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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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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Léonarda Dibrani: Not French enough?

October 18, 2013 by 15 Comments

Léonarda Dibrani

A couple weeks ago, Léonarda Dibrani, a fifteen-year-old girl, was with her class on a field trip. Léonarda lived with her Kosovar Roma family in eastern France, in Levier. The Dibranis had applied for asylum years earlier. In the meantime, Léonarda went to school, grew up, made friends, and integrated herself into the community. Basically, Léonarda became French.

But not French enough. While on the field trip, police stopped the school bus, asked the fifteen-year-old to get down, and then took her away. With her family, she was immediately deported to Kosovo, a place she doesn’t know, a place whose languages she doesn’t speak.

And so now, Léonarda sits in Mitrovica, in Kosovo, gives interviews and pushes to return to Levier, to France, to her school, to her friends, to her community.

Meanwhile, as the adults dither about whether Léonarda was taken `properly’, because apparently there are strict rules for State abductions of minors; about whether the Interior Minister is still `of the Left’; about whether the Left is still … the Left, the high school students have taken to the streets in protest.

Across France yesterday, thousands of high school students marched, shouted, demonstrated, closed schools and boulevards. Their message? “Documented or undocumented, they are like us. They are students!” “They” are Léonarda and Khatchik Kachatryan, a 19-year-old Paris student who, on Saturday, was deported to Armenia.

High school students said clearly, “These deportations touch people just like us.” They argued that education is a universal human right, not merely a civil right bestowed by any particular nation-State. They look at Léonarda and Khatchik and, rightly, see themselves.

The high school students of France are arguing, and demonstrating, for the sake of humanity. As the story develops, more details will emerge that will serve to complicate and obfuscate the simple truth of the students’ message: We are all humans, and no human being is illegal.

Like so many other children, Léonarda Dibrani was abducted by the State. No list of rules followed will alter that. Let’s hope the State hears and listens to its schoolchildren and returns Léonarda, Khatchik, and so many other children to France, to their homes and to their friends … now.

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The Right to Know is the Right to Live … in a democracy

October 7, 2013 by 13 Comments

 


In the late 1980s, three activists – Aruna Roy, Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey – moved to a village in Rajasthan, in the northwest of India, and set out to live by Gandhi’s precepts. The plan was simple, ie to live simply. Out of that simple plan emerged, first, the “people’s organization” Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, “Movement for Workers’ and Peasants’ Power”, or MKSS. MKSS has been at the forefront of India’s Right to Information, Right to Work, and Right to Food movements, and they’ve had a stunning record of accomplishments, based broadly and deeply in the works and days of poor rural women.

What Roy, Singh and Dey found in Rajasthan is common enough. An agricultural zone, mostly single crop, relied on rain for survival. When the rains didn’t come, as happened often, the men went off to find work and the women stayed behind. The men sent money, but it was seldom enough and irregular. So, the women had to find work and wages where there was none.

And so the women of Rajasthan organized, with and across the MKSS, and with Aruna Roy pulling, pushing, leading, following, listening, talking, organizing. After a long and mighty struggle, they won. In 2005 the Indian government enacted the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or NREGA. NREGA assures rural workers 100 days of paid employment, at minimum wage, in every fiscal year.

It was a major victory, especially for rural women. The only problem was wage theft and general corruption on the part of employers, both private and State. Again, what happened in Rajasthan is a common enough story. The women rejected and rewrote the master narrative.

They understood that the Right to Know is the Right to Live. They understood that part of their suffering and super-exploitation came from the fog at the contracts’ end. And so, under the banner of MKSS and with the leadership of Aruna Roy, they pushed. They rejected their `destiny’ of ignorance and submission, and demanded to see village records. And, again, they won. They won the right to know and the right to live.

Today, across Rajasthan, the information is in plain sight … literally. Across hundreds of thousands of walls, village governments are required to paint all of their budgetary decisions and contractual arrangements. It’s some of the best and most exquisite graffiti in the world.

Aruna Roy and her colleagues didn’t stop there. Once the information was available, they pushed for social audits. According to the Indian government, “Social Audit is an independent evaluation of the performance of an organisation as it relates to the attainment of its social goals. It is an instrument of social accountability of an organisation. In other words, Social Audit may be defined as an in-depth scrutiny and analysis of the working of any public utility vis-a-vis its social relevance. Social Auditing is a process that enables an organisation to assess and demonstrate its social, economic and environmental benefits. It is a way of measuring the extent to which an organisation lives up to the shared values and objectives it has committed itself to. It provides an assessment of the impact of an organisation’s nonfinancial objectives through systematic and regular monitoring based on the views of its stakeholders. Stakeholders include employees, clients, volunteers, funders, contractors, suppliers and the general public affected by the organisation.”

