A Message of Solidarity; a post by Jodie Lawston

In July 2011, over 6,000 prisoners in the state of California went on hunger strike for four weeks to protest unjust prison conditions in Administrative Segregation and Secure Housing Units across the state.  On September 28, 2011 6,000 prisoners resumed a hunger strike to protest these inhumane conditions.  Critical Resistance (http://www.criticalresistance.org/) sent out a press release explaining prisoners’ families have confirmed that prisoners in the Calipatria State Prison general population and Ad-Seg units, in addition to prisoners at CCI Tehachapi, CSP Centinela and West Valley Detention Center, are refusing food until their demands are met.  The press release explains:

“The prisoners are refusing food to protest what have been characterized by human rights groups as torturous conditions in California’s Securing Housing Units (SHUs) at Pelican Bay, CCI Tehachapi, CSP Corcoran and Valley State Prison for Women. Prisoners continue to rally around 5 demands, originating at Pelican Bay, which include an end to the practice of long term solitary confinement as well as the policies of gang validation and debriefing. A prisoner at CCI Tehachapi recently described the conditions and reasons for striking: “The only clothing we are given in here are socks, boxers and a t-shirt. To be honest they’re filthy. Now just imagine being locked in that bathroom for 24 hrs, 7 days a week, year after year after year for no legitimate reason. We have only been allowed to have fresh air for four hours in the past eight months.”

Administrative segregation are some of the most inhumane conditions a prisoner can be subject to, as they are forced to stay in a cell without human contact for 23, and sometimes 24, hours per day.  In some cases they do not even see correctional officers as everything is automatic; for example, food is given through a slot in the cell door, and the person providing the food (which is awful itself and has little to no nutritional value) is not seen.  This kind of environment provides no intellectual or positive emotional stimulation at all.

You can read more about the hunger strike here: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/.  There are an array of community and organizational supporters, including actors such as Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo, activists such as Nawal El Saadawi—who was involved in the 2011 Egyptian protests—and Cindy Sheehan, and scholars such as Saskia Sasson and Cornell West.  We here at Razor Wire Women stand in solidarity with the hunger strikers and the communities that support them, and demand that their voices be heard, and action be taken on their demands.

From Jodie Lawston: Mary Thompson on “rehabilitation,” budget cuts and Three Strikes

With the ongoing “budget crisis” across the country, education and rehabilitative programs in prisons are disappearing.  This is particularly difficult for people in women’s prisons, as women’s prisons already had significantly fewer programs than men’s prisons.  Mary Thompson, a woman incarcerated in California who also took my writing workshop, writes of the struggles of being incarcerated with few arenas for rehabilitation:

Since education and substance abuse programs were cut to almost nothing in the prison system, the effects on inmates have been drastic.  My question to those in charge is how can you call the prison system, “California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation” when you cut all of the rehabilitation programs?  Without education and substance abuse programs many will fall back into the behavior that got them in prison in the first place.  Even the programs we have left are often cut or cancelled, due to lack of space.

Mary continues, reflecting on her own pathway and achievements despite the lack of support in the prison system:

Thank God for outside entities.  I have been able to further my education for these 16 plus years.  Presently, I am two courses away from a Doctorate in Christian Counseling.  But, it was not without great struggle and setbacks.

I have been incarcerated for over 16 years of a 25-life sentence for a theft charge.  It amazes me that the system would prefer to pay $50,000 a year to incarcerate me (and thousands more) for a crime that carried three years tops without the Three Strikes Law.  Not all of us are violent, predators, or someone to fear.  To look at my criminal life you would think, “Oh, she has a robbery on her record.”  No one knows that this charge took place 14 years prior to the nonviolent charge that struck me out—that I turned myself in—that I never physically hurt anyone—that my criminal history is much shorter than many who use prison as a revolving door year after year—that I am one of the most nonviolent people you will ever meet.  It seems no one realizes it would have been cheaper for the state of California to treat my drug addiction than to incarcerate me for life.  I have, however, graduated from the substance abuse program before its demise.  I went on to become a peer mentor in the program.  After taking several courses outside the institution, I became a Certified Drug Counselor.  I truly believe I could be of more use to society on the outside.  I would certainly be cheaper.

