Pubdate: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 Source: Essence Magazine (US) Pubdate: September 2000 Website: http://www.essence.com/ Address: 1500 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 Contact: 2000 ESSENCE Communications, Inc Fax: 212 921 5173 Section: page 150 Author: Angela Y. Davis WOMEN IN PRISON (Angela Y. Davis is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) If, at the height of 1970's activism, we had learned of a prophecy that by the year 2000 there would be 2 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, we would have been incredulous. And if we had been told then that more than 1 million of these prisoners would be Black men, we would probably have considered that prophecy a grotesque racist joke. But this is our contemporary reality, according to statistics from The Sentencing Project. It should lead us to suspect that perhaps the lauded progress in "race relations" has been achieved, at least in part, through strategies of forced seclusion. In other words, the mass imprisonment of Black men should serve to contradict some of our prevailing assumptions of progress in the battle against racism. There is more and more cause for concern. In a landscape of rapidly decreasing zones of expansion for U.S. industry, punishment has become a profitable business one that yields enormous profits not only for the $40 billion private industry that operates penal institutions but also for companies that appear to be far removed from the business of punishment. The involvement of many corporations we depend on, from phone and computer companies to clothing manufacturers, means that though most of us inhabit what prisoners call the free world, we are not by virtue of our freedom innocent. Our lives are not unaffected by what some call the prisonindustrial complex. Though we are increasingly and shockingly aware of the effect of rising rates of incarceration for Black men, and by extension the indirect punishment of the women and children who love and care for them, how often do we think about the direct impact of this punishment industry on women themselves? More often than not, women -- who comprise approximately 6 percent of people in prisons and jails, according to The Sentencing Project remain beyond public understanding of the emergent prison -- industrial complex and its impact on our communities. We might realize that the vast numbers of Black men who have been moved into prison have reduced our electoral power by virtue of the denial of the right to vote to felons, and sometimes ex-felons, in many states. But do we really try to understand how a prison system with economic imperatives to expand affects the lives of Black women, who now have the country's fastest-rising incarceration rate? How often do we try to understand how their accelerating incarceration diminishes us all? Media reports keep us painfully aware that African-American women are the most visible targets of the recent campaign to dismantle welfare. The demonization of welfare mothers, however, was met with overwhelming silence, even from successful African-American women whose proximity was perhaps too great for them to imagine their sisters' fate. Many women who once relied on welfare payments as a minimal safety net are now in prison, or soon will be, for an expanding set of nonviolent charges. They are learning what it means to be human sacrifices when education, job creation and welfare receive short shrift and profitable technologies of imprisonment garner more and more support. Although Black women are eight times (and Latinas four times) as likely to go to prison as White women, imprisoned women of color are not seen as victims of racist and sexist discrimination. Isn't it time for us to learn how to recognize the structures of racism and sexism that are sometimes even more injurious than overt acts of discrimination on the job, at school or in interpersonal relations? Some of us may feel relatively secure and successful in our jobs, our educational careers and our lives, but others, unable to find the jobs and education promised by the advocates of reduced welfare, will end up in prison for offenses that are often most harmful to ourselves. Women in prison are among the most wronged victims of the so-called war on drugs, which, as Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) continues to insist, is, in effect, a surreptitious war on Black and Latino communities. The sentencing practices known as mandatory minimums have turned imprisonment into the main strategy for managing people who turn to drugs and make other unproductive choices when trying to cope with the difficulties they confront in their lives. The defendants -- most are Black or Latino -- facing convictions for possession of five grams of crack cocaine receive a five-year mandatory federal sentence with no possibility of parole. But possession of powder cocaine carries the same mandatory sentence only if the defendants (most are White) have been convicted of possessing at least 500 grams. Contrary to most available sources -- including those inside prisons and jails -- it is not just a series of bad choices that land Black women in prison but a deadly combination of reduced possibilities and extensive police targeting or public monitoring. Still, the impact of poor choices cannot be ignored. As the story of Dorothy Gaines reveals, many women spend their most important years in prison only because they have intimate relationships with men who are drug traffickers. Kemba Smith, the sister who became involved with a drug dealer as a student at Hampton University, was sentenced at age 24 to 24 years in federal prison. Such women, unable to bargain with prosecutors because they can offer no information, are invisible victims at the dangerous intersection of racism and sexism. Will these women be abandoned, forgotten and treated as if imprisonment is an inevitable consequence of individual irresponsibility? Dangerous societal patterns form the context of individual poor choices. Many Black men experience continuity in how they are treated in school, where they are disciplined as potential criminals; in the streets, where they're subjected to police profiling; and in prison, where they're warehoused and deprived of virtually all rights. For women, the continuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, because they confront the same forms of violence in prison they confronted in their homes and intimate relationships. The criminalization of Black women includes persisting images of our perceived hypersexualilty, which serve to justify sexual assaults against us in and out of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a recent Nightline series taped on location at California's Valley State Prison for Women (November 1999). Many of the incarcerated women interviewed by Ted Koppel complained of receiving frequent and unnecessary pelvic exams, even during doctor visits for such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these exams, the prison's chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for "male contact," and they therefore welcomed the superfluous gynecological exams. This officer was eventually removed from his position because of these comments, but his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse. Will we stand by and watch it happen? In the era of a rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex -- where prison building is often the one hope for a community struggling against downsizing and reorganizations and struggling for jobs and tax dollars -- more and more Black women are severed from their communities and considered deserving targets of contempt and abuse. Those of us who have fortunately -- and sometimes barely -- escaped that fate should not by our inaction affirm the oblivion to which our sisters have been relegated. Despite our relative comfort, we're not that far removed historically from the circumstances that led them to prison. That is precisely why when they ask if we will be their allies, we should say yes. Activist Angela Y. Davis is a professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is working on a book about the prison-industrial complex. - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase