Recently in Prisons Category

Via Radical Doula, we find that as Washington state is proposed with a bill that would outlaw shackling of pregnant incarcerated women, the superintendent of Washington's only prison that houses pregnant women contended that only about 30 percent of pregnant women are restrained:

The Superintendent at the Corrections Center for Women said pregnant inmates are not restrained during the final moments of labor.

Superintendent Douglas Cole said only about 30 percent of pregnant offenders are restrained while they're at the hospital.

On those occasions, said Cole, the women are attached to the hospital bed with a 3-foot-long handcuff.

And this number is supposed to be appeasing how exactly?

Related posts:
Racism, Xenophobia and Misogyny Intersect: Giving birth while in shackles.
Victory for incarcerated pregnant women
Judge jails HIV positive woman to "protect" her fetus
New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

Just when you think that the human rights of sex workers aren't violated enough, take a look at this centuries-old law that allows sex workers to be branded as sex offenders.

New Orleans city police and the district attorney's office are using a state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers like Tabitha as sex offenders. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in "unnatural copulation"--a term New Orleans cops and the district attorney's office have interpreted to mean anal or oral sex. Sex workers convicted of breaking this law are charged with felonies, issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver's license with the label "sex offender" printed on it.

Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.

The law impacts sex workers in both small and large ways.

Tabitha has to register an address in the sex offender database, and because she doesn't have a permanent home, she has registered the address of a nonprofit organization that is helping her. She also has to purchase and mail postcards with her picture to everyone in the neighborhood informing them of her conviction. If she needs to evacuate to a shelter during a hurricane, she must evacuate to a special shelter for sex offenders, and this shelter has no separate safe spaces for women. She is even prohibited from very ordinary activities in New Orleans like wearing a costume at Mardi Gras.

This is one of the best articles I have seen that has brought an intersectional lens to this aspect of sex work. This article uses intersectionality to explore the plight of how members of our society who are already marginalized face additional discrimination by the criminal justice system as sex workers. Intersectionality is an important device in this piece because it allows for us to view the current marginalization of sex workers in the context WOC and transgender women live.

It was discovered that the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Virginia was separating inmates they felt had masculine attributes and putting them in their own cell block to separate them from the rest of the population. All of the links to this original story seems to be down. Hmm.

Now the warden, Barbara Wheeler, is stepping down in the middle of the investigation.

via NYTimes.

Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said Monday that Barbara Wheeler will retire as warden of Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. He would not say when or provide other details.

State Sen. Frank Ruff, R-Mecklenburg, asked the department in June to look into allegations that the prison curtailed inmates' access to religious services and separated masculine-looking prisoners from the rest of the population at the 1,200-inmate facility in Troy.

His request followed an Associated Press report in June that inmates -- mostly lesbians -- who wore short hair and baggy clothes and had more masculine features had been segregated in a wing commonly referred to as the ''butch wing'' or ''little boys wing'' for more than a year. Inmates and guards said the practice stopped after the AP questioned Wheeler about it.

Horrifying stories of what prisons do when you are not looking continue to outdo themselves.

This is what an asshole looks like.

In Sheriff Joe Arpaio's world, this is acceptable behavior.

The most recent atrocity committed by the self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff" involves a woman who was detained while 9-months pregnant. Alma Minerva Chacon's case has been receiving media attention due to the brutality with which she was treated. The very same night of her arrest, Chacon went into labor and found herself afraid and alone, being rushed to a local hospital with her hands and legs chained in shackles.

Once she reached the hospital, nurses repeatedly begged the Sheriff's staff to allow them to unchain the mother, but they refused and Chacon was forced to give birth while still shackled to the bed. At one point, the nurse asked for them to release her so that she could be escorted to the bathroom for a urinalysis, but even that request was denied. But the worst came once Chacon gave birth to her baby girl.

Still chained to the bed, Arpaio's police staff refused to allow Chacon to hold her newborn baby and then warned her that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, she would be turned over into state custody.

via Latina.com

This is disgusting. We are well aware that Arpaio is no charmer, tasking himself with attempted eradication of Latinos in his fair state of Arizona, but this is horrifying. Not only is it a basic negligence of a person's basic human rights, it is a very misogynistic act of control, denying a mother the ability to give birth in a safe and healthy way or allowing her to see her child. You must really hate a group of people to legislate in this way. And well, law dictated by personal feelings of hatred is not really law at all.