Thank you, Mary, for sharing your story and for voicing yourself!  We live in solidarity with you as we continue to raise awareness about all of the women inside, and the injustices that you face on a daily basis.

From Jodie Lawston: Letters from Jane Dorotik and Je’Anna Redwood

I received letters today from Jane Dorotik and Je’Anna Redwood, two of our contributors to Razor Wire Women.  Both Jane and Je’Anna are incarcerated in California and took my writing workshop a few years ago; out of this workshop emerged Je’Anna’s essay “The Voice of Silence,” which is chapter 2 of RWW, and Jane’s essay, “The Prison Mentality,” which is chapter 9 of RWW.  Both Je’Anna and Jane write that they are thrilled to be part of the book, emphasizing that they feel it is important that incarcerated women’s experiences be told to the world.  Additionally, Jane writes:

What a great book!  It is an honor to be part of it and I feel like it is so very valuable for the public to become informed about our prison system.  The book is filled with eye-opening revelations about incarcerated women and the struggles they endure.  I believe with publications such as Razor Wire Women, society will become informed and then become active in reversing this shameful trend.  The more we can inform the public about what goes on behind prison walls, the more likely it is that society will rise up and say, “No, this is shameful, we will not tolerate it.”  Thank you so much for such an important book.

Thank you, Jane and Je’Anna, for being a part of this project!

Renita Phifer: The Archbishop Visits

The following poem was written by RWW contributor Renita Phifer after Catholic Archbishop Timothy J. Dolan visited Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2009.

The Archbishop visits Bedford Hills Correctional Facility

Who am I
I’m told, I’m no one
My number defines me
And allows for their abusive
Actions.

Does the archbishop know
They can hit me, verbally abuse me,
Violate me without provocation
My number means my name is taken from me.
And without a name I’m removed
From humanity—
An inmate, convict, not a person
Yet when visitors come concrete
Is waxed!

C.O.’s paint on smiles and put on dress uniforms—
There’s a pretense of care Commissioner Fisher
Arrives and inmates become a part of humanity.

Let’s all sing cum ba ya, the Archbishop
Is here pull out the red carpet
–Symbolic—for their infamy—
As it symbolizes the bloodshed of
My peers beaten bloody by batons and
Subjection.

Does the Archbishop know about that, and
After his visit—I’m told I’m no one!

Ashley Lucas: Women Inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility Respond to Razor Wire Women

Renita Phifer, one of RWW’s incarcerated contributors, shared our book with her peers in the women’s studies program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State.  The following is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to me on May 15, 2011:

Dear Ashley,

I hope this finds you and Jodie well.  As for me, I’m still floating on a spiritual high about being included in Razor Wire Women.  I’m enclosing a card that contains only a few names of the women who read and were touched.  Rev. B— also read Razor Wire Women and will have church members read/purchase/spread the word to other churches and family and coworkers.

The college in the prison will require permission to utilize the book.  However, the student volunteers who come to Bedford for seminars, etc. have committed to push for its usage on the outside.  J

Renita is a contributor to Just Detention International’s Advocacy Toolkit, and she has collaborated with people at Human Rights Watch, National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, Out of Time, and A Thousand Kites.  She knits scarves and hats for members of the U.S. military and is a tireless advocate for other women in prison.  Her letter continues:

… It’s my advocacy work that causes me to continuously be under attack by officers and administration, but I press on because it must be done!  In fact since receipt of the book I’ve received two bogus infractions charges for correspondence.  J  I will not be moved—as I’ve grown accustomed to being placed in segregation and keeplocked.  I’ve been removed from honor unit three times already, and it appears they seek to do it again.  Yet I fear them not, and will always find a way to give a voice to the voiceless.

