THROWAWAY WOMEN

Seattle journalist Silja Talvi reveals the living nightmares of the
female inmates who are filling U.S. prisons in ever greater numbers.

Journalist Silja Talvi has written extensively on race, gender, and
poverty for more than a decade, with a focus on the War on Drugs and
the growth of the U.S. prison system. Her first book, Women Behind
Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, documents the
sharp increase in the number of women in prison and how the penal
system has dismally failed to adapt to their needs.
She will be reading from her book at the Elliott Bay Book Company on
Sat., Nov. 17, at 2 p.m.

The United States leads the world as jailer of its citizens. Help us
understand what that means.

We have 2.24 million people in prison. That's the size of a small
country. What tends to help people picture it more clearly is that we
have 732 people per 100,000 in prison, which actually works out to 1
in 42, and these are people just doing time. We have 6.5 million under
some form of correctional supervision, which is tremendous. And again
this does not include people who are cycling through the jail system.
Somebody, say, who's been picked up on drunk driving charges. So if
you're on a bus, and say there are sixty people on it, three would be
under correctional supervision.

What is the logic of incarceration and who benefits?

That's a tough question to answer. It differs from state to state and
sometimes county to county. Sometimes it's that if we arrest these
people and lock them up, we're guaranteed more funding. In the case of
New Mexico, it's private, for-profit prisons. They have the highest
percentage of private prisons of any state in the nation, I lived
there for awhile and couldn't believe how they were all in bed with
each other. The politicians sometimes even come through as wardens and
administrators of these prisons. Governor [Bill] Richardson himself,
who is now a presidential candidate, has very strong ties to private
prisons.

The argument was that violent crime will go down, and drug use will go
down. Well, drug use keeps going up, and we certainly have some of the
highest rates of drug use in the world. And now violent crime is
ticking up again as we have the highest number of people in prison
we've ever had. So it's not working.

I've heard that in California the prison guards' union is larger than
the teachers' union.

Yeah, the CCPOA [California Correctional Peace Officers Association]
is larger than the teachers' union, and they are also one of the most
powerful unions in the country at this point. And they very, very
much, even though they say they don't, influence legislation and the
politicians too. [Former Governor Pete] Wilson, despite being a
Democrat, had the closest ties. If the CCPOA said something, he did
it, without exception. If rehabilitation isn't the goal anymore, what
is?

Well, there are different theories. Bruce Western at Harvard says we
have a whole class of disposable people. They're unemployed. They're
poor, They're out in our communities and they're too visible, and that
it's an easy way to manipulate our unemployment rate. Once we throw
them in prison, they're no longer unemployed or underemployed. So I
think that has a lot to do with it.

Edwards and Obama are talking about poverty, but I'd be willing to bet
that they haven't said anything about the incarceration issue.

No, they're not talking about it. [Democratic U.S. Rep.] Chuck Rangel
[of New York] and [California Senator] Maxine Waters have always
talked about incarceration, but they are a very small minority. Most
politicians who talk about law and order are trying to be the
tough-on-crime candidates and they'll ride on that in many states.
People think this has nothing to do with them. In that sense, we are
all to blame. Is this a third rail issue?

It's even worse than that. Civil rights organizations, with the
exception of the Urban League, which has now begun to address it, do
not consider it their issue. So, the NAACP -- and there are a bunch of
folks that are not afraid to say it anymore -- isn't talking about the
mass incarceration of African Americans. I think that the perception
is, again, that "those people" make us look bad. It's way too
controversial. It's easier to talk about, say, poverty.

When I teach my class on homelessness, I show graphs of the growth of
the prison industry and of homeless sheltering, and the line is almost
identical.

Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago just did this piece that
got some New York Times coverage showing the direct correlation in the
release of people from mental institutions and from community mental
health organizations to the number of people who are in prison. A
direct correlation, almost to the hundredth, you know. And of course,
the prison environment exacerbates even the mildest of mental
illnesses. What is driving the disproportional increase in women's
incarceration?

What's driving it mostly has to do with the drug war. So women are
being locked up for long periods of time on even minor possessions.
The women's incarceration rate has grown 757 percent since 1977. Women
are only about 8 percent of the people in prison, and in jails they're
about 13 percent. But they used to be a tiny percentage.

They're being hit with charges that were originally designed for
high-level drug traffickers and gangsters. And these are the federal
conspiracy charges and they are being applied very broadly.
Unfortunately, a conspiracy charge can send you to prison for 20 to 50
years.

We have no way of quantifying it, but part of what's happening is that
women tend to snitch less. They're very worried about their partners
or their loved ones. This is something we also see in domestic
violence cases -- "Yes, he's beating the shit out of me, but I don't
want him to get arrested" -- to the point where he's dragged off
somewhere and the next day it'll be, "No, I don't want to press
charges." Any cop will tell you how common that is.