Who are stakeholders? Everyone … equally. That’s the women’s point. 100 days of employment is neither charity nor welfare. It is part of shared values and objectives, and it’s not lodged in some impossibly complex cloud. It sits right in front of everyone, and everyone can and must evaluate its social relevance.

The social audit is, or can be, democracy in action. For MKSS, it involves obtaining information, through participatory research, and then holding meetings in which all stakeholders attend, and then finding out what’s going on and whose responsible. The State of Andhra Pradesh has led the way in social audits, training and sending out thousands of researchers to engage with millions of residents, often door-to-door. The program is now being considered for national implementation.

At some level, all of this began with three people moving to a village in order to follow Gandhian precepts. At another, it’s about the feminist Aruna Roy and the millions of rural women, first in Rajasthan and now across the country, who refused to be left out or written out, who organized, over decades, for a feminist understanding of democracy as a shared social engagement that is open and available to scrutiny and intervention. The Right to Information is the Right to Live … in a democracy.

(Photo Credit: RAVEENDRAN / AFP / Getty Images / The Epoch Times)

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John Greyson, Tarek Loubani, and the Notorious Tora Prison

September 29, 2013 by 14 Comments

 


Tora Prison, in Cairo, has long been notorious. Over seven weeks ago, John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, on their way to Gaza, were arrested in Cairo, never charged, and thrown into the `notorious’ Tora Prison. They protested. Others protested. They are now in an extended hunger strike. This weekend, it appears the Egyptian State has decided to keep them in `the notorious’ for another 45 days.

(In 2005, the George Washington University Women’s Studies Program brought John Greyson, Jack Lewis, Siphokhazi Mthathi, Shereen Essof, Amit Rai, Patricia Clough and others for three days of films, discussions, engagements, and more. The highlight, or keynote, of the festival was a showing and discussion of Proteus, a terrific movie collaboration between Greyson and Lewis, a film about Robben Island prison … in the eighteenth century, a meditation, through historical and archival and visual assemblage, on prison, sexuality, justice. And now … John Greyson and too many others sit in the notorious Tora Prison.)

Here’s John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, a couple of citizens of the Republic of Tora, in their own words:

“We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since August 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3m x 10m cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.

“We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.

“Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).

“Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th, our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera. The protest was just starting – peaceful chanting, the faint odour of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead – when suddenly calls of “doctor”. A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode…and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

“We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.

“That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

“We were two of 602 arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.

“We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls. The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.

“We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

“Peace, John & Tarek”

CONTACT: Cecilia Greyson, cgreyson@gmail.com, Justin Podur, justin@podur.org”

Peace … and an end to `the notorious’. Now.

Tora Prison

 

(Photo Credit 1: IndieWire) (Photo Credit 2: Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters)

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Rebecca Mafukeni, citizen of the Republic of Chikurubi

September 27, 2013 by 16 Comments

 

Rebecca Mafukeni died last month, in remand in Zimbabwe’s `notorious’ Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. She had meningitis. Her bail application was denied. Her appeals for medication attention were rejected, and so Rebecca Mafukeni died … or was killed.

Mafukeni was one of 29 MDC-T supporters who were arrested two years ago, in 2011, on suspicion of having killed a police officer. Last week, 21 were acquitted because of lack of evidence. There was no evidence, and yet they remained behind bars, in Chikurubi, some for more than two years. The High Court Judge Chinembiri Bhunu took great pains to discuss the case of human rights activist Cynthia Manjoro. Manjoro had been released on bail in 2012, after a State witness testified that Manjoro had only been arrested “as bait” to lure her boyfriend into a trap. Whatever the plan was, Manjoro spent May 2011 to October 2012 in prison.

Yvonne Musarurwa had been with Rebecca Mafukeni in Chikurubi. She has described the experience as a nightmare, especially the months long period held in complete solitary confinement, under a `no human contact’ order. During that period, they thought they were Zimbabwe’s “most isolated women.”