In solidarity,
Renita Phifer

Renita’s letter included a card signed by a dozen other women at Bedford Hills.  These are some of their words:

Thank you for giving the graduating class of 2011 a chance of reading that wonderful book about our lives.

Bless you all for allowing our words to be heard.

When I read different things in the book, it touched my heart.  Thank you for giving me the chance.

Thank you for your great help to express our voice to help people to see us as human, as women fighting for our rights and our freedom.

I wish to humbly express my gratitude for giving voice to Ms. Phifer’s story/essay because it is an important situation that gets swept under the rug and hushed.  Ms. Phifer, and now you, Ashley, has only strengthened my resolve in this place.

After 15 years, one begins to wonder if one has the strength and courage needed to continue.  I continue to learn that I do.  Thank you.

To Renita/Ashley, I applaud you for your courage in speaking out about the injustice behind prison walls.  I offer my thanks, and I am particularly grateful for your insight of the important issues that have been silenced through the years for society to become finally aware of.  You are the voice for the voiceless.  Thank you.

I will always feel honored to have worked with you on this project.

-Renita

In response to this outpouring of warmth and generosity, I extend my deepest gratitude and admiration to Renita and the women of Bedford Hills.  It is because of your strength, your bravery, and your willingness to speak out that the scholars and activists who wish to advocate for women in prison are able to do our work.

Ashley Lucas: Reflections on the VIII Taller Internacional: Mujeres en el Siglo XXI, hosted by the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Havana, Cuba

When a colleague of Jodie’s told us about this conference sponsored by the University of Havana, we recognized an excellent opportunity to promote Razor Wire Women and to engage in international conversations about incarcerated women.  As it turned out, this was also the first opportunity we had to speak publicly about the book.  What more auspicious occasion could we have hoped for than an international conference to launch a year of speaking engagements?

Since the theme of the Havana conference was rather broad—loosely translated as “Women in the Twenty-First Century”—we were the only presenters whose work touched on incarceration.  We had adapted a good portion of the introduction of Razor Wire Women and combined it with an overview of the book.  Our presentation basically provided a rundown of the pertinent statistics on women’s incarceration in the U.S., along with the reasons why we feel it’s so important to bring the voices of prisoners, activists, scholars, and artists into the same conversation.  The audience for our panel consisted of about fifteen Cuban women—presumably scholars—who seemed both surprised and disconcerted by the content of our talk.  As we spoke, several of the spectators wore truly horrified looks.  This confused me as we talked, and I began to wonder if I was doing a bad job of translating myself into Spanish—something I’d decided to do off the cuff when I heard how much detail our appointed translator was losing as she restated Jodie’s opening remarks.  We came to believe that translation was not the source of our audience’s apparent shock.

We learned that the Cuban government provides absolutely no statistics and very little information about its prisons or those held within them.  Cubans do not even know how many prisons exist in their country, much less how many people are incarcerated on the island.  International human rights organizations have been unable to attain even the most basic data about, much less access to, Cuban prisons, and discussion of incarceration among Cubans appears to be a taboo subject because people have so little information and so much fear.

Only one woman in the audience asked us a question after our presentation.  She wanted to know the ages of girls in youth detention facilities in the U.S.  Jodie responded to her question, and we took our seats.  After our panel ended, two women who had heard our talk approached us in the hallway of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba (Havana’s most luxurious hotel), where the conference was taking place.  They asked us about the conditions women face in U.S. prisons, and as soon as we began to respond, they pulled out handheld voice recorders and taped our answers to their questions.  The whole situation felt very strange, but we didn’t say anything that wasn’t already in our book.  After they exhausted their questions, one woman thanked us and walked away without identifying herself.  The other told us she was studying journalism at the University of Havana.  We’ve since wondered if we appeared in any news reports at the university, but we have no way of finding out.

Our trip to Havana raised more questions for us than it did answers, but we are very grateful to have had the opportunity to speak about Razor Wire Women in a country where public conversations about women’s incarceration seldom take place.  Being in a place where censorship is common and where a book like Razor Wire Women could not have been published reminded us of the urgency of the work that razor wire women are doing all over the globe.  One of our book’s contributors, Ana Lucia Gelabert, was born in Cuba and now writes activist comics from inside a Texas prison.  We dedicate this trip and our talk at this conference to her life and work.

This is just the beginning!  Jodie recently spoke about the book on a radio show in California, and I gave a talk about the book at my home university (UNC Chapel Hill).  We’ll speak on a panel with RWW contributor Sara Warner at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Chicago in August, and later that same month we’ll be in Las Vegas promoting the book at the American Sociological Association conference and the Society for the Study of Social Problems conference.  Check out the “Appearances” tab on this website for a full listing of all the places that you can find RWW contributors speaking about the book.  We hope to see you in our travels!

Jodie Lawston discusses RWW on Blog Talk Radio

Check it out.

Contributor Spotlight: Malaquias Montoya

Painter and poster artist Malaquias Montoya, famous for his contributions to the Chicano Art Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, was kind enough to let his painting Ruth Snyder appear in Razor Wire Women. Ruth Snyder is part of Montoya’s series PreMeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment. (Also appearing in this series: The Rosenbergs; Jesus Christ). Despite his prestigious career and deep back catalogue, he remains committed to activist causes and has shown great personal kindness again and again to the book’s co-editor, my wife, Ashley Lucas. His presence honors the book.

How to Help, Pt. 1

Just found this from the War Resisters League: “Six Ways for People on the Outside to Support Women’s Resistance on the Inside.”

• Make contact with women in prison. “Visits, phone calls, and letter writing are essential. Only with a firm foundation, a strong foundation, can we together be able to build a greater movement,” says a woman incarcerated in Florida.
• Speak out about these issues, especially when they intersect with issues that are considered “non-prison” issues.
• Send literature and news from the outside.
• Write articles about women prisoners’ issues, experiences, and actions, or publish their articles.
• Peer education groups need up-to-date information on health issues and treatments! They need outside people who are willing to provide services not available (but much needed) within the prison.
• If you are connected to a university or other educational institution, look into setting up a women’s studies course or other program within a women’s prison that helps articulate and challenge the dominant ways of thinking and the power structure.

If you’re thinking about doing Item Six, we just might be able to suggest a decent textbook …

From NewPolitics: On resistance in women’s prisons

A valuable piece by Victoria Law, who is the outside publisher of Tenacious and the author of Resistance Behind Bars. (More about both of those here or just look at the sidebar.) She narrates an entire secret history of fighting back in women’s prisons, beginning with the August 1974 rebellion at Bedford Hills:

IN 1974, WOMEN IMPRISONED at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Prisoner organizer Carol Crooks had filed a lawsuit challenging the prison’s practice of placing women in segregation without a hearing or 24-hour notice of charges. In July, a court had ruled in her favor. In August, guards retaliated by brutally beating Crooks and placing her in segregation without a hearing. The women protested, fighting off guards, taking over several sections of the prison, and holding seven staff members hostage for two and a half hours.

(Note: My linking to this piece is not meant to valorize rioting or hostage-taking. I wouldn’t want to be one of those seven guards. Nor for that matter would I want to be Carol Crooks after the guards finished beating her. Which is kind of the point.)

Thanks

Jodie Lawston and Ashley Lucas appeared last week to read from the book’s introduction, “Las representaciones de Estados Unidos: las mujeres encarceladas,” at a conference in Cuba! Thanks to the organizers of VIII Taller Internacional: Mujeres en el Siglo XXI, hosted by the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Havana, Cuba, for hosting them, and hopefully we’ll feature some excerpts from Jodie and Ashley’s adventures in Cuba here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Kathleen Ferraro