It is also worth noting that Arpaio was told by (the notorious!) US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that he will be losing power to carry out the ridiculous extension of federal law given to some local enforcement by ICE.

New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice is competing for funding from the "Women and Girls Foundation. The group is led by badass young women of color and they are being considered for a 10,000 dollar grant if they get enough votes through the web. New Voices is also a member of SisterSong, which folks may remember from the post on Loretta Ross last week. Here is a brief description of the project New Voices wants to take on:

The "FOCUS on Women" Campaign, a grassroots community organizing initiative, will redress the current conditions of non-violent female offenders housed in Allegheny County Jail (ACJ), including reproductive and general healthcare, nutrition and as well as trauma-informed care in human services delivery. Our campaign centralizes the experiences of women who are currently or have been previously incarcerated in ACJ, organizes women/communities of color through Human Rights and Reproductive Justice and develops new voices for leadership in Pittsburgh.

Here are some facts about incarcerated women, most of whom are single moms, from recent coverage:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of women behind bars has increased 843 percent in the last three decades, growing from 12,279 in 1977 to 115,779 last year.

As University of Pittsburgh is my alma mater, I have worked with New Voices personally. Their organization was one of the many orgs that were conceived during the 2004 March for Women's Lives. I can tell you that they are some of the most organized, dedicated young women in the feminist movement right now. Voting ends at 5pm today. Support badass young women of color who are advocating for justice for women.

*Content is triggering*

This story speaks for itself. From the free Sara Kruzan action page at change.org:

"Life without parole means absolutely no opportunity for release," said Senator Yee. (of California) "It also means minors are often left without access to programs and rehabilitative services while in prison. This sentence was created for the worst of criminals that have no possibility of reform and it is not a humane way to handle children. While the crimes they committed caused undeniable suffering, these youth offenders are not the worst of the worst."

"As a society we've learned a lot since the time we started using life without parole for children," said Elizabeth Calvin, a children's rights advocate with Human Rights Watch. "We now know that this sentence provides no deterrent effect. While children who commit serious crimes should be held accountable, public safety can be protected without subjecting youth to the harshest prison sentence possible."

Watch. Listen. Weep. Take Action.

Also, read our previous coverage on prisons.

This week, a victory from the folks at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and the ACLU.

This case is pretty horrific. You can see more about Nelson's story in the RH Reality Check video after the jump. More info:

On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit (the federal level appellate court that reviews decisions from federal district courts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas) issued the long-awaited decision in Nelson v. Norris. In this case, Shawanna Nelson argued that being forced to go through the final stages of labor with both legs shackled to her hospital bed was cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. She argued that she should be allowed to sue the director of the prison and the guard who repeatedly re-shackled her legs to the bed. Ms. Nelson, an African-American woman, was incarcerated for non-violent offenses of credit card fraud and "hot checks."

The idea of shackling any person during labor is abominable, but in this case the one argument for the practice is bunk. The only argument I can think of (which I definitely don't agree with) is that an incarcerated person could be "dangerous" and therefore need to be restrained, even while giving birth. It's ludicrous for even the most "violent" of criminals, let alone a woman like Nelson, who was incarcerated for CREDIT CARD FRAUD. Absurd.

Under pressure from the international community, President Karzai has secretly pardoned Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student imprisoned and sentenced to death in Afghanistan for trying to promote women's rights. The 24-year-old journalist-in-training has been flown to an undisclosed foreign location. The Independent reports: "Prior to his departure, he spoke of how his relief was mixed with deep regret at knowing he was unlikely to see his family or country again."

Earlier this year Kambaksh was doing some research when, according to reports:

He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without - say his friends and family - being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

Don't miss Judith Warner's awesome piece on Hillary, and so-called "women's issues." An excerpt:

Women's issues are being framed by this administration in terms of realpolitik: U.S. security depends on women's empowerment. Global economic growth depends on women's participation.

Women's empowerment won't be delivered at the end of a gun or through economic sanctions or even overt criticism, if it cuts into accepted cultural practices. This is messy stuff; some of our most sensitive allies have horrific records on women's rights. Programs that show success tend to be slow-moving and incremental. Can all this complexity attract -- much less sustain -- the attention of the public?

