women prisoners

Who killed Samba Martine? We all did

January 29, 2014 by Dan Moshenberg 27 Comments

Samba Martine died, or was killed, on December 19, 2011, in the Aluche immigrant detention center in Madrid. This week, a Spanish court ordered her case to be reopened, stating that Martine’s death “could have been avoided.” That’s putting a fine point on it. Samba Martine was killed. She was killed by the Spanish government. She was killed by a global immigration detention gulag that has little to no rules, even less enforcement of the few rules it has, almost no accountability, and so little transparency as to be opaque. Except to the prisoners who continue to die … avoidably.

Here’s one version of Samba Martine’s story, as presented last year to a European Parliament Commission: “On 19 December 2011, a Congolese citizen, Samba Martine, died at the Aluche immigrant detention centre in Madrid. According to the Spanish Ombudsman’s 2012 annual report, her death was due to a lack of communication between institutions, which meant that she was not given the right treatment as someone with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The immigrant held at Aluche had been diagnosed as HIV-positive at the Melilla temporary detention centre for immigrants but was transferred to the Aluche immigrant detention centre in Madrid without the latter centre being given any information whatsoever about her health status. This meant that at Aluche she was diagnosed with different illnesses and the centre’s doctors treated her on the basis of the different diagnoses without realising that she was HIV-positive, which consequently led to her death … The case of Samba Martine shows that the lack of coordination between the Aluche immigrant detention centre and the Melilla temporary detention centre for immigrants led to a diagnostic error which meant that she was not given the essential treatment for her illness, which indirectly caused her death. In addition to this case, there is the case of Idrissa Diallo and many other immigrants who have lost their lives in immigrant detention centres in Spain, suggesting that human rights … are being systematically violated.”

Samba Martine did not die of a `lack of coordination’. She was killed. She was killed by a program that targets immigrant women, and especially African women.

Samba Martine was held at Aluche for 38 days. From the day she arrived to the day she died, she complained of severe headaches, perineal irritation, stomach pains, and more. She went to the on-site medical facility, such as it is, and was given little to no treatment. Finally, the pain was so severe, they decided to send her to the hospital, only after debating whether to send her in a police car or ambulance. Hours later, Samba Martine died, alone, in pain.

Who died that night? 3106. A number, not a person. Cause? Cryptococcal infection … the second most common AIDS-defining illness in Africa. What crime did she commit? None. `Officially’, Aluche isn’t a prison. In fact, it’s worse. Next to Aluche, standard Spanish prisons look almost decent.

Samba Martine is not an exception. The notorious CIE, the Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros, is filled with Sambas. Women, and especially African women, suffer particular indignities and violence. A litany of `failures’ and `omissions’ will now ensue. The prison clinic is private. The prisons don’t communicate with one another. The prison staff is inadequately trained. None of these describe what happened.

Samba Martine was not failed by anyone. She was killed. She was killed by the State, in this instance Spain, and she was killed by the world that sustains black holes, militarized borders on every corner, and dispensable surplus populations.

On June 2, 2012, six months after she died, Samba Martine was buried in a cemetery in Madrid. Her mother, Clementine, came from Canada. She knew her daughter’s death was neither accident nor failure. It was murder. She knew. We all killed Samba Martine.

(Photo Credit: elpais.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, immigration, prison, Samba Martine, Spain, women prisoners

Healthy Births for Incarcerated Women: Women are the etc.

January 28, 2014 by Dan Moshenberg 12 Comments

In Annapolis today, the Maryland House of Delegates Judiciary Committee is scheduled to conduct hearings on HB27, the Healthy Births for Incarcerated Women Act. Delegates Mary L. Washington, Ariana B. Kelly, and Barbara A. Robinson sponsored the bill. Its synopsis reads: “Prohibiting the use of a physical restraint on an inmate while the inmate is in labor or during delivery; requiring the medical professional responsible for the care of a specified inmate to determine when the inmate’s health allows the inmate to be returned to a correctional facility after giving birth; prohibiting, with specified exceptions, a physical restraint from being used on a specified inmate; requiring a correctional facility to document specified use of a physical restraint; etc.”