This book must have been emotionally difficult.

It was. As a journalist, these women are my subjects. I am not
supposed to be friends with them, but in truth I am. I am friends with
women who are survivors. These are women who don't trust anyone on the
outside, they have been screwed their whole lives. And to get letters
from them and their family members saying you gave us this ray of
hope, that someone is actually listening to me, that's a good feeling.

One of the most striking things for me about the book was how
completely arbitrary and unaccountable power is within the
incarceration system. What is it about that system that lends itself
to that?

They have no independent oversight. I visited several prisons outside
the U.S. In Finland there are these groups of people who just show up,
who are they? They are in civilian clothes. These are the people who
can show up unannounced, and check out what's going on. It's Her
Majesty's Commission, which operates independently of Her Majesty's
appointment, and then there are the civilian monitors. So they can go
in any damn time they like, no advance warning or anything like that.
Oversight. There are also wardens there, and there will be serious
repercussions if there are lots of incidents of, let's say, sexual
abuse. They lose their jobs.

Did you feel conflicted about arguing that institutions need to adapt
to be better at jailing women?

No, because that's not what I'm arguing. I know that 1.3 million women
are under some sort of correctional supervision, more than 200,000
locked up. I'm not going to see an immediate reduction, none of us
are. It's going to take a long time. But in the meantime, we can't
ignore women's specific needs.

Prisons are really defined by military-style barracks. You're allowed
no comfort, no blanket. Sometimes you couldn't even get teddy bears.
You can only decorate, depending on the prison, two cards on the wall
and a picture of your family or something. And for women, and I'm not
saying that men don't want this, but these are the creature comforts
that most of us need. I don't think it's an essentialist thing,
necessarily, I think this is the way it looks when you grow up.

The other thing is that because of the military style, a lot of the
bathrooms don't have any privacy, or if they do, men are allowed to
enter there. What they have, they are called modesty curtains or
doors. What happens is that when men walk in they can usually see the
women's breasts, and certainly smell and hear what's going on. And for
a woman that is tremendously shameful. Women talk about not even going
to the bathroom or taking a shit for as long as they can hold out -- a
month and a half or two. It sounds really gruesome, not being able to
take a crap, but that's their reality. There needs to be more
bathrooms or more stalls.

Women in jail are given men's clothing, even in San Francisco, which
is one of the most progressive cities as far as their incarceration
standards. So, you walk in and they're wearing exactly what the men
are wearing. They aren't given new clothes; they often smell like
men's sweat. They get their own underwear, but even those are not new.
Every single prisoner talked to me about this, they aren't given more
than a few pads or tampons a week so women resort to using socks. I
don't think people have any idea, well women would, how utterly
disgusting you feel.

Institutions you visited in other countries were operated more
humanely. What's the difference?

We see [prisoners] as throwaways. They're no longer viewed as members
of our society and for all intents and purposes, in many cases,
they're really not. They are behind the gates and we don't have to
think about them. Even middle class Black folks, I hear it all the
time: "Well, they fucked up." With variations from state to state,
they are not allowed to vote. If they committed a drug crime, they are
denied possibly state and certainly federal loans or grants for
education. In most states you're not eligible for public housing
unless you have been free and clear for several years. We are actually
one of the few states you can get food stamps as a former felon. And
on and on and on. So, when people come out, we are like, "Good luck,
we don't care."

What are the institutional openings for reform?

I have been at enough conferences where I've actually heard
professional officers and wardens finally talking about the fact that
the state is allocating a tremendous amount of money for maintaining
the prison system and arresting people. But they don't have enough
money to fix up moldy bathrooms. And that they don't approve of a lot
of these policies that are set in Olympia. They believe that women
should have women's clothes. Some of that also is driven by the mental
illness issue. I've heard this so many times. They're scared. They are
like, "These people are sick, we don't know what to do. Why the hell
are they in our care?" A lot of people who are demanding this change
are Republicans that see that this is a fiscal problem that we have.
It's sucking our money out of our states' pockets. Why aren't we
seeing results? They're coming from a money standpoint, not a civil
rights standpoint.

Is there a point when the institutional logic of prison expansion
reaches a tipping point and collapses?

I think we have already seen that in several states where they are now
actively talking about releasing nonviolent offenders. I think that
tipping point is what we have all been waiting for. It's going to be a
partial tipping point, varying from state to state. And it's largely
going to be driven by the money issue. It is like the California
thing: more prisons filled than schools filled. It will come down to
that. I don't think that most people care enough about the wellbeing,
the humanity. They regard these people as throwaways.