Maybe -- if we stop viewing everything Clinton does as entertainment.

In May, we posted about 20 year old Samantha Orobator, a pregnant British woman who was jailed in Laos on drug charges - and originally sentenced to death by firing squad. (She became pregnant while in jail; her mother feared that she was raped while in prison - Orobator says she was not.)

CNN reports that Orobator will be freed to today and go to Britain to receive a sentence there.

Related: Amnesty International's Human Rights Report on Laos.

The topic of hate crimes has been in the news a lot lately with the movement of the Matthew Shepard Act through Congress and the trial and conviction of Lateisha Green's killer. Many may take it as a given that all members of the queer and trans communities support hate crime legislation and convictions. This is not the case, though. Myself and many other queer and trans organizers and activists oppose this approach to violence against our communities.

It is important to recognize violence motivated by bigotry, and difficult to see alternatives to hate crime convictions as a means to this end. A sense of justice for the family and friends of people who have been killed because of their sexuality or gender identity is also valuable. But the ultimate goal should be to end such violence. Harsher sentencing does not decrease the amount of hate crimes being committed. A focus on sentence enhancement for these crimes does nothing for prevention. Putting our energy toward promoting harsher sentencing takes it away from the more difficult and more important work of changing our culture so that no one wants to kill another person because of their perceived membership in a marginalized identity group.

Hate crimes legislation puts the power to bring and pursue such charges in the hands of a law enforcement and criminal justice system that disproportionately targets marginalized communities. As a result, hate crime charges are brought against black folks for allegedly targeting white folks and against queer folks for allegedly targeting straight folks. In fact, as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) points out in their non-endorsement of GENDA, so called anti-white hate crimes constitute the second highest amount reported by the FBI. Self defense in the face of a racist, homophobic or transphobic attack can equal a harsher sentence for the person being attacked in the first place.

Incarceration is supposed to deter crime, and harsher sentencing for hate crimes is supposed to deter crime even more. However, this is not the reality. In fact, longer time spent in prison actually increases recidivism. Our current system of imprisonment is producing more violence, not less. Hate crime verdicts will only add to this sad reality.

In this week's New Yorker there is a great profile of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. (Sorry, the full text isn't online.) Although it contained a lot of stuff I already knew about Arpaio -- that he's virulently racist, sexist, anti-immigrant; that he is dedicated to creating the most inhumane conditions possible in his jails; that he is a major attention whore -- it made a few unsettling points really hit home.

Arpaio is popular because he's hateful. He racially profiles Latinos, his ratings go up. He divides families and goes out of his way to deport peaceful people who are just here to make a living, his ratings go up. He treats jail inmates -- some of whom have not even been convicted of a crime -- as subhuman, his ratings go up. He sort of functions as a conduit for the worst impulses in our society.

The sheriff also raises a question I think about often: When do we call out hatemongers who are looking for attention, and when do we decide the best course of action is to ignore them? In Arpaio's case, I think it's important to call it out -- even though what he desires most in the world is more attention. And this is the reason:

Maricopa County is not a modest, out-of-the-way place. It includes Phoenix, covers more than nine thousand square miles, and has a population of nearly four million. Joe Arpaio has been sheriff there since 1993. He has four thousand employees, three thousand volunteer posse members, and an over-worked media-relations unit of five.

In other words, whether we like it or not, he's powerful. When it comes to the immigration issue, one federal policy that empowers him is the 287(g) provision, which essentially allows local police and sheriffs to act as national-security officials. It is this provision that has enabled Arpaio to turn his law-enforcement unit into a racial-profiling and immigrant-hunting unit. Even when this provision is wielded by non-crackpot sheriffs, Nezua points out,

It's simply not a good idea to give police, who are (in ideal) in existence to help the community, the powers to enforce the borders of the nation--a job that is normally in the province of the military

Many organizations have called for the repeal of 287(g). However, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano recently announced she is actually expanding this program, despite some evidence that in 287(g) districts like Arpaio's, actual crime-fighting is suffering because of the focus on immigrant-hunting. Let's collectively smack our palms against our foreheads, shall we?

What the New Yorker profile underscored for me is that Arpaio is more than your average Fred Phelps or Pat Buchanan-style hatemonger. He is one of the most popular politicians in Arizona. And, disgustingly, he has built that popularity by doing everything he can to push people who are on the margins of society even further out. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be closer to the center should be doing everything we can to disempower him.

Check out RH Reality Check's Anna Clark's recent piece on the occurrence of incarcerated pregnant women who are shackled when giving birth. It gives a lot of insight to its legal status in various states as well as the work behind the anti-shackling movement.

States may find themselves losing money if they continue to let sexual assault in prison be swept under the rug, reports AP.

New standards are being proposed by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission to Attorney General Eric Holder on revising the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, an act that has been problematic for survivors for a number of reasons, one being that prisoners are required to prove "physical injury" in order to file claims against prisons. (This allows courts to say that sexual assault by itself doesn't count as an injury.)

Holder has a year to write national standards. If states don't adopt them, they can lose 5% of federal prison grant money.

While folks are confident that states will sign on, some are worried that certain county prisons won't be able to afford to implement some programs that require extra funding, like hiring additional staff specialized in mental health treatment for rape survivors. But other steps to prevent sexual assault, like closer screening of inmates and staff and zero tolerance policies, can and should be taken - particularly when sexual assault is so often committed by prison guards.

Check out Just Detention, a organization that advocates for the rights of prisoners to be free from sexual assault, for more information on rape in prison.

Marilu Morales has filed a federal lawsuit after being allegedly shackled while giving birth at Cook County Jail in Chicago.

...Morales was eight months' pregnant when she was incarcerated in April 2008, according to the lawsuit. It could not be immediately determined on what charges Morales was being held.

When she went into labor three days later, she was taken to Stroger. A sheriff's deputy shackled a hand and foot to the hospital bed, the lawsuit alleged.

Morales was in labor for four hours before a physician ordered the deputy to remove the shackles shortly before she gave birth, the lawsuit said. The shackles were allegedly put back on immediately after the baby was born.

This is the fourth lawsuit that Flaxman has filed against Sheriff Tom Dart's office regarding a pregnant prisoner had been shackled while giving birth. Unbelievable.

Related posts: Judge jails HIV positive woman to "protect" her fetus
New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

Last week, I wrote about Quinta Layin Tuleh - a 28 year old woman from Cameroon sentenced to 238 days in federal prison because she is HIV positive and pregnant.

Today, Margo Kaplan from the Center for HIV Law and Policy has a piece on RH Reality Check analyzing just how terrible the judge's decision was.

Judge Woodcock's decision ignores the complex factors involved in a pregnant woman's medical treatment decisions - as through being HIV positive makes one incapable of reasonable decision-making - and glibly equates being HIV-positive and pregnant with committing a crime. When reading the sentence, he makes clear that his sole reason for keeping Tuleh in prison was that she was HIV-positive and pregnant, and that, had she been pregnant and not HIV-positive, he would release her with time served. He reasons that he could keep Tuleh in jail "to protect the public from [her] further crimes."

...While some states do, indeed, criminalize HIV exposure, Judge Woodcock does more than this - he imprisons a woman for the mere possibility that she might transmit HIV in the future. His reasoning essentially criminalizes being HIV-positive and allows the state to jail anyone with HIV simply because they have HIV and are capable of transmitting it to another. It classifies anyone with HIV as a threat to society who can be incarcerated at the whim of the state to protect public health.

Make sure to check out the whole piece, Kaplan does a great job linking the paternalism, discrimination and misogyny that are so rife in this case.

From the Bangor Daily News:

A woman from the African nation of Cameroon could give birth in a federal prison because she is HIV-positive.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock last month sentenced Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, to 238 days in federal prison for having fake documents. Woodcock said the sentence would ensure that Tuleh's baby, due Aug. 29, has a good chance of being born free of the AIDS virus.

"Judges cannot lock a woman up simply because she is sick and pregnant," said Zachary Heiden, legal director for the Maine Civil Liberties Union.

"Judges have enormous discretion in imposing sentences, and that is appropriate. But jailing someone is punishment -- it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment."

Yet that's exactly what Woodcock did - using the paternalistic justification that he is looking out for the best interest of Tuleh's unborn child, who he apparently thinks will benefit from the stellar prenatal care given in prison.

"My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant," he said at Tuleh's sentencing, "and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she's carrying. I don't think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.

"If I had -- if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person," Woodcock said, "I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm."