Etc. Women are the etc.

Across the United States, women are being imprisoned at a high rate, higher than any other group, according to some reports. From 1977 to 2004, Maryland `enjoyed’ a 353 percent increase in women going to prison. Maryland has one women’s prison, in Jessup. In Jessup, the women prison population breaks down as follows: 53 percent are Black women; 46 percent are White women. (Almost ¾ of Maryland’s prison population is Black, while only 30% of Maryland’s population is Black.)

Most of the women are in for drug-related offenses. Many are in for longer terms, `thanks’ to Three Strikes and mandatory sentencing policies.

Mary Washington introduced a similar bill last year, which was so watered down in committee that it was gutted of any serious content. Hopefully this year’s bill will fare better. Washington has been working with the ACLU of Maryland; Power Inside, a Baltimore group that “serves women impacted by incarceration, street life and abuse”; law faculty from the University of Maryland Law School; students from the University of Maryland – Baltimore County; members of Women In and Beyond the Global; and others.

According to Washington, “One of challenges that these women face is that they are permanently scarred, emotionally and in some ways physically, from being restrained during pregnancy and during birth.”

Maryland is one of a number of states in which legislators are trying to ban the shackling of pregnant women prisoners. In each state, part of the struggle is that women are the etc. Opponents suggest security and flight risks; they share anecdotes of prisoners who have escaped while in hospital. Those anecdotes never involve women, much less pregnant women, much less women in labor or childbirth. Last year, when those anecdotes were presented to the Judiciary Committee, no one mentioned that salient issue.

Women are the etc.: women of color, working women, women prisoners, women. The Healthy Births for Incarcerated Women involves all women, any woman, every woman.

(Photo Credit: DaretobePowerful.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, Mary L. Washington, Maryland, pregnant prisoners, prison, shackling, women prisoners

Michigan: Demand clear standards that protect the rights and health of pregnant inmates!

January 27, 2014 by Caroline McFadden 13 Comments

In Maryland, incarcerated women are struggling for the right to safe and humane birthing conditions. Currently, Maryland practices the shackling of pregnant inmates before, during, and after labor and the delivery of their babies.

But this isn’t the only state where that proverbial glow radiating from expectant mothers is dulled by the heavy chains habitually used to restrain them. In fact, only 18 states have legislation limiting the use of shackles on pregnant women. Michigan is one of those states.

Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti is the only women’s prison in Michigan. According to the operating procedures at HVCF, pregnant prisoners are handcuffed during transport to the hospital, even if they are in active labor. At the hospital, the prisoner’s handcuffs are removed and no other form of restraint may be used during labor and delivery, with exceptions through authorization. However, there is no state legislation mandating this practice. Furthermore, not all incarcerated women are housed at Huron Valley; many serve their sentences in local jails throughout the state. What are the operational procedures, if any, that protect pregnant and postpartum women there? And how is HVCF held accountable to make sure they comply with operating procedures?

There are three main reasons why we should be concerned about the shackling of pregnant inmates: 1.) cruelty, trauma, and humiliation associated with shackling, 2.) the significant health risks they pose to pregnant women, and 3.) constitutionality. According to the ACLU, every single court that has consider the practice of shackling women during labor has found it to be unconstitutional.

On Tuesday January 28^th, Maryland lawmakers will gather in Annapolis to decide on the fate of HB27, the “Healthy Births for Incarcerated Women Act.” Michigan should follow Maryland’s lead by demanding clear standards that protect the rights and health of pregnant inmates.

(Photo Credit: Michigan Department of Corrections)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Caroline McFadden, Maryland, Michigan, pregnant prisoners, prison, shackling, United States, women prisoners

Things that begin with A: Aqua, asylum, atrocity, Australia

January 2, 2014 by Dan Moshenberg 12 Comments

The detention center on Christmas Island

A new year begins: “Australian Federal Police are investigating an allegation of sexual assault made by an asylum seeker detained on Christmas Island. An AFP spokesperson confirmed the matter was referred to the police on 27 December… Union of Christmas Island Workers’ president Gordon Thomson told Guardian Australia the allegations were made by a female asylum seeker housed in Aqua compound, one of the family compounds in the detention centre.”

