power by asking why these strategies have emerged and what forms of citizenship they have given rise to. While the intentions of the state were to "empower" and "enhance self-reliance," Haney suggests they instead push women into a state of disentitlement.

Offending Women uncovers two fundamental ways in which states of disentitlement operate: through the narrowing of woman’s needs and the regulation of women’s desires. Enriched with vivid images and details on incarcerated women’s lives, this book reminds us of incarcerated women's social realities. All of them faced poverty and experienced neglect, abandonment, and restricted access to social support. The fact that they not only survived histories of abuse, but managed to keep their familial bonds intact is outstanding. Offending Women acknowledges and honors these women's survival in a social system that promotes their demise.

Written by: Olivera Simic, April 18th 2010

Resistance Through Writing: An Interview with Victoria Law

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:56:00 +0000

Interview with Victoria Law

Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Here Law shares her thoughts on making her book an activist tool, the culture’s blind spot about the prison industry, social justice movements’ responsibility to incarcerated women’s issues, and how motherhood radically altered her own work and informed her upcoming anthology, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind.

Who did you write Resistance Behind Bars for?

I originally wrote the book, or the college paper that was the start of it, with no audience in mind. I had spent a semester researching post-Attica prisoner organizing and resistance in college. At the end of the semester, I looked back at what I had and realized that every instance, except for one, was about male prisoners. So the first paper was written to explore what women were doing and why their actions weren’t as well-documented, or remembered, as their male counterparts.

When I first had the idea to turn my paper into a book, I had a few audiences in mind: people who were already interested in prison and prisoner issues; those interested in women’s issues; people who aren’t particularly interested in prisons or prisoners’ issues, but are interested in tales of resistance, and incarcerated women themselves. In corresponding with over a dozen women incarcerated around the country, I also wanted to make sure that the book was accessible to them. None of the women I’d reached out to had any idea of organizing being done in other prisons or of the previous organizing, resistance, and riots that had happened in women’s prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. I kept in mind that I wanted my book—and the information in it—to be accessible to someone with an eighth-grade education. The book doesn’t work as a potential organizing tool if those most affected by these issues aren’t able to read and comprehend it.

What’s the response to Resistance Behind Bars been like—and how has it affected you personally and your work as an activist?

I think that because Resistance Behind Bars is a book specifically about incarcerated women—and even more specifically about their acts of resistance—it’s attracted attention and interest from people who normally think of prison issues as male issues and are excited and intrigued by incarcerated women’s resistance. Such an enthusiastic response means that I’ve been kept busy planning and doing events, not only the typical bookstore readings, but also workshops at various social justice conferences and at schools.

My daughter, who was a newborn when I first started researching incarcerated women’s resistance, is now eight years old and knows a lot about prisons, prison and gender, and abolition, probably more than most other eight-year-olds (except, perhaps, for any children whose parents are Critical Resistance organizers). She’s asked me very pointed questions about both realities inside prisons and ideas about abolition, which means that I had to clearly articulate my arguments, thoughts, and ideas.

What was the writing process like for this book?

When I first started researching, I did two things: I set aside all preconceived notions of what prisoner organizing might look like and started reading specifically about women in prison. I found a lot of material covered issues like motherhood and pregnancy. Issues of parenting—and, of course, pregnancy—do not come up in documentation about male prisoner organizing, and so people who are looking at instances of prisoner resistance aren’t going to necessarily look at how they organize around and challenge the realities of parents in prison. Battering and past abuse is another issue that comes up in a lot of the studies around incarcerated women, but again, that’s not an issue that we see impacting men going to prison and thus isn’t looked at as a “prison issue.”

I also scoured the news—and alternative media, mostly prison-related zines—for mentions of actions by incarcerated women. Once I found that someone had done something—filed a lawsuit, complained to the press, launched a hunger strike, etc.—I used the websites of either that state prison system or the Federal Bureau of Prisons to find the woman’s contact information and sent her a letter explaining who I was and what I was researching. I asked if she would be willing to share her stories and experiences with me.

Not wanting to take without giving back, I offered what I could: I offered to look up lawsuits for them and send them copies of court decisions; I offered to look up other resources for them; I offered to send them books via the Books Through Bars program that I helped start here in NYC; I sent stamps so that they could not only respond to me, but also write letters to other groups or people; in some cases, I offered to call their children if they were unable to get through themselves.

