women's prison

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

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

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

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

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:37:00 +0000

By Victoria Law

PM Press

Of the many staggering statistics in Victoria Law’s eight-year study, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women, the following fact will make your jaw drop: the number of incarcerated women in United States prisons has almost doubled from 68,468 to 104,848 between 1995 and 2004.

Like their male counterparts, this population of women is overwhelmingly comprised of African Americans and Latinas, which can be largely attributed to racial profiling—not, as popular mythology might suggest—an ad hoc increase in crime amongst these ethnic groups. Law’s fascinating text is born from her personal experience as a teenager who narrowly avoided incarceration herself, and the friendships she cultivated with women who were not so lucky. As Law raised her own consciousness about the prison-industrial—complex, she began investigating incarcerated women’s involvement in prisoners-rights movements and was told flat-out by other activists that “Women don’t organize.”

Resistance Behind Bars is a compelling testament to the untruth of this statement, and offers innumerable examples of women’s prison uprisings. One such instance is a 1975 sit-down demonstration for improved medical care at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women, in which women fought back against prison guards attempting to beat and herd them into a gymnasium. Creatively, these prisoners used volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete and anything else immediately available, causing the state to invoke the aid of over 100 guards from other prisons to pacify the rebellion.

Law’s exhaustively researched text includes anecdotal information she harvested from interviews, letters, and conversations with prisoners as well as government reports and major media sources. Most importantly, Law highlights the deeply gendered nature of women’s prison experiences, which cuts across virtually all aspects of incarcerated life. Sexual abuse, motherhood, physical labor, education, medical care, and the extent to which women prisoners’ activism receives media attention are all areas that Law treats with a distinct sense of urgency. What’s more, Resistance Behind Bars has bonus features that underpin Law’s activist project: a list of resources organized according to region for how readers can get involved in the prisoners-rights movement, and an annotated list of recommended readings.

Written by: Heather Brown, July 5th 2009

La Corona

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:52:00 +0000

Directed by Amanda Micheliand Isabel Vega

Cinema Guild

La Corona, which translates to "the crown," is a short documentary centering around a beauty pageant which takes place every year in the largest female prison in Colombia. One of the judges jokes early on that Colombia has a pageant for everything, except cocaine. The prison warden, when interviewed, says that she doesn't like the pageant very much, but it is the only time of the year that there is some peace and quiet around the prison because all of the girls look forward to it so much and want to participate.

Girls are nominated from each of the four cell blocks to represent their block in the beauty pageant. The first contestant we are introduced to is Maira Alejandro, a girl about five foot four inches in stature who was put in jail for murder. She explains in an interview that she has killed many times, which is unbelievable taking into account her size. The second contestant, Viviane Busto, was convicted of guerrilla activity. She laments her time in prison, because she has a son who she would like to eventually reunite with and teach him everything she knows. Angela Valoyes, convicted of robbery and assault, is a lesbian whose eyes sparkle as she describes passages from the Bible "that God told us to love, but he did not tell us who specifically to love." The newest convict, Angie Jimenez, has only been in jail for eighteen days. She hasn't gotten used to life in jail, especially since she also has a son on the outside.

Each of the girls chosen to compete must be prepared at all times. Meaning, they must be wearing high heels and full makeup. They also have to attend dancing and runway walking classes, like a real beauty pageant. In participating in the pageant, they become minor celebrities among the inmates. Hand-washed laundry hangs from every steel bar that covers the windows in the jail, but for the competition, the women are given designer dresses.

It seems absurd that women would have to conform to gender standards in something like a beauty pageant while they are in prison, and toward the end of the documentary you wonder who the pageant is really for: the women inside, or the great hordes of reporters who cover the pageant?

The competition only takes up about ten minutes of the documentary. The girls dance and sing with traditional Colombian songs, and there is even a swimsuit competition. When the winner is finally announced (I won't ruin it for you), she gets a full spread in the newspaper. By the end of the film, girls in other blocks complain that the competition was rigged or blame racism for why their contestant didn't win. Things go back to normal for the most part, until one of the prisoners is released. The ending is abrupt and leans hard on the idea that the pageant, while entertaining, doesn't teach the girls how to change and adapt for the better. But, as Vivianne Busto tearfully explains, "It gives us something to look forward to."

Written by: Chrissie Thornburg, March 25th 2009