Christmas Island and Aqua family compound are such lovely names for such sinister operations. Aqua and Lilac “family compounds” are part of the immense immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeker prison system Australia employs Serco to run. It’s a bad place, as reported by Serco staff, prisoners current and former, and doctors who have served on the island.

Serco staff members complain that the prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. For example, at night, 11 security workers monitor hundreds of prisoners. Women prisoners have complained, repeatedly and to no avail, of their fear for their safety.

Women prisoners fear sexual assault. They also fear systemic abuse. Pregnant women, such as Elham, are told to lower their expectations, when it comes to medical care. When asking for an ultrasound, Elham was told, “You are in detention and should not expect a lot.” Women who need to terminate their pregnancies are in even more dire conditions. Women in high-risk pregnancies are treated like everyone else, poorly and viciously. The new policy is to ship them off to even more isolated and desolate Manus Island and Nauru. If a few women die in childbirth, well … it’s the price of public policy, isn’t it?

Women with disabilities are treated like trash. A 30-year-old woman with severe mental disabilities was separated from her family until doctors and others forced the Government’s hand. How many others living with severe mental disabilities languish and deteriorate right now in what is effectively solitary confinement?

The stories continue: an epileptic child held without treatment for at least two months; a baby with a defective pacemaker had to wait for two months to leave the island, despite the pleas of a waiting hospital; a woman with level-five cerebral palsey who receives little to no treatment; the HIV+ person who went poof, lost in the system that is nothing more than a system of loss and losing.

The 15 doctors who wrote and presented, last month, a 92-page letter of concern describing the conditions, describe the prison island as “life-threatening” and “harmful.” They talk of the risk to lives that is endemic to the entire process. Others describe the situation as “inhumane.”

It is all of those and worse. The worse is that this system of atrocity and abuse is, around the world, business as usual. It is the situation that emerges when the State works to persuade its citizenry that immigrants are `a flood’ and, worse, `a tsunami.” When human individuals and populations become jetsam and flotsam, so much trash to be cleared before it pollutes the pristine beaches and bucolic alleyways, prisons become overcrowded. In those overcrowded prisons, women are routinely attacked. Other women are systematically abandoned to new forms of isolation and self-harm. Other women are simply lost. There is no surprise here.

Australia, along with other so-called democracies, has been building this world for decades. Another asylum is possible, isn’t it?

(Photo Credit: Guardian / Paula Bronstein / Getty Images)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Aqua family compound, asylum, Australia, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, prison, Serco, women prisoners

Women bear the cost of federal prison overcrowding

November 6, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 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)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, Danbury Correctional Insitution, Haunts, United States, women prisoners

Stop shackling pregnant women!

October 30, 2013 by Brigitte Marti 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)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Alicia Beltran, Brigitte Marti, cocaine mom laws, feticide laws, Resistances, shackling, United States, Wisconsin, women prisoners

At HMP Bronzefield, we were dismayed

August 30, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 22 Comments

Welcome to HMP Bronzefield, a “Private Finance Initiative”, or PFI, prison for women in southeast England. If you are a `women with complex needs’, a women who is both `vulnerable and violent’, you can expect to spend your time, years and years of it, in isolation, in a squalid cell.

That is the finding of an unannounced visit by Nick Harwick, the Chief Inspector of Prisons. In April he visited Bronzefield, and here’s part of his report: “HMP Bronzefield is a closed women’s local prison run by Sodexo Justice Services that at the time of this inspection held 446 women on remand or serving sentences ranging from a few weeks to life … At our last inspection in 2010 we reported:

“The prison held a small number of ‘restricted status’ women, some of whom had severe personality disorders. Their needs could simply not be met by the prison. One woman, who had exhibited unpredictable and violent behaviour, had effectively been held in the segregation unit for three years with very little human contact or activity to occupy her. The conditions in which she was held seemed likely to lead to further psychological deterioration and were completely unacceptable. There was little evidence that senior staff in the Prison Service had oversight of women segregated for long periods to ensure their conditions were humane. Bronzefield is not an appropriate place for women with these needs and there was a lack of a national strategy to manage women with such complex demands.

