Shackling the birthing, dead and dying: All in a day’s work

November 11, 2013 by 10 Comments
Juana Villegas

Juana Villegas

Which is worse, the use of chains and shackles to confine the most vulnerable in times of crisis or the fact that the usage has become routine? Ask pregnant women prisoners across the United States. Ask terminally ill, hospitalized, disabled and even dead prisoners in the United Kingdom.

Last month the Nevada Prison Board voted to stop shackling and otherwise `restraining’ women prisoners in labor, in delivery, and in post-delivery recuperation. This decision resulted from a lawsuit brought by Valorie Nabors, with the ACLU. Nabors had been an inmate at the Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center. She went into labor and was placed in leg shackles in the ambulance. Ten minutes after giving birth to a daughter, Nabors was again placed in shackles. Valorie Nabors and her attorneys argued, apparently convincingly, that she suffered injury when doing doctor prescribed rehabilitative exercises while shackled.

Juana Villegas has lived a related story. In 2008, nine months pregnant, Mexican, undocumented, Villegas was picked up in a traffic stop in suburban Nashville. Under `an arrangement’ between Davidson County and Federal authorities, Villegas was detained for six days. Villegas went into labor, was taken to the hospital, where she was chained to a bed, during labor and during recovery. She has since sued for damages and recently won, not only financial compensation but also, possibly, a resident visa.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, prisoners literally at death’s door, prisoners living with paralyzing and debilitating disabilities, are shackled, not only when taken to hospital but also during their stay. Michael Tyrrell, dying from cancer and too weak to move; Kyal Gaffney, diagnosed with leukemia, unconscious due to a brain hemorrhage; Daniel Roque Hall, 30, in intensive care, wasting away, and barely able to use arms or legs: these are typical of the `security risks’ that required not only chains and shackles but three prison guards … each.

And then there’s `Lucy’. In 2007, Lucy was transported to hospital for a recurring and serious gynecological problem. Although Lucy had no history of violence and had actually just returned from a daylong release on license, she was handcuffed to a male and a female officer en route to the hospital and while at the hospital. During the interview with the doctor, Lucy was handcuffed to both officers. When the doctor said he would be doing an internal examination, the male prison guard said he would have to remain in the examination room. At last, the doctor convinced the male officer to handcuff Lucy to the examining table and wait outside. Throughout the entire internal examination, the female officer remained handcuffed to Lucy.

That the global prison has produced a boom niche market in chains and shackles is horrible enough. Worse is that the shackling has become routine. Prison guards routinely shackle women in childbirth and women and men on deathbeds, and then go home to their families and communities. Medical professionals routinely tend to shackled women in childbirth and shackled women and men on their deathbeds, and then go home to their families and communities. It’s all in a day’s work.

 

(Photo Credit: The New York Times / Mark Humphrey / Associated Press)

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Women bear the cost of federal prison overcrowding

November 6, 2013 by 12 Comments

“The Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Danbury houses low security female offenders and also has an adjacent satellite camp that houses minimum security female offenders…Mission Change: After nearly 20 years of housing a female inmate population, the Federal Correctional Institution is being converted back to a low security male facility.” Welcome to the Danbury Correctional Institution. Welcome to America.

This week it has been discovered that the United States Federal Prison system is dangerously overcrowded. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, “There’s been a tendency in the past to mete out sentences that frankly are excessive.” The Urban Institute released a terrific report, Stemming the Tide: Strategies to Reduce the Growth and Cut the Cost of the Federal Prison System, that argues forcefully for alternative sentencing, more judicial discretion in sentencing, shorter sentencing, and, generally, common and human sense, which is to say uncommon sense. Today, Charles E. Samuels, Jr., Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, asked the United States Congress for help: “We are facing significant challenges that are ultimately putting our staff at risk, putting prisoners at risk, and the community at risk.” What exactly is “the community”?

