beyond attica.womens resistence behind bars-gctid35715

[kweku, afro olmec]

"When I was 15, my friends started going to jail," says Victoria  Law,  
a native New Yorker. "Chinatown's gangs were recruiting in the  high  
schools in Queens and, faced with the choice of stultifying  days  
learning nothing in overcrowded classrooms or easy money, many of  my  
friends had dropped out to join a gang."  
 "One by one," Law recalls, "they landed in Rikers Island, an entire  
island in New York City devoted to pretrial detainment for those who  
can not afford bail."
 
 Law shares this and other recollections in her new book, Resistance  
Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). At 16,  
she herself decided to join a gang, but was arrested for the armed  
robbery that she committed for her initiation into the gang. "Because  
it was my first arrest -- and probably because 16-year-old Chinese  
girls who get straight As in school did not seem particularly  
menacing -- I was eventually let off with probation," she writes.
 
 Before her release from jail, Law was held in the "Tombs" awaiting  
arraignment. While the adult women she met there had all been  
arrested for prostitution, she also met three teenagers arrested for  
unarmed assault. "Two of the girls were black lesbian lovers. In a  
scenario that would be repeated 13 years later in the case of the New  
Jersey Four, they had been out with friends when they encountered a  
cab driver who had tried to grab one of them. Her friends intervened,  
the cab driver called the police and the girls were arrested for  
assault." Law notes that "both of my cellmates were subsequently sent  
to Rikers Island."
 
 These early experiences, coupled with her later discovery of radical  
politics, pushed Law "to think about who goes to prison and why." She  
got involved in several projects to support prisoners, which included  
helping to start Books Through Bars in New York City, sending free  
books to prisoners. In college, she "began researching current  
prisoner organizing and resistance," and upon discovering almost zero  
documentation of resistance from women prisoners, she began her own  
documentation and directly contacted women prisoners who were  
resisting. A college paper became a widely distributed pamphlet, and  
at the request of several women prisoners she'd corresponded with,  
Law helped to publish their writings in a zine called Tenacious: Art  
and Writings from Women in Prison. Law writes that the zine and  
pamphlet "heightened awareness not only about incarcerated women's  
issues, but also women's actions to challenge and change the  
injustices they faced on a daily basis."
 
 "This book is the result of seven and a half years of reading,  
writing, listening, and supporting women in prison," Law says about  
Resistance Behind Bars, noting that each chapter in her book "focuses  
on an issue that women themselves have identified as important." The  
chapters include topics as diverse as health care, the relationship  
between mothers and daughters, sexual abuse, education, and  
resistance among women in immigration detention. Resistance Behind  
Bars paints a picture of women prisoners resisting a deeply flawed  
prison system, which Law hopes will help to empower both the women  
held in cages and those on the outside working to support them.
 
 Who Goes To Prison?
 
 Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has skyrocketed, from 300,000  
to over 2.3 million. According to the U.S. Justice Department, this  
staggering increase has not resulted from a rise in crime. In fact,  
since 1993, the prison population has increased by over one million,  
but during this same period, both property offenses and serious  
violent crime have been steadily declining. The New York Times  
recently cited a 2008 report by the International Center for Prison  
Studies at King's College ukkk documenting that the U.S. has more  
prisoners than any other country. Furthermore, with 751 out of  
100,000 people, and one out of every 100 adults in prison or jail,  
the U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With  
only five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has almost a  
quarter of the world's prisoners.
 
 While women comprise only nine percent of the U.S. prison population,  
their numbers have been increasing at a faster rate than men. As Law  
documents, "between 1990 and 2000, the number of women in prison rose  
108 percent, from 44,065 to 93,234. (The male prison population grew  
77 percent during that same time period.) By the end of 2006, 112,498  
women were behind bars."
 
 Like with male incarceration rates, women behind bars are  
disproportionately low-income and people of color. Law writes that  
"only 40 percent of all incarcerated women had been employed full-
time  before incarceration. Of those, most had held low-paying jobs: a  
study  of women under supervision (prison, jail, parole or probation)  
found  that two-thirds had never held a job that paid more than $6.50  
per  hour. Approximately 37 percent earned less than $600 per month."
 
 A 2007 Bureau of Justice study documented that 358 of every 100,000  
Black women, 152 of every 100,000 Latinas, and 94 of every 100,000  
white women are incarcerated. Explaining this racial discrepancy, Law  
argues that inner-city Black and Latino neighborhoods are  
disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. She cites a 2005 U.S.  
Department of Justice study which concluded that Blacks and Latinos  
are "three times as likely as whites to be searched, arrested,  
threatened or subdued with force when stopped by the police."
 
 The so-called "War on Drugs" has played a key role in the growth of  
the U.S. prison population. Law writes about the impact of New York  
State's Rockefeller Drug Laws passed in 1973, "which required a  
sentence of 15 years to life for anyone convicted of selling two  
ounces or possessing four ounces of a narcotic, regardless of  
circumstances or prior history. That year, only 400 women were  
imprisoned in New York State. As of January 1, 2001, there were  
3,133. Over 50 percent had been convicted of a drug offense and 20  
percent were convicted solely of possession. Other states passed  
similar laws, causing the number of women imprisoned nationwide for  
drug offenses to rise 888 percent from 1986 to 1996."
 