“We were dismayed that the woman who had already been in the segregation unit for three years in 2010 was still there in 2013. Her cell was unkempt and squalid and she seldom left it. Although more activities had been organised for her and better multi-disciplinary support was available, she still had too little to occupy her. Her prolonged location on the segregation unit amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment – and we use these words advisedly. The treatment and conditions of other women held for long periods in segregation was little better. Much of this was outside the prison’s direct control and required a national strategy for meeting the needs of these very complex women – as exists in the male estate. However, Bronzefield itself needed to do more to ameliorate the worst effects of this national failure.”

When Bronzefield opened in 2004, it was the first PFI prison for women in the United Kingdom. In their nine years of operation, they have not managed, or refused, to take into account `women with complex needs.’

Juliet Lyon, of the Prison Reform Trust, wondered, “Why in this day and age are women with such complex needs transported like cattle and dumped in prison, where one of the most damaged women is left to rot in some form of solitary confinement for five years?”

Frances Cook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, was a bit more direct: “This shocking case of treatment, which appears to amount to torture, in an English prison should shame ministers who tolerate the over-use of custody for women and consequent poor treatment.”

It should should … but it didn’t. They loudly proclaim their opposition to violence in Syria but for `women with complex needs’ in their own backyards? Not so much.

Jan Sambrook, the Chair of the Independent Monitoring Board at Bronzefield, wrote, today, “We are … very concerned about the humane and fair treatment of a small number of such women. The discussion so far has been about one woman. This is not an isolated case … I, previous chairs, and members of the IMB have raised our concerns repeatedly about the women held long-term in the segregation unit. This is in direct contravention of National Offender Management Service (Noms) guidance, falls well below what is fair, decent and humane, and discriminates against female prisoners, as the special accommodation available to men is not provided for women … I’d like to emphasise that the concern is not just about the one woman being talked about today, but the wider issue of the holding of the small number of women who are potentially very violent, difficult and volatile but also vulnerable. Presently there are no dedicated facilities for the holding of these women such as those available in the male prison estate, meaning that they get held in what we consider unsuitable conditions, including being isolated for far too long. This is unfair and discriminatory.”

What do we know about women’s prisons? They have a higher ratio of people living with mental health illnesses and a higher ratio of people who have been sexually and otherwise abused. What else do we know about women’s prisons? If you’re a woman prisoner in the United Kingdom and you’ve got any problems, unlike in the male prison system, there’s nowhere to go but in a hole … for a long time.

Call it torture. Call it systematic as well. And please refrain from expressions of shock. This is not an isolated case; this is not about one woman or one prison; and none of this is new.

(Photo Credit: Martin Argles / The Guardian)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, HMP Bronzefield, prison, Sodexo, solitary confinement, torture, United Kingdom, women prisoners

A girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here.

August 3, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 10 Comments

Women prisoners in Eloy Detention Center in Florence, Arizona, are on hunger strike to protest conditions there. This hunger strike was sparked by the internment of the Dream 9 activists, and in particular of 24-year-old Lulu Martinez and 22-year-old Maria Peniche, who have spent practically all of their time in isolation. No doubt, the conditions are `preventive’. What is the women’s crime that places them in solitary? Too much autonomy? Too much independence? Too much hope?

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that overcrowded is overcrowded, and too much overcrowded is inhumane, as in cruel and unusual punishment. It’s good news for thousands of prisoners in the California prison system, who soon will be released. And who “bears the brunt” of California’s systematic prison overcrowding? Women.

At first, women benefited from both early-release programs and from alternative sentencing programs. Those benefits were shortlived. Now the women’s prisons are once severely overcrowded and getting worse by the day. As so-called low-level women offenders are shunted off to county jails, which are not and more to the point have not prepared for the particularities of this influx, the levels of violence in the prisons intensifies. This means more and more women are being sent to solitary. And so the cycle not only continues but spins ever more rapidly, ever more violently, ever more viciously.