This is the story of women’s lives, and deaths, in the Republic of Chikurubi. Chikurubi is one of those prisons that give notorious a bad name. It is the house of beatings, intimidation, sexual violence, and degradation. It is a place in which people are meant to rot, literally. It is a women’s prison where violence against women extends from overcrowding to refusal to dispense sanitary pads to direct sexual violence to torture to continual abuse and threats to isolation. It is a place that aims to destroy people, individuals, families, communities. In Chikurubi, the personal is political, and the politics is death.

Ask Jestina Mukoko. Ask Beatrice Mtetwa. Ask Violet Mupfuranhehwe. Ask Jennie Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu. Ask Cynthia Manjoro. They’ll tell you. Ask Yvonne Musarurwa. She’ll tell you: “During the first few weeks, we couldn’t cope with living in prison. Rebecca and I broke down completely. We thought we were going to die. But slowly, when we realized there were people who have been there many years before us, the condemned prisoners, we thought okay, we might make it as well.”

We might make it as well. Rest in peace, Rebecca Mafukeni. The struggle continues. We might make it as well.

(Photo credit: Newsday)

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Westgate: There must be more than grief

September 23, 2013 by 17 Comments

Westgate. There must be more, something more human, than reports of smoke and explosions and flying bullets and destruction and carnage. There must be more than `eye witness accounts’ and there must be more than smart analyses of why Kenya, why now.

There must be more than, other than, grief to unite a people, a nation. Kenyans have responded not only with horror at the violence. They have responded with support, with blood, money, sweat and tears, and prayers.  But there must be more …

Last year, Kenyan poet Njeri Wangari performed part of her poem, “When Change Comes”, to a gathering in Nairobi. The poem begins:

“When villages grow into towns
Towns into cities
Shops into malls
Spaces into estates,
When streets turn into avenues
Avenues into highways, super highways
Subways and runways
Then things change.

Villages become old frail women deserted by their offspring
All gone to the cities with big lights,
Who, unlike prodigal sons, only return in coffins.”

Wangari’s reading omits the last part of the poem:

“When you realize that your fate was sealed in that moment of conception
Even before you took your first breath in this cosmic space
You then know, it takes more than yourself to survive.

When you are born in a small dark room
In the slum-ghettos of Nairobi,
The wrong side of town
Born in the wrong side of jobs
Wrong side of school
Wrong side of life
Wrong side of everything good in life
Except life itself
Then you know it takes more than yourself to be on the right side

It takes governments that are willing to accept the growing gap
The gap between those with and those without
It takes bridging that gap with informal jobs, equal opportunities
With Youth, women, men empowerment bridges
Bridges that seek to empower minds, endanger idlers
Bridges that recapture people’s dream of equal opportunities
And put them back into peoples’ hearts

It takes more than corrupt officials
It takes more than paying taxes for more government officials
It takes more than policemen gunning down innocent youth
It takes more than black men looking down upon their brothers as lesser mortals

It takes leaders willing to listen to the cries of their people
It takes systems that will help its people come out of mental slavery, self pity, oppressed lives
It takes everyman to make that change.
you, me, him, her, them,
Us.”

That was July 2012. A few months later, a poem by Kenyan poets Shailja Patel and Wambui Mwanji wrote a poem, “Our Camera Has Come Home: A Found Poem”. Here it is in its entirety:

Our Camera Has Come Home: A Found Poem

in her absence we could not see properly
a way of being
engendered by her presence
was denied us

we did not die
we were not sick
or even depressed
just newly prone
to random piercings
of grief

she allowed us
to quarrel
with ways of reading the world
she explained
why our eyes stop
where they stop

other cameras
work well
we have nothing against them

other cameras
sit badly in our hands
like borrowed reading glasses

only she who has come home
is ours

The world mourns. The world mourns the loss of poets, such as Kofi Awoonor, and presenters, such as Ruhila Adutia-Sood. The world mourns the loss of those connected to people with names, such as Mbugua Mwangi, nephew to Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta. The world mourns the children, and the adults. Around the world, the national news media report on `their own’ who were killed in the massacre. The Westgate Mall has been a popular, and safe, place for many in Nairobi.

The world mourns, and world leaders and their messengers claim `We all stand with Kenya.’ We don’t. Instead, we watch the spectacle of grief at a distance, as a distance. After the post-election violence of 2007, Kenyan poet Sitawa Namwalie understood this. She understood that a first, decisive step in creating a road to peace would be to scramble the map. When they ask you where you come from, answer “I come from everywhere.”