I agree with Jess: I fail to see how Tuleh's inability (if that really is the case) to procure affordable, decent healthcare is an "assault" against her fetus, rather than the system's assault of Tuleh. And of course, one wonders if Woodcock's decision would have been the same had Tuleh been from Denmark or Italy, not Cameroon...though you don't have to wonder long. (70% of cases involving prosecuting pregnant women are brought against women of color.)

For more information on the U.S.' long history of persecuting pregnant women (and what you can do about it) check out the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Women and Prison project, and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights.

Related posts: New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

The Women's Prison Association released a new report on Mother's Day, about incarcerated parenting mothers called Mothers, Infants and Imprisonment A National Look at Prison Nurseries and Community-Based Alternatives.
Since there is no standard policy for what happens when a woman gives birth while incarcerated, it analyzes the two options that are available now, prison nurseries that allow moms to keep their children with them for limited periods of time, and community-based programs that allow parents to fulfill their sentences in the community under supervision while parenting.

This is an increasingly important issue as incarceration rates, particularly for women, have grown immensely in the past decades. According to the report:

Between 1977 and 2007, the number of women in prison in the United States increased by 832 percent. 2 According to data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2004 four percent of women in state prisons and three percent of women in federal prisons were pregnant at the time of admittance.3 In 1999, BJS reported that six percent of women in local jails were pregnant at the time of admittance.4 As the number of women in prison has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, states have had to consider what it means to lock up women, many of whom are pregnant or parenting.

There are important impacts on these families, particularly since the majority of these women are non-violent offenders who will eventually be released and be the primary caregivers to their kids.

The overwhelming majority of children born to incarcerated mothers are separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed with relatives or into foster care. In a handful of states, women have other options: prison nurseries and community-based residential parenting programs.

Prison nursery programs allow a mother to parent her infant for a finite period of time within a special housing unit at the prison. Community-based residential parenting programs allow mothers to keep their infants with them while they fulfill their sentences in residential programs in the community.

Some of their research findings:

• The number of prison-based nursery programs is growing, but such programs are still rare. Only 9 states have these programs, and almost half were created in the last five years.


• Research shows that these programs benefit mothers and children. Women who participate show lower rates of recidivism (likelihood to commit a new crime), and their children show no adverse affects as a result of their participation. Improves maternal child bonding as well.


• Many women parenting their infants in prison nurseries could be doing so in the community instead. Women in both types of programs are serving relatively short sentences for non-violent offenses, and will continue primary caretaking responsibility for their child(ren) upon release. Most women in prison nursery programs present little risk to public safety. The issues that bring most women in contact with the criminal justice system - drug addiction, lack of education, poverty - are better addressed in a community setting than in prison.

You can read the full report here.

This story from my hometown is deeply disturbing:

Blood covered Terra Keil's hands, and her cries echoed against the jail cell walls.

But the Dubuque County Jail inmate said she took little notice of her own tears; she was focused on the howls coming from the infant squirming in her arms.

Early Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old Dubuque woman gave birth behind bars.

Keil claims guards ignored her pleas for help and left her to deliver her son alone. Jail officials say the mother never showed signs she was in labor.

"I guess it's a he said-she said situation," Keil said. "I know it's their word against mine, but how does somebody have a baby in jail without anybody noticing?"

Except it's not a "he-said, she-said" situation. Keil went into the jail cell pregnant, and came out with a baby.

"I was screaming I needed help, and I even pounded on the door a few times, but nobody came," she said. "Around 7 a.m., a guard came in and asked me if I wanted breakfast. I was crying and holding my stomach and said that I needed a nurse, but he only said, 'Do you want breakfast or not?'

"And that's when it hit me -- I'm going to have this baby on my own."

Police records confirm that she asked for a nurse when breakfast was delivered, and that she had screamed for help. What part of "women inmates are human beings" is so hard to understand?

Keil's son was placed in foster care, as she has another three months to serve. Seems like an opportune time to point to this new report from the Women's Prison Association about programs for inmates with newborns.

Related:
Voices of Justice Now: Safe motherhood

To clarify, I did not create this picture but was created to accompany this piece. When the creators put up a statement I will add it.

Update: The artist's statement here.

Last week, Lovelle Mixon allegedly shot 5 cops, killing 4 of them. This fact is tragic. It is not only tragic because 4 public servants who have families were killed, but also because the retaliation in the black community in Oakland by police will be severe. If you know what I know, angry cops are capable of anything.