Given all the studies that point to the concentrated levels of mental health issues among women prisoners, what has been California’s response? Solitary isolation. It’s … preventive. It’s also typical.

The same abuse of women prisoners occurs around the world. In Australia, journalist Christine Rau laments that nothing was learned from the abuse her sister, Cornelia Rau, suffered in immigration detention. It’s a common story. Cornelia was picked up and wrongfully detained, by immigration authorities. She then vanished into the system. Literally. For a year, her family and NSW Missing Persons detectives searched for her. Finally, she was located, in an immigration detention cell.

While fellow prisoners recognized that Cornelia Rau lived with serious mental illnesses, the prison guards and system chose to ignore the symptoms, and so effectively ignored the woman.

Upon her release, Cornelia Rau received a hefty settlement for her torture, but the money is meaningless. As Christine Rau, her sister, notes: “Her life is a misery. Her neurological pathways have been so damaged after 10 months in an untreated psychosis, that she cannot settle in any permanent residence, she can’t sustain relationships beyond fleeting ones, and she is one of the unhappiest people I know. The money is meaningless: it’s handled by financial administrators employed by the NSW Government; her medical needs are rarely followed up, and we rely on a network of friends and acquaintances to try and make sure she’s safe. It’s a nightmare; but anyone with a family member without insight into a mental illness would tell you that. It’s hardly unusual.”

It is hardly unusual.

It is more than hardly unusual. It is the entire system. While immigrants are treated abysmally in “detention centers” around the world and prisoners with disabilities are abused pretty much universally, there is a special hell designated for women immigrants, for women prisoners with disabilities, for women. In Australia as in the United States, private corporations profit from the particular abuse of women, and so does the State.

It is hardly unusual. It is the systematic abuse and torture of women.

So, the women prisoners of Eloy are on hunger strike. As Thesla Zenaida, a sister prisoner and hunger striker at Eloy, explained: “Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. [After] she was hanged, they didn’t want to take her body down. And for the same reason—because they treat us poorly. A guard treated her poorly, and that guard is still working here.”

The torture and abuse of women is the work of the State. That’s the lesson we are meant to learn.

(Photo Credit: NACLA.org)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Australia, Cornelia Rau, Dan Moshenberg, Dream 9, Eloy Detention Center, Haunts, Lulu Martinez, Maria Peniche, women prisoners

Casual Rape: Who prosecutes the abusers that endanger women’s health?

July 3, 2013 by Brigitte Marti and Carol Ritter 1 Comment

In a consultation with her gynecologist a woman reports informally that she needs confirmation that she is free of all sexually transmitted diseases. It wasn’t really rape she pleads with a mix of fear and shame. She should not have been there, but he said she was pretty. It all happened so quickly, in a split second. Then she screamed, and he stopped. He is an administrative supervisor of 30 years; she is an employee of only 6 months. Elusive statistics on casual rape show 90% remain unreported. The data implies the existence of many fellow victims at her work place. This information, along with her negative test result, did little to assuage the permanent violation of body and mind that she carries each day back to the work place. Fear of exposure, retaliation, loss of job and personal safety becomes her new mode of existence. The physician bound by the limits of health privacy and absence of appropriate resources to help becomes an impotent appendage of the system, unable to address the social pariah, a system that traps the victim and the health care professional in a prison of secret public health epidemics of rape.

Here the prison isn’t a figure of speech. The two work in prison, and she is an inmate.

As mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes regular statistical reviews and analyses of incidents and effects of prison “sexual victimization.” In its 2011-2012 report, sexual abuse rates remained fairly constant, with 4% in prisons, down from 4.5% in 2007; and 3.2% in jails, which is the same as 2007. Since incidents of sexual abuse are notoriously under reported and because the high volume of admissions in local jails making these detainees invisible to BJS surveyors, the statistics represent only a small percentage of prisoners’ abuses.