What were some of the most surprising realities about women in prison that you discovered in researching your book?

I remember receiving a letter from the Clear Creek County Jail in Colorado about the re-institution of the chain gang for the women held there. That wasn’t the huge surprise; the surprise was that the woman who wrote me was actually happy to be on the chain gang! She had recently given her newborn son up for adoption, and so I can’t help but wonder if keeping occupied, even if it’s on a chain gang, helps her process losing him. She’s not the only one: women at Clear Creek want to be on the chain gang. It’s tiring, backbreaking work in the hot sun, but it’s also the first chance they’ve been given to get out of their cells, be outdoors, and accrue “good time,” or time off their sentences. Keep in mind that the jail’s male inmates have had the chain gang for a while. They also have other chances to earn “good time.”

What are the most common misconceptions and assumptions circulating right now about women in prison that keep people from understanding what’s really going on inside prisons for women?

In May, I was invited to speak at a New York City high school about women and prison. Having done so many of these talks to people who are interested in prison issues and have some framework about the issue, I forget what the majority of people think or don’t know. I came in ready to talk about historical contexts and what is going on now and started with the question: “What do you think about when you think about prison? Who goes to prison and why?”

One girl raised her hand and said, “Criminals. People who do bad things.”

“Drug dealers.”

“Men.”

I realized that most of the students had no framework about incarceration other than what they had been fed by the mass media, so I had to mentally throw out my outline and start from scratch. I talked about poverty and racial profiling, the history of the prison as a means of social control, how Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon equated the civil rights movements and liberation movements with street crime and started their war(s) on crime to lock up poor people of color before they could mobilize to demand their rights. None of the students had ever heard of the Rockefeller Drug Laws or mandatory minimum sentencing. I hadn’t either when I was their age, and I grew up in New York City too!

I also talked about some of the conditions inside—the lack of health care treatment, the fact that staff members often encouraged prisoner-on-prisoner violence, because it’s easier for them if the prisoners aren’t uniting and fighting for basic human rights, lack of educational programs inside the prison. At the end of the hour, when we talked about what they, as high school students, could do about this issue, one boy raised his hand and suggested that we should lobby for medical treatment for people inside prison. “If I broke my leg in prison—or anywhere—I would want people to help me get it treated.”

Later one of the coordinators of that high school’s community day told me, “Students in your session were really struck by the experiences you shared with them, and there has been a lot of conversation in among students about issues concerning prison.” Some of the students were talking about forming a student club to do work around some of these issues, like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

You write in the book that calls for reform have failed to adequately address the factors leading to women’s incarceration. How so?

Prisons fail to address the societal conditions that lead to incarceration, such as poverty and the increasing feminization of poverty, misogyny, violence, racism, and the issues that accompany women to prison. How does locking someone in a cage address any of these factors?

You have to remember that people have gone to prison face numerous obstacles in successfully reintegrating into the community when they are released from prison. Oftentimes, they are not only released with the same lack of resources and opportunities than they had before being arrested and incarcerated, but now have a criminal record which prevents them from getting certain jobs, qualifying for certain housing, or social safety nets. The 1996 welfare “reform” banned people with drug felonies for life. Similar legislation banned them from receiving governmental financial aid for college, etc.

We also need to keep in mind that prison issues affect all sorts of issues on the outside, shifting money and resources away from other public entities, such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports that are needed.

Did motherhood change your own activism?

Before motherhood, I was super-involved in all sorts of political projects and organizing. New motherhood definitely made me sit still! Once my daughter was born, I realized that I had to pick a few issues and focus on them. I also couldn’t risk arrest or bringing my daughter to something where the police might attack the crowd.

I started researching resistance and organizing among incarcerated women shortly after my daughter was born. Being stuck inside during the winter with a newborn gave me a lot of time to read, respond to letters, contemplate ideas and issues—this, by the way, is something I did a lot while nursing—and work on draft after draft of this paper. I don’t know if I would have had this same opportunity if I had tried to do this as a childfree person rushing off from one political [event] to another at various hours of the day and night, or if my daughter had been older, more mobile, and needing more direct attention.

