WOMEN IN PRISON

(Angela Y. Davis is a professor at the University of California, Santa
Cruz.)

If, at the height of 1970's activism, we had learned of a prophecy that
by the year 2000 there would be 2 million people in U.S. prisons and
jails, we would have been incredulous. And if we had been told then
that more than 1 million of these prisoners would be Black men, we
would probably have considered that prophecy a grotesque racist joke.
But this is our contemporary reality, according to statistics from The
Sentencing Project. It should lead us to suspect that perhaps the
lauded progress in "race relations" has been achieved, at least in
part, through strategies of forced seclusion. In other words, the mass
imprisonment of Black men should serve to contradict some of our
prevailing assumptions of progress in the battle against racism.

There is more and more cause for concern. In a landscape of rapidly
decreasing zones of expansion for U.S. industry, punishment has become
a profitable business one that yields enormous profits not only for the
$40 billion private industry that operates penal institutions but also
for companies that appear to be far removed from the business of
punishment. The involvement of many corporations we depend on, from
phone and computer companies to clothing manufacturers, means that
though most of us inhabit what prisoners call the free world, we are
not by virtue of our freedom innocent.

Our lives are not unaffected by what some call the prisonindustrial
complex. Though we are increasingly and shockingly aware of the effect
of rising rates of incarceration for Black men, and by extension the
indirect punishment of the women and children who love and care for
them, how often do we think about the direct impact of this punishment
industry on women themselves? More often than not, women -- who
comprise approximately 6 percent of people in prisons and jails,
according to The Sentencing Project remain beyond public understanding
of the emergent prison -- industrial complex and its impact on our
communities.

We might realize that the vast numbers of Black men who have been moved
into prison have reduced our electoral power by virtue of the denial of
the right to vote to felons, and sometimes ex-felons, in many states.
But do we really try to understand how a prison system with economic
imperatives to expand affects the lives of Black women, who now have
the country's fastest-rising incarceration rate? How often do we try to
understand how their accelerating incarceration diminishes us all?
Media reports keep us painfully aware that African-American women are
the most visible targets of the recent campaign to dismantle welfare.
The demonization of welfare mothers, however, was met with overwhelming
silence, even from successful African-American women whose proximity
was perhaps too great for them to imagine their sisters' fate. Many
women who once relied on welfare payments as a minimal safety net are
now in prison, or soon will be, for an expanding set of nonviolent
charges. They are learning what it means to be human sacrifices when
education, job creation and welfare receive short shrift and profitable
technologies of imprisonment garner more and more support.

Although Black women are eight times (and Latinas four times) as likely
to go to prison as White women, imprisoned women of color are not seen
as victims of racist and sexist discrimination. Isn't it time for us to
learn how to recognize the structures of racism and sexism that are
sometimes even more injurious than overt acts of discrimination on the
job, at school or in interpersonal relations? Some of us may feel
relatively secure and successful in our jobs, our educational careers
and our lives, but others, unable to find the jobs and education
promised by the advocates of reduced welfare, will end up in prison for
offenses that are often most harmful to ourselves. Women in prison are
among the most wronged victims of the so-called war on drugs, which, as
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) continues to insist, is, in effect,
a surreptitious war on Black and Latino communities. The sentencing
practices known as mandatory minimums have turned imprisonment into the
main strategy for managing people who turn to drugs and make other
unproductive choices when trying to cope with the difficulties they
confront in their lives. The defendants -- most are Black or Latino --
facing convictions for possession of five grams of crack cocaine
receive a five-year mandatory federal sentence with no possibility of
parole. But possession of powder cocaine carries the same mandatory
sentence only if the defendants (most are White) have been convicted of
possessing at least 500 grams. Contrary to most available sources --
including those inside prisons and jails -- it is not just a series of
bad choices that land Black women in prison but a deadly combination of
reduced possibilities and extensive police targeting or public
monitoring.

Still, the impact of poor choices cannot be ignored. As the story of
Dorothy Gaines reveals, many women spend their most important years in
prison only because they have intimate relationships with men who are
drug traffickers. Kemba Smith, the sister who became involved with a
drug dealer as a student at Hampton University, was sentenced at age 24
to 24 years in federal prison. Such women, unable to bargain with
prosecutors because they can offer no information, are invisible
victims at the dangerous intersection of racism and sexism. Will these
women be abandoned, forgotten and treated as if imprisonment is an
inevitable consequence of individual irresponsibility?

Dangerous societal patterns form the context of individual poor
choices. Many Black men experience continuity in how they are treated
in school, where they are disciplined as potential criminals; in the
streets, where they're subjected to police profiling; and in prison,
where they're warehoused and deprived of virtually all rights.

For women, the continuity of treatment from the free world to the
universe of the prison is even more complicated, because they confront
the same forms of violence in prison they confronted in their homes and
intimate relationships. The criminalization of Black women includes
persisting images of our perceived hypersexualilty, which serve to
justify sexual assaults against us in and out of prison. Such images
were vividly rendered in a recent Nightline series taped on location at
California's Valley State Prison for Women (November 1999). Many of the
incarcerated women interviewed by Ted Koppel complained of receiving
frequent and unnecessary pelvic exams, even during doctor visits for
such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these exams,
the prison's chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had
rare opportunities for "male contact," and they therefore welcomed the
superfluous gynecological exams. This officer was eventually removed
from his position because of these comments, but his reassignment did
little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to
sexual abuse.

Will we stand by and watch it happen? In the era of a rapidly expanding
prison-industrial complex -- where prison building is often the one
hope for a community struggling against downsizing and reorganizations
and struggling for jobs and tax dollars -- more and more Black women
are severed from their communities and considered deserving targets of
contempt and abuse. Those of us who have fortunately -- and sometimes
barely -- escaped that fate should not by our inaction affirm the
oblivion to which our sisters have been relegated. Despite our
relative comfort, we're not that far removed historically from the
circumstances that led them to prison. That is precisely why when they
ask if we will be their allies, we should say yes.

Activist Angela Y. Davis is a professor of history of consciousness at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is working on a book
about the prison-industrial complex.