I suppose you are thinking what many Americans are thinking. How could he do this? He deserves to die. Armed dangerous gunmen deserve to die. Why are black youth so violent? But I want to push your thinking on this situation.

As Kevin Weston points out in a really controversial piece at New American Media,

If there were a scoreboard that displayed the number of police killed by black people versus the number of black people killed by police - it would look like the scoreboard of the Lakers playing a junior high school team. So when an aberration like Mixon appears - a once in a generation kind of event -- the implications are cosmic.

When police officers are found to have murdered young black men, they are almost always let off the hook, they do not face life in prison and they are not then hunted and killed. This is not to suggest that the murder of cops is justified, but to ask that we look at it within the context of police brutality and the damage it has wreaked on the black community.

The power that resides in the laps of armed police officers is terrifying. Imagine living in these conditions, in the kind of world where you can be gunned down just for being young, black, male and walking down the street. This story is almost impossible to understand given dominant narratives around race, class, gender and black masculinity. It is considered OK to kill young black men, often violently. We may be outraged, but not nearly as outraged as when cops are killed.

I do not deny that Mixon was armed, dangerous, a career criminal and potentially linked to the rape of a young woman. Lovelle Mixon's actions are deplorable. But if we look at them within the context of police brutality, they sadly start make sense. Lovelle Mixon was trying to get out of going back to jail and this compounded with not finding work led him to desperate actions. Earl Ofari Hutchinson reports,

A general consensus is that it was a deadly mix of panic, rage, and frustration that caused Lovelle Mixon to snap. His shocking murderous rampage left four Oakland police officers dead and a city and police agencies searching its soul about what went so terribly wrong. Though Mixon's killing spree is a horrible aberration, his plight as anunemployed ex-felon isn't. There are tens of thousands like him on America's streets.

In 2007, the National Institute of Justice found that 60 percent of ex-felon offenders remain unemployed a year after their release. Other studies have shown that upwards of 30 percent of felon releases live in homeless shelters because of their inability to find housing. And those are the lucky ones. Many camp out on the streets.

A significant number of them suffer from drug, alcohol and mental health challenges, and lack education or any marketable skills. More than 70 percent of all U.S. prisoners are literate at only the two lowest grade levels. Nearly 60 percent of violent felons are repeat offenders. They are a menace to themselves and, as the nation saw with Mixon, to others. In some cases, they can be set off by any real or perceived slight, insult, or simply lash out from bitter rage. Mixon was one and he made four Oakland police officers victims and left a terrible trail of grieving and distraught families and a shell-shocked city and police department.

I don't support young people in Oakland suggesting that this is somehow fair revenge for Oscar Grant, but I think it is apparent that Oakland is fed up with watching our young men die at the hands of our public servants. While the conversation in mainstream media is really focused on Lovelle Mixon's history of crime, violence and imprisonment, let's try and change the dialog and have a honest conversation about police brutality, the production, harassment, imprisonment and murder of "angry black men" everywhere, and ways we can work collectively to bring peaceful solutions to our communities. And I ask the youth of Oakland to hang back, look at the bigger picture and think honestly about what will help your community the most in this volatile situation.

This is just sad. Remember the man that took modelizing to an even more deplorable level? Well, he was found guilty of 1 count of rape and 15 counts of sexual assault.

A Beverly Hills fashion designer, once touted as a future star of the catwalks, was found guilty Thursday of sexually assaulting seven girls and young women, capping a two-month trial that offered a sordid portrait of the fashion world.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for seven days before finding Anand Jon Alexander guilty of one count of rape and 15 counts of sexual assault and other charges.

In general I don't really support incarceration, but since it is usually the only tool we have access to when sentencing for rape, it is sadly one of our only options. Anand Jon shouldn't be allowed to use his influence to manipulate women and then rape them. It is disgusting. It is necessary and should be noted when the criminal justice system takes the testimony of women seriously in rape cases.

But I do want to take an opportunity to talk about two factors that I think are also at play here that are not being talked about. The first is the way women are treated in the modeling industry and how they are often taken advantage of in unfair or abusive ways and the second is Anand Jon's race and citizenship.