According to Samuels, “Most federal inmates (50 percent) are serving sentences for drug trafficking offenses.” The so-called War on Drugs has ballooned the Federal Prison population from around 25,000 in 1980 to 219,000 in 2012, which puts the United States in first place in the Amazing (Global Incarceration) Race. Despite some increase in federal prison spaces, the current overcrowding results, predictably, in impossible living situations, violence, and generally something between bedlam and mayhem. Plus, the exponentially growing prison population eats up more and more of the Federal budget. It’s a perfect vicious circle.

Missing from the week’s `discoveries’ of the dangers and risks and costs of prison overcrowding are women. So, here’s the story of the Danbury Correctional Institution.

In order to `meet the needs’ of prison overcrowding, the Bureau of Prisons decided to take all of the women in Danbury and ship them off to Alabama. The women are all “minimum and low-security offenders”. No matter. For the Bureau, it made sense to ship these women, and ship is the word, far from their families, communities, and support networks, to make room for the `real prisoners’. Men.

It took two months of heavy lifting by four U.S. Senators – Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) – and others to finally persuade the Bureau of Prisons to rethink the plan. Apart from the general social justice issue, Gillibrand and Leahy understood that closing Danbury as a women’s facility would have “nearly eliminated federal prison beds for women in the Northeastern United States”. It’s not a local Danbury issue or a Connecticut issue. Closing Danbury would have affected women, women’s families, women’s communities, across the entire northeastern United States. As Senator Murphy noted, “Being sentenced to federal prison is punishment enough. These women shouldn’t be punished again by being removed from their families.”

85 percent of the women in Danbury are not there because of violent or weapons-related `offenses’. 57 percent are drug offenders. They are low to minimum-security prisoners. Why punish them, specifically, doubly and so cruelly in this way? Because, for the State, women prisoners don’t count. The State traffics in women prisoners’ bodies. The value of those women’s bodies is their vulnerability, their collective and individual capacity to be treated like another sack of potatoes. Need more space? Take the women and ship them off. What difference does it or will it make?

 

(Infographic Credit: Urban Institute)

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If faut arrêter d’enchainer les femmes!

November 6, 2013 by 3 Comments

Aux Etats Unis, dans le Wisconsin, en juin 2013, Alicia Beltran enceinte de 14 semaines ne pensait pas en se rendant à son rendez vous de suivi de grossesse que son cas servirait à lancer une action de justice pour enfin remettre en cause les lois fœticides et autres lois qui permettent d’envoyer en prison des femmes enceintes accusées de mettre en danger la vie du fœtus qu’elles portent.

Alicia Bretan s’étant sevrée d’une accoutumance médicamenteuse l’année passée, décide d’en parler à son docteur et son assistant pour plus de sureté. Au lieu de répondre à ses questions et inquiétudes, le cabinet de son docteur a appelé la police en vertu de ces lois qui donnent au fœtus le statut d’une personne, trahissant ainsi le secret médical et la confiance qui devrait être à la base de la relation patient – praticien.

Deux jours plus tard la police est venue l’arrêter à son domicile et a placé chaines et menottes sur poignets et chevilles. Elle fut ensuite conduite ainsi enchaînée au tribunal où une procédure expéditive l’attendait. Le fœtus était représenté par un avocat, mais Alicia Bretan n’avait droit à aucune assistance légale ou médicale. Le juge ordonna qu’elle suive un traitement de désintoxication, bien qu’aucune trace de drogue n’ait été trouvée dans les analyses réalisées après, bien qu’elle ait eu soin de veiller sur sa grossesse, bien qu’elle avait fait confiance à son docteur et à la société pour la respecter. A la suite de ce jugement les problèmes se sont accumulés pour Bretan et elle a finalement perdu son emploi, puisqu’il n’y a pas de garantie d’emploi pour les femmes enceintes aux Etats Unis. De plus, toute cette action en justice a sans aucun doute eu des effets néfastes sur sa santé et la santé du fœtus ainsi que sur son statut social et celui de sa famille présent et à venir.