 Distinguishing women prisoners from their male counterparts, Law  
cites a Bureau of Justice study which "found that women were three  
times more likely than men to have been physically or sexually abused  
prior to incarceration. "
 
 Women Prisoners Don't Resist?
 
 The central thesis of Resistance Behind Bars is truly profound. In  
clear, non-academic language, Law argues that recent scholarship  
documenting and radically criticizing the increased incarceration  
rates and mistreatment of women prisoners "largely ignores what the  
women themselves do to change or protest these circumstances, thus  
reinforcing the belief that incarcerated women do not organize."  
Alongside academia, Law also harshly criticizes radical prison  
activists, arguing that "just as the civil rights movement of the  
1960s and 1970s downplayed the role of women in favor of highlighting  
male spokesmen and leaders, the prisoners' rights movement has  
focused and continues to focus on men to speak for the masses."
 
 Law gives honorable mention to two books that documented women's  
resistance at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State:  
Juanita Diaz-Cotto's Gender, Ethnicity, and the State (1996) and the  
collectively written Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in  
a New York State Maximum Security Prison (1998). Since these two  
books "no other book-length work has focused on incarcerated women's  
activism and resistance," writes Law. As a result, Law argues that  
women prisoners "lack a commonly known history of resistance. While  
male prisoners can draw on the examples of George Jackson, the Attica  
uprising and other well-publicized cases of prisoner activism,  
incarcerated women remain unaware of precedents relevant to them."
 
 Epitomizing the scholarship that Law criticizes, author Virginia High  
Brislin wrote that "women inmates themselves have called very little  
attention to their situations," and "are hardly ever involved in  
violent encounters with officials (i.e. riots), nor do they initiate  
litigation as often as do males in prison."
 
 To challenge Brislin's assertion, Law gives numerous examples of  
women rioting and initiating litigation, including the "August  
Rebellion" in 1974 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York  
State. On July 2, 1974, prisoner Carol Crooks won a lawsuit against  
prison authorities, with the court "issuing a preliminary injunction,  
prohibiting the prison from placing women in segregation without 24-  
hour notice and a hearing of these charges," writes Law. In response,  
"five male guards beat Crooks and placed her in segregation. Her  
fellow prisoners protested by holding seven staff members hostage for  
two and a half hours. However, 'the August Rebellion' is virtually  
unknown today despite that fact that male state troopers and (male)  
guards from men's prisons were called to suppress the uprising,  
resulting in 25 women being injured and 24 women being transferred to  
Matteawan Complex for the Criminally Insane without the required  
commitment hearings."
 
 Law also criticizes author Karlene Faith, who acknowledges that women  
resist, but who wrote that in the 1970s, women prisoners "were not as  
politicized as the men [prisoners], and they did not engage in the  
kinds of protest actions that aroused media attention." To challenge  
Faith's argument, Law cites several rebellions that received  
significant media attention, including one that the New York Times  
wrote two stories about. As Law recounts, "in 1975, women at the  
North Carolina Correctional Center for Women held a sit-down  
demonstration to demand better medical care, improved counseling  
services, and the closing of the prison laundry. When prison guards  
attempted to end the protest by herding the women into the gymnasium  
and beating them, the women fought back, using volleyball net poles,  
chunks of concrete and hoe handles to drive the guards out of the  
prison. Over 100 guards from other prisons were summoned to quell the  
rebellion."
 
 In light of the many such stories documented in Resistance Behind  
Bars, Law argues that "instead of claiming that women in prison did  
not engage in riots and protest actions that captured media  
attention, scholars and researchers should examine why these acts of  
organizing fail to attract the same critical and scholarly attention  
as that given to similar male actions."
 
 Resisting With Media-Activism
 
 In the chapter "Grievances, Lawsuits, and the Power of the Media,"  
Law observes that "gaining media attention often gains quicker  
results than filing lawsuits." Among the many organizing victories  
that were significantly aided by media attention, in 1999, Nightline  
focused on conditions at California's Valley State Prison for Women.  
Law explains that "after prisoner after prisoner told Nightline  
anchor Ted Koppel about being given a pelvic exam as 'part of the  
treatment' for any ailment, including stomach problems or diabetes,  
Koppel asked the prison's chief medical officer Dr. Anthony  
DiDomenico, for an explanation. "
 
 DiDomenico was apparently so confident that he would not be held  
accountable for his misconduct, that he answered Koppel by saying  
"I've heard inmates tell me they would deliberately like to be  
examined. It's the only male contact they get." After this interview  
was aired, DiDomenico was reassigned to a desk job, and as of 2001 he  
had been criminally indicted, along with a second doctor.
 