There is a need for a different kind of dialogue that would expose the marginalization of people that allows, and promotes, sexual abuses to go on behind closed doors. The important confidentiality of the physician’s office contrasts with the dearth of instances for sexual abuses to be rendered public without fear and shame. As we recall, pregnant women may be prosecuted and sent to jail for supposedly endangering their fetus, but who prosecutes the abusers that endanger women’s health?

We need to start a change in the paradigm of power that makes so many suffer.

(Photo Credit: ThinkProgress / Just Detention)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brigitte Marti, Carol Ritter, prison, rape, women prisoners, women's health

But some of us are older women prisoners

June 13, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 9 Comments

A new infographic, Aging Behind Bars, focuses attention on the grim realities of the graying prison nation: “Between 2007 and 2010, the number of state and federal prisoners age 65 or older grew 94 times faster than the overall prison population. Between 1981 and 2010, the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 and over increased from 8,853 to 124,900. By 2030, that number is projected to grow to 400,000, an increase of 4,400 percent from 1981.”

Thanks to three-strikes policies and other aberrations, prison is not only the national mental health institution. It’s also fast becoming the national senior “care” facility, except without the care. Elder women live poorly and die hard in those “care facilities”. For example, in California, a few years ago, Helen Loheac, 88 years old, nearly blind and deaf, suffering from late stage Alzheimer’s and in the very last phase of kidney failure, applied for compassionate release. She had a place waiting for her… for ten years. But she was denied parole because she would be a risk to public safety. And so on January 5, 2009, Helen Loheac died of pneumonia in a hospital near the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla. She died shackled at her waist and ankles, two guards at her bedside. It’s called “care.”

In California, elder women prisoners call themselves Golden Girls and they’re organizing. Elder women prisoners in Alabama, residents of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, are organizing as well. Some of them, like Erline Bibbs, are members of the Longtimers/Insiders. For over a decade, they have been pushing, through the courts and through collective advocacy and activism, to have a role in prison reform. They understand, with their bodies, that the women’s prison population is too large and that there have to be better conditions for women prisoners and for women, more generally. This means building identifying low-risk women prisoners and “sending them out the door”; building more work-release sites, rather than bigger prisoners, so that women prisoners could stay connected with the so-called free world and could have some savings when the get out; building and sustaining well-run drug facilities that would actually pay attention to the particularities of women’s lives, and especially of the lives of women of color and of low income women.

Eleven years ago, Bibbs and others sued the state of Alabama and won. Their overcrowded prison was found to be in violation of the Constitution. The Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women was designed to hold at most 370 prisoners. In 2002, it held a thousand.

So where are the women prisoners of Alabama today, and in particular the elder women prisoners?

Last year, Equal Justice Initiative investigated and found the following. Women prisoners are raped, sexually assaulted, and sexually harassed by the staff. Officials systematically under-report sexual assaults. Women prisoners who report sexual assault are punished, which creates a climate intimidation. Male staff members continually view nude women prisoners, despite the rules, and are never punished or disciplined.

The Federal government sent in an investigative team, and they found the level of sexual violence, harassment, and intimidation [a] as high as ever, [b] pervasive and part of the fabric of the place, [c] part of the physical architecture of the prison. According to the federal investigators, the spatial and architectural “inducements” to sexual violence could be fixed, and at very little cost.

But what is very little cost when talking about women prisoners, and especially older women prisoners? We know that elder care is costly, and yet the numbers continue to grow. We know that sexual violence preys on the vulnerable and does not discriminate among age groups. None of this is new, and none of this is hidden or esoteric knowledge.

In Alabama, some officials and some newspapers are “appalled” by the “shameful”. After over a decade of women prisoners organizing, advocates winning case after case, the Federal government intervening time and again, the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women is one of the ten worst prisons in the United States. At Tutwiler, all the prisoners are women, most of them need help rather than imprisonment, and some of them are older.

(Photo Credit: Ron Levine/http://sowkweb.usc.edu)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Aging Behind Bars, Alabama, California, Dan Moshenberg, Equal Justice Initiative, Erline Bibbs, Haunts, Helen Loheac, Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, prison, women prisoners