Le Wisconsin comme le Maryland font partie des 38 états qui ont fait passer ces lois fœticides ; le Wisconsin, le Minnesota et le Dakota du sud se sont aussi dotés des lois dites “cocaïne mom“ qui expédient encore plus vite en prison les femmes enceintes qui auraient utilisé de la drogue. Enfin après toutes ces années ce cas a ouvert la voie à la première action en justice au niveau fédéral soutenue par deux ONG qui défendent les droits reproductifs des femmes  “The National Advocates For Pregnant Women et The Reproductive Justice Clinic ainsi que l’avocat de la plaignante Linda S. Vanden Heuvel. Il faut savoir que durant la dernière décennie le risque de se retrouver derrière les barreaux pour les femmes n’a fait qu’augmenter et en particulier pour les femmes enceintes.

Cette action en justice est la première du genre contre ces lois qui menacent les femmes et  les rendent légalement inferieures au fœtus qu’elles portent, tout particulièrement lorsque celles-ci sont des femmes de couleur, pauvres, bref socialement vulnérables.

L’an passé, une loi interdisant l’utilisation de chaines et autres moyens de contrôle sur les détenues enceintes a été proposée au vote durant la session de travail du parlement du Maryland. Etonnement cette loi a été rejetée.

Ces pratiques qui consistent à enchainer les femmes enceintes servent deux buts, d’abord elles rendent les femmes inferieures, les deshumanisant, et ensuite elles “déféminisent“ la société. L’année dernière le Maryland a abrogé la peine de mort, il serait temps pour cet état de joindre les 18 autres états qui interdisent cette pratique.

Espérons que cette affaire créera un précédent, Quoiqu’il en soit nous ne devrions pas oublier que l’argument pour ces lois fœticides était d’apporter une protection supplémentaire aux femmes enceintes ; en réalité en faisant du fœtus une personne elles avaient pour but de réduire et peut être même d’éliminer le droit à l’avortement  et le droit des femmes à contrôler leur corps. Les attaques constantes contre le corps de la femme sont une insulte au désir d’une société qui se voudrait plus juste et plus équilibrée.

Nous devons soutenir tous les efforts pour désenchaîner les femmes aux Etats Unis et ailleurs.

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Stop sending children to prison!

November 1, 2013 by 14 Comments

 

In 2003, children started disappearing in Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania. By 2009, over 5000 had vanished, or more precisely had been disappeared. They were sold into juvenile prison system in what some call a kids-for-cash scam. In 2011, Judges Mark Ciaverella and Michael Conahan pled guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud.

Over a period of five or six years, two private juvenile prisons, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care, paid the judges to send over 5000 children to jail. Many were first time offenders. Some, like Edward Kenzakoski, committed suicide. Others, like Jamie Quinn, walked away. But all suffered harm. In 2009, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court voided almost all the juvenile convictions from 2003 on.

Recently, the two private detention companies settled a kids-for-cash civil suit, agreeing to pay $2.5 million in compensation. It’s estimated that the companies had paid the two judges $2.6 million, and so there’s a kind of tragic elegance to the number, except that there is nothing elegant in this story.

In 2011, the kids-for-cash story seemed like a horror, a nightmare. Now we know it’s the tip of a global iceberg. Across the United States, and beyond, nation-States have decided that the best place for children is prison. Often, that prison is one for adults.

For example, the City of New York Board of Corrections just released a report, entitled “Three Adolescents with Mental Illness in Punitive Segregation at Rikers Island.” The report follows three boys, Jimmy, Matthew and Carlos: “This report describes the life and jail experience of three mentally ill adolescents who were each sentenced to more than 200 days in punitive segregation at Rikers Island. Mentally ill adolescents in punitive segregation merit special attention because they are the most vulnerable prisoners in custody. New York State is one of only two states in the country where all 16‐ and 17‐ year‐olds are under the jurisdiction of the adult criminal justice system regardless of the offense. In New York City jails, all 16‐, 17‐, and 18‐year‐olds are deemed “adolescents” and are housed separately from adults. Adolescents make up approximately 5% of the average daily population of prisoners at Rikers Island. A recent one‐day snapshot of the jail population showed that almost 27% of the 586 adolescents at Rikers Island were in punitive segregation, and roughly 71% of those in punitive segregation were diagnosed as mentally ill.”