I want to stress that what’s made my continued involvement and even writing my book possible is the huge amount of support I get from my friends and the people with whom I organize. I realize that not all mothers get this type of support, although they should, and that I’m extremely fortunate to have such a wonderful support system.

What are you working on now?

My next book, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, will be an anthology co-edited with China Martens, a mother, writer, and publisher of the longest running subculture parenting zine, T_he Future Generation_. Originally, China and I wanted to share our experiences as radical mothers and advocate for community support of all families. We were meeting parents and their allies and hearing their stories and experiences. A few years ago, we realized that we wanted to extend the reach of our message of community support and decided to compile a handbook specifically geared towards allies, or potential allies, of radical parents.

With Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, we’re addressing the need to support—and build support systems for—families in our own social justice movements. In so many of our so-called radical movements, we’re not providing support for people who decide to have children so that they can continue participating in political work. There’s an individualistic attitude that says, “Well, I didn’t choose to have kids. You did, so you deal with them.”

Even when there’s not an overt resistance to having children in our movements, we need to look at how ways that we organize and socialize exclude parents and caretakers. We lose valuable organizers—and organizing experience—when we don’t take these factors into consideration.

Unlike Resistance Behind Bars, this book will be an anthology of both caregivers and their allies of ways that their movements support children and their caretakers in your collectives, organizations, or communities. We are especially seeking experiences that take into account factors such as race, class, gender, single parenthood, and/or mental health issues, since these issues often aren’t talked about when we talk about building communities and support systems here on the outside. We’re still reaching out, meeting people and collecting submissions, so if anyone out there has stories and experiences to share, they should definitely get in touch!

Written by: Ellen Papazian, November 9th 2009

From May to December

admin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:25:00 +0000

By Pat MacEnulty

Serpent’s Tail

From May to December is the story of four women, sisters Lolly and Jen and inmates Nicole and Sonya, whose lives intersect at a women’s correctional facility. As the title suggests, the timeline of the book spans from May to December and each chapter focuses on a different woman’s point of view.

Lolly teaches classes to women in prison. Her current project is a theater class where the inmates write their own monologues, learn to act, and plan out a production. A survivor of a childhood cancer that left her with only one leg, Lolly is a strong, educated woman whose worst nightmare comes to life at the beginning of the book. She once again has cancer, only this time, it’s in her breast. Lolly convinces her older sister Jen, who has always been somewhat resentful of Lolly due to her attention-grabbing illnesses and do-gooder attitude, to help teach the theater class.

A part-time theater professor, Jen is also promiscuous, an alcoholic and a former adult film actress. All these characteristics could have made for a very unlikable character, but Jen’s honest admittance of her mistakes and her actions to correct them, as well as her support for her sister when her illness takes a turn for the worst, make Jen come off as sympathetically damaged instead of disgusting. I was actually surprised at how much I liked the character by the end of the book.

As for the two inmates in the theater class, Nicole is a young coed who ended up in jail for taking the wrap for her drug-dealing boyfriend. She is a talented writer who first catches Lolly’s interest when she enrolls in her poetry class. Nicole’s part of the story is told through excerpts from her “memoirs” that are scattered throughout the book. These passages give insight into not only her life but also those of the other inmates who appear as colorful side characters, the most interesting of which is Viola, a woman who shot her husband after finding him in bed with another woman.

The last of the four main characters is Sonya, a gypsy woman who is serving time for running cons. Sonya has a husband and baby son but while she misses her child, she has no such attachment to her husband, their union being the result of an arranged gypsy marriage. A con-woman by birth, prison has cut Sonya off from the only existence she has ever known and as a result, she begins to question her actions and confront the guilt over the crimes she has committed. To add to her confusion, she has developed a crush on another female inmate named Alice.

While there was nothing groundbreaking or life-altering presented in this book, I was completely fascinated by it and could not wait to see what happened next. The characters were well-developed, and although not entirely relatable, they were at the very least sympathetic. The reasons for the various inmate’s imprisonment, usually related to men, drugs or money, all seemed very realistic and shed some light on the sad situations that cause many women to end up in prison. Entertaining but at the same time thought provoking, From May to December is for anyone who is looking for something a little heavier than the usual summer read.