An industry that functions off the objectification of women's bodies will create sexist work conditions if they are unchecked or deeply functioning within the constraints of capitalist patriarchy. Furthermore, women are frequently competing to get to the top and make a career out of modeling which also results in compromising situations whether by choice, by demand or by necessity. Unfortunately, I don't think Jon is alone in his sexual abuse of women in the modeling industry.

But I also think the fact that he is South Asian makes him an easy person to find guilty and throw our (deserved) disgust at, since he is not American, but an "other" that engages in those deplorable things that "others" do. Pushing the blame outside of the context of any type of homegrown abuse that happens within the US (or Western)-centric modeling industry gives us the ability to not be self reflective. This doesn't in any way minimize or justify Jon's deplorable behavior, but more to situate it within the historical power relations at play in the narratives surrounding the sexual assault of white women by brown men. Despite his own behavior that should be punished, I think it is high time we take a hard look at modeling as an institution and think about the sexist stereotypes it promotes that frequently fetishize and make normal the sexual abuse of women.

There are many frightening propositions on the CA ballot that we have covered , specifically prop 8 and prop 4. We already know how you are voting on them. Instead of give a full voter guide, which Ann did already, I want to just shed some light on a proposition that will truly harm the young people of California and is a racist and seriously detrimental piece of legislation, CA Proposition 6.

Proposition 6 Facts

"Worst of the Worst"

1) Drops the age to 14 that a child can be tried as an adult

2) California already spends four times as much $ per prisoner as it does per public school student, prop 6 moves millions of $ away from schools and into prisons

3) Creates over 50 changes in law with redundant spending and duplicated bureaucracy

4) Explicitly removes community representatives from juvenile justice coordinating councils so affected communities have no ability to bring a voice to the table

5) Mandates yearly criminal background checks on everyone living in Section 8 public housing and removes the 30 day eviction notice requirement, destabilizing communities through forced evictions

Prisons are a feminist issue as we have written about before. Please vote no on prop 6! Go here for more info.

Some good news for your mid-week: The Bureau of Prisons recently announced it has changed its policy and now bans the shackling of pregnant women during transportation, labor and delivery.

Maria Jones, who was incarcerated for violating drug laws, tells the story of having labor induced two weeks prior to her due date, but being "kept in shackles, leaving 18 inches between her ankles, and told to pace the hallway for several hours. 'It was so humiliating. My ankles were raw,' she said. 'I had shackles on up until the baby was coming out and then they took them off for me to push...It was unbelievable. Like I was going to go anywhere.'"

[...]The new policy represents a huge victory for the thousands of women incarcerated in federal prisons throughout the country -- a victory hard won by groups like The Rebecca Project for Human Rights and other organizations that have advocated for this change.

But this is only the beginning. In 47 states there is no legislation to restrict the practice of shackling pregnant women; state and local prisons are not subject to the new federal policy. And the U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly detains immigrant women who have never committed a crime, has refused to specifically end the use of restraints on pregnant women.

So basically, it's a good start, but we need to keep advocating that state and local prisons, as well as ICE, also ban the practice of shackling pregnant women. As the ACLU notes, women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population. This issue is not going away anytime soon.

Amnesty International has info on the situation at the state-level.

Texas Prison Bid'ness

Started in 2007, when two bills were introduced, one that increased capacity in private prisons in TX and another that would have rolled back tons of standards that were achieved under a previous lawsuit from the 80s. The first passed, the second did not.

The blog was created to have a resource about private prisons in TX for legislators, activists, etc. TX was the birthplace of private prisons in the USA. Highlighting the abuses that were going on in private prisons (deaths, sexual assaults, guard abuse).

Two other criminal justice blogs:

Grits for breakfast--daily criminal justice blogging in TX

Think Outside the Cage---Colorado criminal justice reform blog

Kenyon Farrow

Wrote a piece in 2004 pitched to an indie paper critiquing gay marriage, called Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black? It was censored by that paper, and then it took on a life of its own, after which he began his blog.

Other criminal justice/PIC blogs:
T Don Hutto

In May 2006, the Department of Homeland Security opened its first prison for immigrant families 30 miles north of Austin. It is the first family detention center in the country to be based on the penal model, though plans were quickly made to build more.

The T Don Hutto facility holds men, women (some pregnant), children, and infants, none of whom have a criminal past. Administered by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's largest for-profit corrections company, Hutto lacks proper licensing and medical facilities, and has been proven to traumatize families.