What was their crime? They were children living with mental illnesses. What was their treatment? 200 days in `the box’.

In Texas this week, reports emerged of staff violence against inmates in the Phoenix Program, which was designed to reduce the violence in juvenile facilities. The reports suggest that the violence is both widespread and extreme. How does the State respond? A few staff members are fired, a few `disciplined’, and then back to business as usual.

The private juvenile prison industry and the public juvenile prison industry expand, arm in arm in arm in arm. The State absolves itself of oversight, and children are maimed and broken, in so many ways. Across the country, the rate of girls being incarcerated rises precipitously, and little or nothing is done to attend to the particularities of girls behind bars.

This situation is spreading, and not only across the United States. In certain neighborhoods and communities, particularly communities of color, in the United Kingdom, a night, or more, in detention is a default response to pretty much any whiff of `a problem.’ According to a recent report: “Fifteen per cent of the total number of overnight detentions in 2010 and 2011 were of girls. This is a surprisingly high percentage as girls generally represent less than 5 per cent of criminal sentences.”

Stop sending children to prison. Stop sending children to `overnight detention.’ Stop sending children into solitary confinement. Stop the torture of children.

 

(Image Credit: Prison Culture)

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Stop shackling pregnant women!

October 30, 2013 by 17 Comments

Alicia Beltran

In Wisconsin, Alicia Beltran, 14 weeks pregnant, went for a prenatal check up to make sure that everything was going to be well. She explained to the PA in her doctor’s office her concerns. One was a pill addiction that she had actually ended a year earlier. Instead of addressing her concerns, her doctor’s office betrayed her trust and the celebrated code of confidentiality between patients and doctors, supposedly the basis of medical practice. They called the police. Two days later, the police came to Beltran’s home and shackled her. She was rushed to court handcuffed and shackled, where she was denied access to a counsel but where a lawyer was already assigned to represent her fetus. Then, she was ordered into a drug treatment program although there was no trace of drug in her body, although she was taking care of herself, although she had trusted her doctor and society to respect her as a person. For Beltran, the consequences of this abusive treatment are dire. They include losing her job. In fact, the state has endangered her health, the health of her fetus, her social status and the well being of her family, current and future.

Wisconsin is one of 38 states, including Maryland, that has passed so-called feticide laws. Three states – Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota – have passed “cocaine mom” laws, and that’s what happened to Alicia Beltran. Finally, the first federal lawsuit to challenge these laws has been filed by The National Advocates For Pregnant Women, the Reproductive Justice Clinic of New York University School of Law, and Linda S. Vanden Heuvel, Alicia Beltran’s lawyer. This threat to pregnant women has been on the rise as more women are thrown behind bars.

The lawsuit is the first to challenge these laws that are threatening women for being less than the fetus they carry, especially when they are women of color and/or poor, in brief socially vulnerable.

Last year, a bill was introduced in committee in the Maryland legislature. If passed, the bill would have put into law a ban on shackling pregnant inmates. Surprisingly, or not, the bill was defeated.

These practices of shackling pregnant women serve two purposes. They render women as less than human and they “de-womanize” society. Last year, Maryland repealed the death penalty. It is time for Maryland, and all states, to show real commitment to women’s rights and women’s equality.

Hopefully, Alicia Beltran’s case will set a precedent. Whatever comes out of the suit, we should not forget that feticide laws were presented to protect pregnant women. In reality, by creating the fetus as a full person separated from the woman’s body, feticide laws have one purpose:  to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, Roe v Wade and its guarantees of women’s right to decide for themselves. External control of a woman’s body is an assault on the dream and the possibilities of a society with more equality, better distribution of wealth, and richer harmony. We need to support all and any efforts to “de-shackle” women.

 

(Photo Credit: Feministing / The New York Times)

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This State of Killing and Abandonment

October 4, 2013 by 17 Comments

Although I wrote this piece about three months ago, I would like to dedicate it to the memory of Miriam Carey, an unarmed, possibly depressed, Black woman who was killed by police in Washington, DC on October 3, 2013.  Investigators called her life “typical.”  As we mourn Miriam, let us organize to overcome the violence of ‘typical’ State-sponsored death.

The forty-eight hours of June 25 to June 26, 2013, were filled with killing and abandonment.

On the evening of June 26, Texas performed its 500th inmate execution since reinstating capital punishment in 1976.  Texas executed Kimberly McCarthy, a Black woman convicted of murdering her white neighbor, Dorothy Booth.  Though a judge originally delayed the execution due to evidence of racism in the court proceedings, eventually the judicial process played out, and now McCarthy is dead.  After McCarthy’s execution, Booth’s son was quoted as saying, “We’re just thinking about the justice that was promised to us by the state of Texas.”

What does it mean when the State promises justice?  It means that an exchange must take place.  The State will bestow justice onto a wronged person, and in exchange, the State wants blood.  The State promises justice, and justice comes in the form of the lifeless body of a Black woman.  Justice comes in the form of State violence against women of color.

Perhaps this view of how justice plays out in the United States—as an exchange that ends in State violence—sounds melodramatic.  But in the United States, women, especially women of color, make up the fastest-growing segment of the population being incarcerated.  Incarceration comes with violence.  It can be the violence of capital punishment, or just the daily violence of enduring imprisonment: solitary confinement, assault, lack of adequate health care, and unpaid or low-paid work, among other abuses.  Regardless of the specific violence, the American justice system is carceral, the violence is ordinary, and someone always has to pay, to do the work of payment.

Just a day before the State killed Kimberly McCarthy, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.   This invalidation means that certain state governments (including Texas) that have histories of passing discriminatory voting rules would not be subject to federal government preclearance for any further changes to those rules.  What does this mean at the everyday level?  People will lose their right to vote—and have already lost their right to vote—simply for being themselves due to the enactment of voter ID laws.  People of color, especially women of color, youth, the elderly, and transgender people, will pay the highest price, literally.  To get a new ID to vote because you do not already have one or because you identify as a different gender than previously  means paying hundreds of dollars for both the identification card and transportation.  If you cannot afford to pay this poll tax, you cannot vote.

What is the logic behind this invalidation?  First, the State constructs a crisis: if too many people of color vote, there must be voter fraud.  Never mind that voter fraud rarely occurs in the United States.  Then, the State ‘solves’ the crisis: it repeals laws that protect voting rights and enacts new discriminatory laws.  Meanwhile, the people most affected, like Black women, must labor to protect their rights where the State has abandoned them.  They must do the work of buying new ID’s, of navigating new institutional barriers, and work to organize against a racist and sexist system.  And the State says justice has been served.

In forty-eight hours, people in the United States saw the State both kill and abandon.  Both processes target marginalized populations that the political-economic system produces as worthless.  We are left with an increasingly violent State, bent on extracting as much value from marginalized people as possible, and distributing that value to those who already possess so much.  We end up with more violence and work for the marginalized and less work for the already rich and powerful.  Then the State declares that we are a nation with justice for all.

So when some question why the United States’ political system does not ‘work’ for so many people, the answer seems painfully obvious: it is violent.  This violence lies in the fast and slow deaths of those the State deems valueless.  It lies with a conception of justice where someone always has to pay with their blood or time.  It lies in an economic system where people work harder and harder for a future of less and less.

Organizing against violence and for a political system that works for all requires more than minor tweaking of State policy.  We all must be brave enough to organize, do research, make alliances, and combat the systemic violence around us, as well as do the work to care about each other in the process.  Against killing and abandonment, organized care must triumph.