Written by: Victoria Kroeger, August 22nd 2009

Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:55:00 +0000

By Billy Wayne Sinclair, Jodie Sinclair

Arcade Publishing

In 1965, Billy Wayne Sinclair accidentally killed a store clerk with a shot fired aimlessly into the dark after a robbery he had committed. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair for his crime, however unintentional. Sinclair initially dealt with his death sentence through denial, swallowing the tranquilizers the guards on death row dispensed to keep the inmates pacified. Thankfully, Sinclair became curious about the system that intended to kill him and the methods it had at its disposal to do so.

In 1972, the Supreme Court decided the case of Furman v. Georgia, effectively striking down the death penalty nationwide. Billy Wayne Sinclair’s sentence was commuted to life without parole. Over the next forty years that Sinclair spent in prison, he became a respected, award-winning writer and jailhouse lawyer. Since winning his freedom in 2006, Sinclair has established himself as a senior paralegal in a Houston law firm. Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor is Sinclair’s second book. The death penalty being the divisive issue that it is, it’s not likely that Capital Punishment will change many minds. The tales of miscarriages of justice, dirty politics, and DNA exonerations abounding throughout Sinclair’s book are enough to make one’s jaw drop in utter outrage. (Sinclair is fervently anti-death penalty, as might be inferred from past bitter experience.) However, that’s until Sinclair details the despicable crimes that led to the inmates’ death-row sentences in the first place, which generally caused me to lose any trace of pity I might have held. Perhaps Sinclair himself even realizes this, because the instances in which he actually discusses the crimes committed in a particular inmate’s case study are few and far between.

Sinclair is at his best when discussing in graphic detail America's present methods of executing condemned prisoners. Sinclair presents plenty of interesting anecdotes about the American way of death, past and present. For example, when Mary Surratt was hanged as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, several people held her legs so that her undergarments wouldn’t “immodestly” show in her death throes. The sight of a woman’s underwear was more shocking to the public than the sight of that same woman dying painfully and publicly.

Thanks to several victim-blaming statements early in the book, I was not terribly impressed with Billy Wayne Sinclair's gender sympathies. He regained some ground in a later chapter titled “The Killers of Women” in which he discusses the disparity in the sentences given to those who kill women versus those who kill "real" people. Men who kill women are almost a legal anomaly. Two-thirds of all violent incidents against women in the United States involve a relative or an intimate, and six times as many women are the victims of violence at the hands of intimate partners as by strangers. However, men who kill intimate female partners are rarely if ever charged with first-degree or even second-degree murder. Generally, they plea-bargain down to lesser charges such as manslaughter and can serve even less time than automobile thieves. Capital punishment is rarely handed down in cases involving intimate partner murders. Sinclair makes the compelling argument that the murdered women are not viewed as "crime victims," but simply as victims of "domestic violence." Domestic violence victims, says Sinclair, do not receive the societal benefit of the justice of capital punishment when they are killed by rejected lovers and husbands. Of course, it doesn't help that socially, historically, and legally, women have been viewed as the property of men, to be disposed of as seen fit by her owner.

Female perpetrators of crimes serious enough to warrant the death penalty are extraordinarily rare. As of January 1, 2008, women made up only 1.5 percent of the United States' death row population. Because of this anomaly, and because Sinclair focuses mostly on Texas and Louisiana in his research, and furthermore because of his prior focus on disparate gender issues, I expected Sinclair to bring up the famous case of Karla Faye Tucker's execution in Texas in 1998. However, it merits only a one-line mention in an appendix of statistics. Karla Faye Tucker would have beautifully illustrated the hypocrisy inherent in America's thirst for blood vengeance, so long as that blood comes from the wounds of the public's image of a lower-class black male perpetrator. Tucker, however, was an attractive white female who had converted to fervent Christianity while imprisoned on death row for a brutal ax murder, thus contradicting in almost every way possible the "ideal" capital punishment candidate. Many at the time called for leniency for Tucker, who also begged for her life, but then-governor George Bush would not grant a stay of execution. The lesson here, one may surmise, is that women are treated more delicately and with more sympathy as convicted murderers (out of quaint ideas about the infirmities and inherent passivity and pacifism of women) than they are as the victims of brutality.