I come from everywhere

you, me, him, her, them,
Us

only she who has come home
is ours

There must be more to grief, and life, than reports of smoke and carnage and loss in the distance.

 

(Image credit: A Mishmash Life!

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Lede: Two million women workers … ¡presenté!

September 18, 2013 by 8 Comments

Alpha Manzueta

Good news: “The Obama administration announced yesterday it will extend labor benefits and overtime pay to health care workers providing home care. This ruling affects nearly 2 million health care workers, who daily manage the needs of elderly and chronically ill people, as well as people with disabilities. One of the fastest-growing professions in the U.S., these workers have been exempt from benefits provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act since 1974.”

Bad, and unsurprising, news: 41% of women in the United States are poor or verging on poverty. The poverty rate among women is at the highest it’s been in twenty years. For Black and Latina women, almost one in four is `living in poverty’. From non-profit to corporate America, from not-for-profit sea to shining corporate capital C, women are paid less for the same or equivalent work, are promoted less often and less rapidly, and generally are positioned for hard times and slow death. Women workers won’t come anywhere near pay equity until, say, 2058. In other words, most women workers will not see any kind of gender equity or equality in their working lives.

Two-thirds of caregivers are women. Across the land, daughters are the caregivers to family elders: “It’s almost like being back at the turn of the century.” There’s no almost about it, and there’s no `back at’, because there hasn’t been progress. When it comes to care work, we live at the turn of the twentieth century.

When it comes to the description of care work, as well, we live at the turn of the twentieth century. Consider these examples from the past day’s news.

Alpha Manzueta is a full-time worker and single mother who lives with her daughter in a homeless shelter in New York. You know who lives in homeless shelters in New York City? The working poor. And you know who the working poor are: “Mostly female, they are engaged in a variety of low-wage jobs as security guards, bank tellers, sales clerks, computer instructors, home health aides and office support staff members. At work they present an image of adult responsibility, while in the shelter they must obey curfews and show evidence that they are actively looking for housing and saving part of their paycheck.”

Mostly female. A sidebar more or less buried in the fourth paragraph.

And who are the home care workers who will benefit from yesterday’s important decision to extend workers’ hard earned rights? “Mostly female” and almost never in the opening paragraph.

“Home care workers, like domestic workers worldwide, are mostly female, and many of them are immigrants and women of color.” Fourth paragraph.

“More than 90 percent of home care aides are women. About 30 percent are black, and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Ninth paragraph.

“President Barack Obama first proposed the rules nearly two years ago as part of broader effort to boost the economy and help low-income workers struggling to make ends meet. More than 90 percent of home care aides are women. About 30 percent are black, and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Seventh paragraph.

“The federal government estimates that 90 percent of home health workers are female and that 50 percent are minorities. As the population ages, the home health industry is expected to grow rapidly, expanding by 69 percent between 2010 and 2020.” Sixth, and final, paragraph.

“According to the Obama administration, almost 40 percent of aides receive government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid. Ninety-two percent of these workers are female, almost 30 percent are black and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Seventh paragraph.

Bloomberg Business Week actually began their report with the women: “Overturning a decades-old exemption, the U.S. Department of Labor has extended minimum wage and overtime benefits to the mostly female and minority workforce of nearly 2 million home health-care workers.”

Meanwhile, The San Francisco Bay Guardian reported yesterday, “The California Legislature gave final approval to the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on Sept. 12, legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) to finally extend some labor rights to this largely female and immigrant workforce. Advocates are hopeful that Gov. Jerry Brown will sign it this time.”

Women workers. Women of color workers. Immigrant women workers. That’s the news. Put it in the lede. Two million women workers … ¡presenté!

 

(Photo Credit: Michael Nagle for The New York Times)

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Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned

September 16, 2013 by 21 Comments

Evenia Mawongera

 

On Friday, Zimbabwean activist, outspoken critic of Robert Mugabe’s regime, grandmother, long-time resident of Leicester, England, Evenia Mawongera made her weekly visit to the Border Agency. She shows up each week because she’s applying for asylum. Mawongera was detained, held and then shipped off to Yarl’s Wood, where she now awaits deportation.

Evenia Mawongera has lived in England for a decade. She went to England, fleeing persecution in Zimbabwe. She went to Leicester because her two daughters lived there. They had gone to University in England and had been allowed to stay. The daughters have lived in England since 1999. Mawongera has no family left in Zimbabwe.  Her daughters and her grandchildren are all British citizens.