 

(Photo Credit: David J. Phillip / AP)

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Women organize the choir to end mass incarceration … and beyond

September 30, 2013 by 6 Comments

Michelle Alexander presented her thoughts on race, rights, and mass incarceration in the United States at a recent talk in Washington, DC.  A law professor and civil rights lawyer, Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  In this book, Alexander examines how State political-economic policy—specifically the War on Drugs—has created a regime of caging and profiling Black and Brown men and led to a new racial caste system, a New Jim Crow.

At her talk in DC, Alexander said that she wanted her book to be not just a tool for educating more people on mass incarceration.  She remarked that it should be a starting point for further organizing and activism.  Alexander stated, “Nothing short of a major social movement, a human rights movement, has any hope of ending mass incarceration.”

However, in conversations about mass incarceration, including in Alexander’s book, women are left out of the narrative.  Women, especially women of color, have faced the fastest-growing rate of incarceration in the world.  Though in the United States women’s imprisonment has slowed a bit, this fact remains true globally.

When asked a question about how the lack of women in her book and talk adds or subtracts from movement building, Alexander affirmed the importance of women’s experiences and voices in conversations about ending mass incarceration.  She highlighted that “women often pay a higher price than men do” in the prison system, such as the burden of being separated from their children.  Alexander added that because men are the vast majority of targets of mass incarceration, women and other people’s experiences (such as immigrants, gays, and lesbians) are often marginalized, though it is extremely important to include them in movement-building conversations.

Alexander is correct, but her answer is incomplete, for two reasons.  First, the State positions women’s incarceration in the neoliberal economy as both a pre-condition and most extreme condition of economic exploitation. This means that women get jailed the fastest, women experience extra violence in prison, and, as Alexander also noted, women must do the work of surviving and fighting back in criminalized communities.  It means that women’s migration provides enough bodies to fill the new warehouses of immigrant detention centers, and that we must connect the reasons for women’s migrations—namely economic interventions of the IMF/World Bank, militarism by the United States, and the worldwide crusade to criminalize sex work—to the rise of mass incarceration, as well.  Women, especially women of color, have always been primary, not secondary, targets of the global prison system, just as women have always been primary, and not secondary, targets of economic exploitation.

The second reason is that movement building cannot relegate women’s experiences to just ‘being included.’  Women of color, immigrants, LGBTIQ people, and all others marginalized under neoliberalism must be (and already are) leading the conversations from the beginning.  By ensuring our anti-incarceration conversations follow their lead, we can best do as Alexander suggested in her talk: not just preach to, but organize the choir.

 

(Image Credit: UprisingRadio.org)

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The political economies of mental illness, solitary confinement, and women’s labor

August 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

Sonya Hall, Amir Hall’s aunt.

Across the United States, people living with mental illness are sent to prisons, rather than hospitals, clinics or other health programs. In the last three decades, prisons and jails have become the single largest institutional residence for those living with mental illnesses. While this is more or less public knowledge, the prison and jail systems have steadfastly refused to address the new tsunami. Funding for mental health providers has not increased. If anything, it’s been sliced and diced. Guards and other staff have not received additional training to address the `new populations.’

And so …

And so, what happens is exactly what you expect would happen. Prisoners `manifest symptoms’ and are placed in solitary confinement, often for prolonged periods of time. Acting out is seen as acting up, and that means the hole. And for prisoners living with mental illnesses, that can, and often does, mean death.

In this theater of atrocity, women take a number of specific hits. Here’s one.

Meet Sonya Hall, Shaleah Hall, and Donna Currao.

Donna Currao is the wife of Tommy Currao. Tommy Currao is one of the `lucky ones’. Currao attempted suicide at least ten times in ten months in solitary confinement. He tried to overdose, to hang himself, to slash himself, using the metal inside of his hearing aid. For the last attempt, with the hearing aid innards, Currao was charged $500 for `destruction of state property.’ In New York, where Currao is imprisoned, irony is not dead.

Donna Currao pushed and pulled and pushed some more. She saw what was happening to her husband in solitary. She knew how to read the words and, even more, the silences, and she forced the State to do something as her husband lost both weight and words.

