Apr-May 97

Women and Imprisonment in the U.S., Part IV

Conditions Today

What are the con-ditions women face when they are imprisoned? Prison authorities rationalize that because the numbers of women have been so relatively low, there are no "economies of scale" in meeting women's needs, particularly their special needs. Therefore, women suffer accordingly. There is a wide range of institutions that incarcerate women, and conditions vary. Some women's prisons look like "small college campuses," remnants of the historical legacy of the reformatory movement. Bedford Hills State prison in New York is one such institution; Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia is another. Appearances, however, are deceptive. Russel B. Dobash, R. Emerson, and Sue Gutteridge, The Imprisonment of Women, 1986, describe the "underlying atmosphere [of such a prison] as one of intense hostility, frustration and anger."

Many institutions have no pretenses and are notoriously overcrowded and inadequate. The California Institution for Women at Frontera houses 2,500 women in a facility built for 1,011. Overcrowding sometimes means that women who are being held for trivial offenses are incarcerated in maximum security institutions for lack of other facilities.

Women's prisons are often particularly ill-equipped and poorly financed. They have fewer medical, educational, and vocational facilities than men's prisons. Medical treatment is often unavailable, inappropriate, and inconsistent. Job training is also largely unavailable; when opportunities exist, they are usually traditional female occupations. Courses concentrate on homemaking and low-paid skills like beautician and launderer. Other barriers exist as well. In an Alabama women's prison, there is a cosmetology program but those convicted of felonies are prohibited by state law from obtaining such licenses.

In most prisons, guards have total authority, and the women can never take care of their basic intimate needs in a secure atmosphere, free from intrusion. In the ostensible name of security, male guards can take down or look over a curtain, walk into a bathroom, or observe a woman showering or changing her clothes. In Michigan, for instance, male guards are employed at all women's prisons. At Huron Valley, about half the guards are men. At Crane prison, approximately 80% of the staff is male and dormitories are open, divided into cubicles. In one section the cubicle walls are only four feet high. No cubicles anywhere at Crane have doors or curtains. The officers' desks are right next to the bathroom, and the bathroom doors must be left open at all times. Male guards are allowed to do body "shake-downs" in which they run their hands all over the women's bodies.

Incarceration has severe and particular ramifications for women. Eighty percent of women entering state prisons are mothers who have to undergo the intense pain of forced separation from their children. They are often the sole caretakers of their children, the primary source of financial and emotional support. Their children are twice as likely to end up in foster care than the children of male prisoners. When a man goes to prison, his wife or lover usually maintains responsibility for the children, but women who go to prison often have no one else to turn to and risk permanently losing custody of their children. For all imprisoned mothers the separation from their children is one of the greatest punishments of incarceration and engenders despondency, feelings of guilt and anxiety about their children's welfare.

Visiting their mother in prison is often extremely difficult or impossible. At county jails where women are awaiting trial, prisoners are often denied contact visits and are required to visit behind glass partitions or through telephones. Prisons are usually built far away from the urban centers where most of the prisoners and their families and friends live. Children who are able to visit have to undergo frightening experiences like pat downs under awkward and generally anti-humane conditions. States are supposed to provide reunification services when women are released from prison, but most do not. Although departments of corrections admit that family contact greatly enhances parole success, the prison system actively works to obstruct such contact.

Ten percent of the women in prison are pregnant, but reproductive rights are non-existent in prisons. All the essentials for a healthy pregnancy are missing: nutritious food, fresh air, exercise, sanitary conditions, extra vitamins and prenatal care. The women are denied nutritional supplements, such as those afforded by the WIC program. They frequently undergo bumpy bus rides and are shackled and watched throughout their delivery. It is no wonder then that a 1985 California Department of Health study indicated that a third of all prison pregnancies end in late term miscarriage-twice the outside rate. Only 20% have live births, and forced separation from the infant usually comes in 24 to 72 hours after birth.

Many commentators argue that, at their best, women's prisons are shot through with a viciously destructive paternalistic mentality. Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice Women in State Prisons, 1800-1935, notes that "Women in prison are perpetually infantilized by routines and paternalistic attitudes." Assata Shakur describes it as a "pseudo-motherly attitude . . . A deception which all too often successfully reverts women to children." Guards call prisoners by their first names and admonish them to "grow up," "be good girls" and "behave." They threaten the women with a "good spanking." Kathryn Burkhart (Women in Prison, 1973) refers to this as a "mass infancy treatment. Powerlessness, helplessness, and dependency are systematically heightened in prison." What would be most therapeutic for women is the opposite-for women to feel their own power and to take control of their lives.

Friendship among women is discouraged, and the homophobia of the prison system is exemplified by rules in many prisons which prohibit any type of physical contact between women prisoners. A woman can be punished for hugging a friend who has just learned that her mother died. There is a general prohibition against physical affection, but it is most seriously enforced against known lesbians. One lesbian received a disciplinary ticket for lending a sweater and was told she didn't know the difference between compassion and passion. Lesbians may be confronted with extra surveillance or may be "treated like a man." Some lesbians receive incident reports simply because they are gay.

Many prison administrators agree that community-based alternatives would be better and cheaper than imprisonment. However, there is very little public pressure in that direction. While imprisonment rates for women continue to rise, the public outcry is deafening in its silence. Ruth Ann Jones of the Division of Massachusetts Parole Board says her agency receives no outside pressure to develop programs for women. [See Tatiana Schreiber and Stephanie Poggie, "Women in Prison: Does Anyone Out Here Hear" Resist Newsletter, May 1988.] However, small groups of dedicated people around the country are working to introduce progressive reforms into the prisons. In Michigan, a program buses family and friends to visit at prisons. In New York, at Bedford Hills, a program is geared towards enhancing and encouraging visits with children. Chicago Legal Aid for Imprisoned Mothers (CLAIM), Atlanta's Aid to Imprisoned Mothers and Madison, Wisconsin's Women's Jail Project are just some of the groups that have tirelessly, persistently fought for reforms as well as provided critical services for women and children.