Anyone interested in issues surrounding women’s incarceration should be aware of Northern Arizona University sociologist Kathleen Ferraro’s work. Her 2006 book Neither Angels Nor Demons: Women, Crime, and Victimization (Northeastern) is an incredibly important contribution to the debate. (It was even reviewed, by your friendly neighborhood blogger, no less, in the Lawston-and-Lucas-edited issue of NWSA Journal that became, after much labor, Razor Wire Women.) Her most recent book is Women’s Lives. Her work is devoted to showing the complexity of the paths by which women become subject to the criminal-justice system: being physically forced to participate in illegal activity; killing an abuser/stalker/potential murderer after repeated refusals by local police to enforce restraining orders; etc. The stories she tells almost always belie the extremely simple terms by which we then refer to these women: murderers, inmates, trash. Ferraro’s work reveals such women as neither angels nor demons, but people.

(Tongue-in-cheek aside: If Ferraro ever wishes to study male antisocial behavior, she could do worse than turn her keen sociologist’s attention to the law enforcement professionals and legislature of the state where she lives and teaches. Their bizarre and aggressive behavior shows a much more profound resistance to explanation than most acts committed by women in prison.)

(Second tongue-in-cheek aside: I bet Kathleen Ferraro hears that joke a lot.)

Mother Jones on Sex-for-Snitching in MA

I didn’t learn of this story until I was doing some other research for this blog. But a Mother Jones reporter posted the following to his blog in November, 2010:

A prisoner at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Norfolk recently wrote to me to report the existence of a “sex for information’’ ring run by guards within the prison. He says the existence of this hitherto unknown operation is responsible for the state’s high number of prison suicides. The inmate suicide rate in Massachusetts is four times the national average, with eight suicides this year alone–including one in June at MCI-Norfolk, the state’s largest medium-security prison, which also had two high-profile suicides last year. The prisoner, who says he has become the advocate for others too frightened of retaliation to talk, himself fears retaliation from within the prison.

Go read the whole piece–it’s disturbing, but, being thinly sourced and inconclusive, it also raises more questions than answers. Hopefully MoJo (or someone else) will do some follow-up. If anyone has any information they might contact the MoJo reporter, James Ridgeway.

Contributor Spotlight: Angela Moe

Western Michigan University sociologist Angela Moe contributes a harrowing chapter to Razor Wire Women on women’s mental-health care in jail; the title, If I Wasn’t Suicidal, That’ll Drive You to It–a quote from one of her research subjects–tells the story. Much of her other work focuses on the ways women are victimized by patriarchal battering, law enforcement, the health-care complex, the corrections industry, and by the complex interplay between all three. This article, “Like a Prison!”, extends her critique by comparing the experiences of homeless shelter users to those of the imprisoned. (Having worked for a year at a major Midwestern homeless shelter, I certainly think this comparison deserves to be made!)

Her more recent work examines US cultural assumptions surrounding belly-dancing. (No one survives Michigan winters without an excellent indoor exercise routine of some kind.) Her forthcoming Beyond the Belly(Dance): The Transformative Effects of an Ancient Art will use ethnographic research “to attest to the multidimensional, interconnected and holistic benefits of this dance form.” More of the valuable eclecticism that characterizes RWW contributors.

Prison News Roundup

The conservative-majority Roberts Court has yet again blocked a lawsuit on behalf of Binyamin Mohamed and other Bush-era victims of extraordinary rendition. I am beginning to think these Supremes could have done a better job overseeing this country’s courts than the Supremes we’ve got.

Did you know New Zealand has a “faith-based” prison? Neither did I, and it sounds all kinds of problematic. It has restorative justice programs but, apparently, no “rehabilitative” programming, and now the New Zealand department of corrections has ordered it to add one. New Zealand has one of the highest prison-population-per-100,000 persons ratios in the developed world; half its prisoners belong to the country’s indigenous Maori population.

More on elderly prisoners, medical bills, and cost containment, this time from the Houston Chronicle.  

Michigan seeks to privatize prison food provision, a cost-containment measure that has led to lowered food quality and profiteering in other states.