A few months ago, Donna Currao’s insistent organizing finally forced the State to send her husband to a psychologist, who diagnosed the prisoner as in serious need of help. He was moved from the hole to health treatment and now, a mere months later, is “1,000 times better.”

Donna Currao now wonders, “Why do we have to fight so hard to get them evaluated?”

Sonya Hall and Shaleah Hall also ask why. Sonya Hall is Amir Hall’s aunt. Shaleah Hall is Amir Hall’s sister. Both are now part of the United States’ version of Mothers of the Disappeared.

Amir Hall’s story is tragically short. He lived with severe mental illness. He would have outbursts. One outburst resulted in prison, for parole violation. He had outbursts in prison. That led, finally, to ten months in solitary. He never returned. As Shaleah Hall noted, watching a video of his `transfer’, “There was somebody who looked defeated, like the life was beat out of him. I don’t know who that person was. The person in that video was not my brother.”

Why? Why, when doctors and pretty much everyone else had diagnosed and recognized Amir Hall as someone living with severe mental illness was the young Black man `diagnosed’ by prison staff as not serious? Why? Why must Shaleah Hall and Sonya Hall now work so hard, so intensely, so long to get something that will not be justice and will not be healing but will be something? Why? Why must Donna Carao fight so hard to get something so obvious?

The populations targeted for incarceration are also targeted for intensive and extensive labor, none of which counts as labor. That population, the laboring non-laboring ones, is made up overwhelmingly of women. Who benefits from women’s non-laboring labor in the prison industrial factory system that shoves those living with mental illnesses into death holes?

 

(Photo Credit: Shannon DeCelle / ProPublica)

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Prison is bad for pregnant women and other living things

June 11, 2013 by 2 Comments

 

A report entitled Expecting Change: the case for ending the immigration detention of pregnant women was released today. It describes the nightmare that is Yarl’s Wood. The report bristles in its portrait of a system built of violence, planned inefficiencies and incompetence, and general disregard for women. You should read this report.

At the same time, a question haunts the report. So much of it is commonsensical that one feels compelled to wonder about the groundwork and horizons of social justice research. Here’s an example: “Asylum seeking women have poorer maternity outcomes than the general population. Many women in the sample were victims of rape, torture and trafficking.” The vast majority of women asylum seekers are fleeing sexual and other forms of violence, and so it comes as no surprise that they have poorer maternity outcomes than the general population. They also have poorer health outcomes generally, including mental and emotional health. They are asylum seekers.

On the one hand, we could discuss `the system’. We could talk about the planning that goes into systematically “failing to recognize” and “failing to appreciate” the particularities of women prisoners’ lives and situations. We could talk about the political economy of that planned failure, about who benefits and howbut we’ve done that already.

Instead, let’s imagine. Imagine what we could be researching and developing if we weren’t constantly working to undo over three decades of intensive, systematic and, for a very few, profitable mass incarceration.

Here’s where we are today. We have to conduct a multi-year study to prove that pregnant women asylum seekers shouldn’t be in prison.

We have to conduct other studies to prove that prison is an inappropriate place for children seeking asylum. We have to conduct another series of studies to suggest that maybe prison isn’t the best place for children, and that adult prison might be an even worse option. We need another multi-year study to `prove’ that sexual violence against children in juvenile prisons is epidemic. We need that same study to `demonstrate’ that the majority of acts of violence against those children, our children, were perpetrated by adult staff members.

We need another study to prove that the reason that self-harm and hunger strikes are so common, so everyday, in immigrant prisons is that the conditions are inhuman and dire. Prisoners have given up hope as they refuse to give up hope. We need many studies to demonstrate adequately that LGBT immigrants suffer inordinately in immigration prisons, and we need many more studies to demonstrate that the same is true for immigrants who live with disabilities. And then of course we’ll need more studies to prove that immigrant prisoners living with HIV have a tough time behind bars. We’ll need studies to prove that the prisons for immigrants and migrants and asylum seekers are extraordinarily cruel, and then we’ll need other studies to prove that the cruelty of those prisons is actually quite normal, and quite like the cruelty of all the other prisons.