I'd liked to have known more about Sinclair's own life on death row, and I did have a few quibbles with his editing and facts, but on the whole I found this to be an exhaustively researched and well-written book, and perhaps enlightening and inspiring to others who have found themselves back outside after years in the penal system. Those who are staunchly and unflinchingly on one side or the other of the capital punishment debate will not likely be swayed to change their position, but there are plenty of facts, case studies, statistics, and anecdotes to make the undecided and the fence-sitters fall to one side.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, July 20th 2009

The Dhamma Brothers: East Meets West in the Deep South

admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:19:00 +0000

Directed by Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein, Andrew Kukura

Freedom Behind Bars Productions

What would happen if the American prison system was based on a treatment model versus a punitive model? The administrators at the W. E. Donaldson Correctional Facility wondered what would happen if they introduced the ancient Vipassana meditation techniques to prisoners. The Vipassana program is modeled after a program in India. The administrators hoped that the Vipassana meditation program would have a calming effect on the prison population. Donaldson Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison located in the countryside southwest of Birmingham, Alabama. The facility houses about 1,500 prisoners with sentences ranging from six months to life terms. The administrators decided to offer a Vipassana retreat for prisoners who wanted to participate in the program. Participants would be required sit in silent meditation for ten days. Vipassana is the Theravada Buddhism mediation technique known as Insight meditation. Vipassana requires the mediator focus the concentrated mind on suffering, impermanence, and lack of the enduring self. The program would allow the inmates to deal with their anger and to rise above the prison culture of revenge, hatred, and retaliation.

The program was met with skepticism from prison officials and local residents. Prison officials feared that some inmates would use the program as a way to get out of being in the prison block and they would not really devote themselves fully to the program. There was also resistance to teaching Buddhist meditation techniques to predominately Christian prison population.

I found the documentary to be very interesting and inclusive of the viewpoints of prison administrators, inmates, community members, and teachers. According to the directors of the film, The Dhamma Brothers seeks to tell the story of spiritual development and the formation of a bond of brotherhood among inmates in maximum security facility. The film focuses on a select group of inmates and their search for a sense of peace and redemption.

The inmates who participated in the mediation retreat did take the program seriously and were profoundly changed. The prisoners were able to take the time in the silent retreat to explore the sensations driving their behavior. Many of the participants were able to confront their emotions and learned to forgive themselves as well as other people in their lives. Inmates continued to meet for mediation groups after they graduated from the program, but they had to discontinue meetings due to opposition from the prison chaplain in 2002. Meditation groups were able to resume meetings in 2006 when the prison administration changed. Rick Smith, an inmate serving a life sentence and who participated in the program, summed up his feelings by saying, “I thought my biggest fear was growing old in prison. I realized my biggest fear was growing old and not knowing myself.”

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, July 12th 2009

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:27:00 +0000

By Lois Ahrens

PM Press

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics.

Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness. The Real Cost of Prisons Project has distributed 115,000 comics to the incarcerated, affected families, and social justice organizations free of charge. Comics are just one part of the organization’s mission to end mass incarceration; since Lois Ahrens founded organization in 2000 a coalition of artists, activists, and researchers has produced and distributed educational materials about the costs—material and affective—of the prison industrial complex and it’s devastating impact on family preservation, women’s reproductive rights, rural economies, and much more.

“What does it cost to lock up 2.3 million people each day in the world’s biggest prison system?” ask Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore in the introduction to The Real Cost Of Prisons. In addition to the staggering economic costs (the U.S. spends $60 billion per year on prisons) that could otherwise be directed at health care, public education, and other social services, the human costs are immeasurable.

In the comic “Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children,” illustrated by Susan Willmarth, we learn about the cost of incarceration for women and their children: One out of every 109 women in American is incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. Half of all women in prison are incarcerated more than 100 miles from their families. Seven million children have a parent in prison, on probation, or on parole. Seventy-nine percent of all women in New York State’s prisons are Black or Hispanic.

The Real Cost Of Prisons documents the vital efforts of the movement to end mass incarceration, and is an exceptional resource for all activists seeking creative ways to build and sustain a political movement.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, July 9th 2009