Overreacting to the new availability of small recording devices, some states are imposing draconian prison terms on people who make audio- or video-recordings of police activity (including recordings of their own harrassment at police hands). One mechanic may face up to 75 years in prison for making a tape of a public hearing in which he was involved, after officials denied his request for a court reporter. (More on this issue from Reason Magazine. Warning: libertarian publication; serious ick factor.)

Speaking of draconian sentences, an environmental activist may get up to ten years for disrupting federal public-land auctions (he made bids he couldn’t afford to pay, hoping to save a few wild spaces from the oil companies).

Contributor Spotlight: Sisters of Unique Lyrics (SOUL)

I wanted to write another in my series of conributor notes; instead I was confronted with one more example of the way the correctional system uproots lives.

According to the book, The Sisters of Unique Lyrics are a poetry group (sponsored by PCAP) meeting weekly at Scott Correctional in Plymouth, Michigan. A quick Google search, however, showed that Scott Correctional is no more … soon after women at the prison won a massive class-action lawsuit for years of sexual harrassment at the hands of guards. (At the emotional verdict, jurors actually stood and read a formal apology, on behalf of Michiganders, to the women.) It’s hard to get more information on the members of Sisters of Unique Lyrics after that, but one of the first Google hits that turns up for “Scott Correctional Facility” is this sad message from a man posting on writeaprisoner.com:

“All the inmates were moved to Huron Valley. I haven’t heard from my love in over a week and a half. I just keep writing. I don’t know if they are delivering my letters to her. I send at least one or more letters, jpay, or postcards each day hoping at least they are given her mail.”

Broke my heart a little.

More information about these contributors or any writing they’d like to see posted would be very welcome.

Contributor Spotlight: Eleanor Novek

Eleanor Novek, who teaches journalism and public relations at Monmouth University in New Jersey, has done academic work on prison journalism for years (a list of her publications in just this area can be found here). But she doesn’t stop there. She also works with the Alternatives to Violence project and blogs for PCARE, the Prison Communication, Activism, Research and Education Collective. Moreover, one of the first things that pops up when she is Googled is a moving blog-tribute by one of her former graduate students and a fascinating paper on the ways everyday communication perpetuates segregation.

CAS profile of Ashley Lucas

Carolina Arts and Sciences, a publication for UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, has done a wonderful profile of Razor Wire Women co-editor Ashley Lucas, discussing the book in detail as well as her play Doin’ Time (excerpted in the book), as well as ten thousand other things that make Dr. Lucas so uniquely impressive.

RWW contributors should feel free to use this blog to let others know about any sympathetic press coverage of their work (whether or not it’s RWW/prison-related). Forward those stories to philipchristman [at] gmail [dot] com.

Edit: Most people reading the blog know this, but in response to a friend who questioned my “journalistic ethics,” I hasten to clarify that Dr. Lucas is also Mrs. Guy-who-posts-these-things.

The New Yorker on mitigation

Last week’s New Yorker had a long, absorbing piece by Jeffrey Toobin about the emergence of mitigation as a strategy for cutting down on the numbers of death penalty verdicts in Texas and other places. For advocates of prison reform, it’s an exciting but problematic strategy–exciting because Danalynn Recer, the woman profiled in the story, seems to have come up with techniques that will cause even Texas jurors to value a defendant’s life; problematic because most defendants who benefit from it are then given sentences of life without parole.

The article gives useful recent history on the development of US criminal law. Unfortunately it’s not available online, but the abstract here is pretty thorough, and people who follow these issues will want to track down the story in print.

Baha’i mistreatment in Iranian women’s prisons

A major human rights issue that is also of interest to those who study women’s prisons worldwide is the ongoing persecution of Iran’s Baha’i religious minority. (Our friend Mark Perry has written a play to contest this injustice.) The Kansas City Star has a brief item on this from Missouri Baha’is who are organizing to improve conditions for all women imprisoned in Iran, not only their co-religionists.