 Demonstrating the power of this media coverage, Law notes that the  
"prisoner advocacy organization Legal Services for Prisoners with  
Children had been reporting the prisoners' complaints about medical  
staff's sexual misconduct to the CDC for four years with no result."
 
 Along with agitating for coverage in the mainstream media, women  
prisoners have also created their own media projects. The chapter  
titled "Breaking The Silence: Incarcerated Women's Media" documents  
many important projects. Law explains that these projects are  
necessary because women prisoners' "voices and stories still remain  
unheard by both mainstream and activist-oriented media. Articles  
about both prison conditions and prisoners often portray the male  
prisoner experience, ignoring the different issues facing women in  
prison." Therefore, "women's acts of writing -- and publishing --  
often serve a dual purpose: they challenge existing stereotypes and  
distortions of prisoners and prison life, framing and correcting  
prevailing (mis) perceptions. They also boost women's sense of self-  
worth and agency in a system designed to not only isolate and  
alienate its prisoners but also erase all traces of individuality. "
 
 Some activist-oriented publications have been receptive and have  
published prisoners' writings. From 1999 until its final issue in  
2002, the radical feminist magazine Sojourner: A Women's Forum  
featured a section on women prisoner issues which included writings  
from the prisoners themselves. Law writes that this section, entitled  
"Inside/Outside" covered many topics, including "working conditions  
in women's facilities, the dehumanizing treatment of children  
visiting their mothers, and prisoner suicides.
 
 Law spotlights many different projects. From 2002 to 2006,  
Perceptions was a monthly newspaper published by and for the women at  
the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Because  
of censorship from prison warden Charlotte Blackwell, Perceptions was  
forced to limit its criticism of the prison, but the women published  
what they could. For example, in one issue, women wrote about how  
they would run the prison differently if they were in charge. Law  
notes that "their fantasies revealed the absence of programming for  
older women and those in the maximum custody unit, emergency  
counseling and therapeutic interventions and opportunities for mother-  
child interactions. It also drew attention to the facility's  
overcrowding and increased potentials for violence and conflict among  
prisoners."
 
 Tenacious, the zine published by Law, was initiated by women  
prisoners who sought the help of friends outside the prison to  
actually publish and distribute it. "Free from the need to seek  
administrative approval, incarcerated women wrote about the  
difficulties of parenting from prison, dangerously inadequate health  
care, sexual assault by prison staff and the scarcity of educational  
and vocational opportunities, especially in comparison to their male  
counterparts. Although circulation remained small, the women's  
stories provoked public response," writes Law.
 
 "Prison officials do whatever they can to strip prisoners of their  
dignity and self-worth," stated Barrilee Bannister, one of the  
founders of Tenacious. "Writing is my way to escape the confines of  
prison and the debilitating ailments of prison life. It's me putting  
on boxing gloves and stepping into the rink of freedom of speech and  
opinion."
 
 Arguing For Prison Abolition
 
 When Victoria Law was first introduced to radical politics, shortly  
after her own stint behind bars, she "discovered groups and  
literature espousing prison abolition."
 
 "These analyses -- coupled with what I had seen firsthand -- made  
sense, steering me to work towards the dismantling, rather than the  
reform, of the prison system." Law's subsequent research has only  
served to affirm her belief in the need for abolition. She states  
clearly that "this book should not be mistaken for a call for more  
humane or 'gender responsive' prisons."
 
 Some readers may view Law's prison abolitionist politics as being  
abstract or overly theoretical. However, to support her abolitionist  
viewpoint, she makes the practical argument that prisons simply don't  
work to reduce crime or increase public safety. She writes that  
"incarceration has not decreased crime; instead, 'tough on crime'  
policies have led to the criminalization ... of more activities,  
leading to higher rates of arrest, prosecution and incarceration  
while shifting money and resources away from other public entities,  
such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other  
societal supports. The growing popularity of abolitionist thought can  
be seen in the expansion of organizations such as Critical  
Resistance, an organization fighting to end the need for a prison-  
industrial complex, and the formation of groups working to address  
issues of crime and victimization without relying on the police or  
prisons."
 
 Towards the end of Resistance Behind Bars, Law quotes Angela Y.  
Davis, who is a leading activist intellectual of the prison  
abolitionist movement. In her recent book Are Prisons Obsolete?,  
Davis writes that "a major challenge of this movement is to do the  
work that will create more human, habitable environments for people  
in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system.  
How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately  
attending to the needs of prisoners -- calling for less violent  
conditions, an end to sexual assault, improved physical and mental  
health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work  
opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with  
families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing -- and at  
the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more  
prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the  
place of the prison in our future?"
 
 As if answering Davis' question, Law concludes that while striving  
for prison abolition "we need to also reach in, make contact with  
those who have been isolated by prison walls and societal  
indifference and listen to those who are speaking out, like many of  
the women who have shared their stories within this book. Because  
abolishing prisons will not happen tomorrow, next week or even next  
year, we need to break through these barriers, communicate, work with  
and support women who are in resistance today."