The best programs are the ones that can concretely improve the situation of the women inside. However, many programs that begin with reform-minded intentions become institutionalized in such a way that they are disadvantageous to the population they are supposedly helping. Psychological counselors may have good intentions, but they work for the Departments of Corrections and often offer no confidentiality. And of course even the best of them tend to focus on individual pathology rather than exposing systematic oppression. Less restrictive alternatives like halfway houses often get turned around so that they become halfway in, not halfway out. That is what we are experiencing is the widening of the net of state control. The results are that women who would not be incarcerated at all wind up under the supervision of the State rather than decreasing the numbers of women who are imprisoned.

Prison Resistance

One topic that has not been adequately researched is the rebellion and resistance of women in prison because those in charge of documenting history have a stake in burying this herstory. Such a herstory would challenge the patriarchal ideology that insists that women are, by nature, passive and docile. What we do know is that as far back as 1943 there was a riot in New York's Sing Sing Prison, the first woman's prison. It took place in response to overcrowding and inadequate facilities. During the Civil War, Georgia's prison was burned down, allegedly torched by women trying to escape. It was again burned down in 1900. In 1888 similar activity took place at Farmingham, Massachusetts, although reports refer to it as merely "fun." Women rebelled at New York's Hudson House of Refuge in response to excessive punishment. They forced the closing of "the dungeon" basement cells and a diet of bread and water. Within a year, similar cells were reinstituted. The story of Bedford Hills is a particularly interesting one. From 1915 to 1920 there was a series of rebellions against cruelty to inmates. The administration had refused to segregate Black and White women up until 1916, and reports of the time attribute these occurrences to the "unfortunate attachments formed by white women for the Negroes." A 1931 study indicated that "colored girls" revolted against discrimination at the New Jersey State Reformatory.

Around the time of the historical prison rebellion at Attica Prison in New York State, rebellions also took place at women's prisons. In 1971, there was a work stoppage at Alderson with the rebellion at Attica. In June of 1975, the women at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women staged a five day demonstration "against oppressive working atmospheres, inaccessible and inadequate medical facilities and treatment, and racial discrimination, and many other conditions at the prison." Unprotected, unarmed women were attacked by male guards armed with riot gear. The women sustained physical injuries and miscarriages as well as punitive punishment in lockup and in segregation, and illegal transfers to the Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In February of 1977, male guards were for the first time officially assigned to duty in the housing units where they freely watched women showering, changing their clothes and performing all other private functions. On August 2, 1977, a riot squad of predominantly male guards armed with tear gas, high pressure water hoses and billy clubs attacked one housing unit for five hours. Many of the women defended themselves and were brutally beaten; twenty-eight women were illegally transferred to Mattawan where they faced a behavior modification program.

This short expositions of the rebellions in women's prisons is clearly inadequate. Feminist criminologists and others should look towards the need for a detailed herstory of this thread of the women's experience in America.

Conclusion

The history of the imprisonment of women in the United States has always been different for White women and African American women. The social control of White women, geared toward turning them into "ladies," was a more physically benign prison track than the custodial prisons that contained Black women , but it was insidiously patriarchal. Historically, the more "black" the penal institution, the worse the conditions. Research is necessary to determine how this operates in terms of White and Afro-American women prisoners. However, we can hypothesize that as women's prisons become increasingly "black" institutions, conditions will, as in the past, come more and more to resemble the punitive conditions of men's prisons. This is an especially timely consideration now that Black women are incarcerated eight times more frequently than White women.

Although the percentage of women in prison is still very low compared to men, the rates are rapidly rising, and it does appear as if the imprisonment of women is coming more and more to resemble that of men. There is no separate, more benign, track for women. Now more than ever, women are being subjected to more maximum security, control units, shock incarceration; in short, everything negative that men receive. The purpose of prisons for women may not be to function primarily as institutions of patriarchal control, but as instruments of social control of people of color. Warehousing and punishment are now enough for women as well as men.

This is not to suggest that the imprisonment of women is not replete with sexist ideology and practices. It is a thoroughly patriarchal society that sends women to prison; that is, the rules and regulations, the definition of crimes are defined by the patriarchy. This would include situations in which it is "okay" for a husband to beat up his wife, but that very same wife cannot defend herself against his violence; situations in which women are forced to act as accessories to crimes committed by men; situations in which abortion is becoming more and more criminalized. In prison, patriarchal assumptions and male dominance continue to play an essential role in the treatment of women. Women have to deal with a whole set of factors that men do not, from intrusion by male guards to the denial of reproductive rights. Modern women's imprisonment has taken on the worst aspects of the imprisonment of men, but also maintains the sexist legacy of the reformatories and the contemporary structures of the patriarchy. Infantilization and the reinforcement of passivity and dependency are woven into the very fabric of the incarceration of women.

Prison as a means of social control of people of color is evidenced by the enormous attacks aimed at family life in communities of color, by imprisoning men, women and children. This area of inquiry concerns the most disenfranchised elements of our society and needs more research. But we mustn't wait for this research before we begin to unleash our energies to dismantle a prison system that grinds up our sisters.

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