We’ll need studies to prove that immigration prisons embody the architecture of xenophobia, and we’ll need other studies to prove that the asylum system is “flawed”. We’ll need other studies to understand that the xenophobia and the flaws are gendered. And then we’ll need meta-studies that will analyze the curious phenomenon of the complete lack of improvement. These studies will note, with compassion, that after decades of detailed research, the prisons are still hell.

I am grateful for the work scholars have performed. It’s often impossible work, and yet individuals and groups, such as those at Medical Justice who produced today’s study, do that work, and do it with grace. At the same time, imagine. Imagine what we could be researching and learning if we weren’t still drowning in our own Hundred Years’ War of Mass Incarceration. Imagine.

 

(Image Credit: Medical Justice)

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Laura S. didn’t have to die

June 8, 2013 by 8 Comments

This is the story of Laura S.

Laura was born in Mexico in 1986. She became involved with a boy, Sergio. Early on Sergio became violent. And Laura stayed with him. At the age of fourteen Laura S. gave birth to their first son, in 2001. She became a resident of Hidalgo County, Texas. She gave birth to two other sons by Sergio, in 2007 and 2005, respectively.

Sergio became increasingly violent and abusive. In March 2003, Laura obtained protection from the local police and courts. Sergio kept harassing Laura. In 2008, she obtained an order of emergency protection. Furious, Sergio returned to Mexico.

On June 8, 2009, Laura S. went out with a cousin and two friends. They were stopped near Pharr, Texas, by a local police officer for a minor alleged driving infraction. The officer then demanded their immigration papers. Only the cousin could produce papers.

“Laura S. began to weep, begging the officer to let her go.”

She explained about Sergio, about the threat to her life. She explained about the protective orders. She explained that her life would be finished, and violently so, if she were returned to Mexico. She talked about her three small children, one of whom was about to have surgery.

The police officer turned the three over to ICE. ICE took the three to Harlingen U.S processing center.

“On the way to Harlingen, Laura S. continued to weep and beg to be released.” More agents came in. Laura explained everything, again, to the federal agents. Laura wept and explained, explained and wept, begged and explained, explained and begged. No one listened.

Laura wept and trembled as she spoke with the agents. No one asked her any questions. No one tried to verify or evaluate her risk of harm. No one explained any of her legal rights to her. If Laura had had a hearing, even in Texas, there’s a good chance she would have been able to stay in the country.

Given the dangers Laura faced in Mexico, a hearing should have been “mandatory and non-discretionary”. Laura never saw Judge or lawyer. Instead, the federal agents decided on their own to ship Laura S to Mexico.

Although the agents intimidated and coerced Laura, she never agreed to go. She continued to beg and explain, to explain and weep, all the way to the Hidalgo/Reynosa international bridge. In the early morning hours of June 9, 2009, a mere few hours after having been stopped, Laura S. was forced to cross the bridge into Mexico.

Within a few days, Sergio found Laura, and slowly tortured and then brutally killed her. On June 14, less than a week after the traffic stop, Laura’s body was found in a burning car. Her mother went to Mexico and testified against Sergio, who was imprisoned. He later escaped.

Now Laura’s mother and her three young children are suing ICE and the Border Police.

Laura S. was forced to cross the bridge into Mexico. What authorizes that force? What is the the force that `gives’ a woman protection only to steal it at the moment its needed? What is the force that refuses to listen to or hear a woman begging for life? What is the force that refuses to recognize its own “mandatory and non-discretionary” rules?

That force is the regime of brothers, the fratriarchy, which underwrites national democratic sovereignty. One law protected Laura, but those federal agents understood that there is a more powerful law. There is the law of force that makes brothers of police agents on one side of a border and a torturer on the other. And the shuttle that binds them is always a woman.

And so Laura S, weeping and begging and explaining and trembling, was forced to cross the bridge. Her mother’s lawyer says, “Laura didn’t have to die.” Tell that to the State.

(Photo Credit: Proceso)

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