By all accounts, since her arrival, Mawongera has been a model and exemplary person. A little over three weeks ago, Evenia Mawongera was awarded the Good Neighbour Award for her many contributions to the community.

And now she sits in Yarl’s Wood.

And what exactly is Yarl’s Wood? It’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, and, as we’ve written many times, it’s a bad place, and a particularly bad place for women: Mojirola Daniels, Aisha, Denise McNeil, Gladys Obiyan, Sheree Wilson, Shellyann Stupart, Aminata Camara, Leila. Bita Ghaedi. Azbaa Dar. Gloria Sestus. Brenda Namigadde. Betty Tibikawa. Lemlem Hussein Abdu. Marie Therese Njila Nana. Jackie Nanyonjo. Roseline Akhalu.

It’s only a partial list, which doesn’t include the names of those who must remain anonymous, to `protect’ their identities, nor the widows and widowers and children. Others have written as well of the sexual predation, of the abuse of pregnant women that takes place in Yarl’s Wood.

For example, yesterday, Tanja’s story broke. Yet another story revealed the systematic sexual predation that is the bread and butter of Yarl’s Wood. Yarl’s Wood is a designed community in which staff preys upon the most vulnerable, typically young women fleeing sexual violence. The police yet again say they will conduct an investigation.

For some, Yarl’s Wood isn’t the disease, it’s the symptom. Others have named the disease: evil. A building whose express purpose is `removal’ is a factory that produces sexual violence, torture, despair and death. It’s in the architecture of the mission. If human beings are just so much dross to be removed, then vulnerable human beings, and especially vulnerable women, are less and worse than disposable, and they are less and worse than despicable.

And this is where Evenia Mawongera sits today.

Yarl’s Wood is part of a global political economy in which vulnerability is a natural resource, meant for exploitation and abuse. Yarl’s Wood is meant for export. Just last week, the newly elected Australian government announced its plans to emulate the fast-track immigrant `processing scheme’ of the United Kingdom. Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned, each and every one.

 

(Photo Credit: The South African)

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In Botswana, a great victory for Edith Mmusi and women everywhere

September 4, 2013 by 10 Comments

 

Edith Mosadigape Mmusi and her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang

Edith Mosadigape Mmusi and her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang

October 12, 2012, was a great day for Edith Mosadigape Mmusi, her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang – and women across Botswana and southern Africa. On that day, the High Court of Botswana ruled that women should be allowed to inherit by customary law. The Court ruled that Edith Mmusi, who had lived continuously in her house and home, should not be excluded from inheriting … her own home.

The sisters were supported by Priti Patel, of the Southern African Litigation Centre, based in Johannesburg, as well as other women’s rights activists across Southern Africa. They were also supported by the earlier Attorney General v Unity Dow, a landmark women’s rights case. From top to bottom and side to side, this was a women’s case, brought by women activists, women jurists, women elders, women. Upon leaving the High Court in Gabarone on October 12, Edith Mmusi said, “It’s a great day for us.”

It was indeed, and it just got better.

Yesterday, in a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal in Ramantele v Mmusi and Others upheld and strengthened the High Court’s October decision: “Constitutional values of equality before the law, and the increased leveling of the power structures with more and more women heading households and participating with men as equals in the public sphere and increasingly in the private sphere, demonstrate that there is no rational and justifiable basis for sticking to the narrow norms of days gone by when such norms go against current value systems.”

In his concurrence, Chief Justice Kirby noted, “Any customary law or rule which discriminates in any case against a woman unfairly solely on the basis of her gender would not be in accordance with humanity, morality or natural justice. Nor would it be in accordance with the principles of justice, equity and good conscience.”

Priti Patel put the day’s decision and event in context: “The judgment today by the Court of Appeal made it clear that women are not second class citizens in Botswana. The Court of Appeal’s unanimous decision – noting that customary law unjustly discriminating against women solely on the basis of their gender would violate the Constitution and the laws of Botswana – was a significant move forward in ensuring the end of gender discrimination in Botswana. Some people had feared that the Court of Appeal would set the fight for women’s rights back yet again,” said Patel. “But instead they ruled unanimously in favour of equality and against gender discrimination. It is a hugely important decision not only for Botswana but for women across southern Africa.”

It’s a great day for Edith Mmusi, for Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang, for Unity Dow and Priti Patel, for women across Botswana, across southern Africa … and beyond.

 

 

(Photo Credit: BBC)

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