This blog is dedicated to providing information on the growing movement to shut down Hutto and prevent this model of immigrant detention from spreading nationally.

Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression: Cross Movement Strategies for Gender Justice

Critical Resistance 10 Conference

Nerissa Kunakemakorn, Justice Now
The Prison Industrial Complex facilitates the destruction of reproductive capacity in three ways:
1) Overuse of hysterectomy and ovarectomy (often nonconsensually)
2) Poor reproductive healthcare provided to people in prisons
3) Imprisonment during the majority of one's reproductive years

More on #1:
-Often these radical procedures are used for fibroids and ovarian cysts, at much higher rates than on the outside
-There are documented cases of sterilization abuse, particularly after childbirth
-The new "gender responsive" prison strategies even discuss the cost effectiveness of sterilization after birth
-Some incarcerated people have been given hysterectomy's for cancers that were later found to be non-existent
-One doctor told a "lifer" (person sentenced to life in prison) that her ovary removal didn't matter since she was going to be in prison forever
-This is very closely connected with a history of sterilization abuse in communities of color (Native American women, Puerto Rican women, Mexican women in LA) More on this here.
-These procedures are disproportionately documented among people of color in prison
-Consent issues around sterilization procedures for people in prison (can someone in prison ever give consent? are there always coercive conditions?)

Elizabeth Barajas-Roman, Population and Development Program

In September of this year, a Texas woman was ordered to stop having children as a condition of her probation. The judge argued that since if she had been in prison for those ten years, she wouldn't have been able to get pregnant, it was a reasonable condition. If she becomes pregnant, she can be put back in prison for violating her parole. Clear connection between the prison industrial complex and population control.

Gabriel Arkles, Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Trans people face a whole different set of problems and barriers in prison. Not only are they targeted for incarceration (because of poverty, sex work, transphobia and racism) but once in prison they face particular challenges. Trans people are placed in prison not based on what their identification says, how they identify or how they present. Instead its usually based on what is between someone's legs. This puts trans people at risk for abuse, sexual or otherwise. Much of this logic (about not putting a trans woman in a woman's prison) is about not wanting there to be a possibility for pregnancy between prisoners. Again more evidence of the population control philosophy, and proof that they don't care about personal safety (or even preventing sexual activity) but just about preventing reproduction.

Other speakers: Maria Nakae, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and Miss Major Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project

*Note: There is no internet access on the conference site, so these live blogs will be posted with significant delay. Sorry everyone!

Getting Real about Alternatives to Cops

Critical Resistance 10 Conference, Rose City Copwatch

Founded in 2003 in Portland Oregon
Building community power in opposition to police violence
-observing police behavior (videotaping police)
-agitation, disruption
-reconciling police abolition with concerns about safety

Examples:
-bad date line for dangerous johns
-Community committees in apartheid SA where the police had abandoned the neighborhood
-Peace for the streets by kids from the streets, Seattle WA "donut dialogues"

Alternatives vs Auxiliaries? How do we reconcile programs to make policing better or safer with a larger goal of prison abolition?
-Hate crimes, violence against women and their usage to legitimize and escalate policing (the idea of "vulnerable populations" who need defense)
-Ubuntu, an organization run by survivors in Durham NC
-Trust building and community building as ways of creating our own networks for safety
-Emergency healthcare: police are always a part of first response
-Philly Stands Up: Sexual Assault Survivor Support
-Gang intervention in a community: mothers in the community would make lunch and go eat it on the corners where young men were hanging out. It was a way to reach out to them and make them uncomfortable.
-Grandmothers used as a security system, tough love policing
-What is crime? How do we look at that critically? Criminalization of drugs, stealing, what about morality, ethics, crime defined by harm?

I will be heading to Oakland tomorrow for the awesome Critical Resistance 10 conference. I will be liveblogging, so stay tuned for those posts! If you're in the Bay Area the conference is free, so think about checking it out.

In September 1998, thousands gathered in Berkeley, California, for conference that founded Critical Resistance's movement to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC).­ Each participant, with their own experiences of oppression and resistance, watched as diverse struggles were unified: by humanity, hope, and the shared vision of a different world. We witnessed a vision of a world with truly safe, healthy, and whole communities; a world with unconditional access to self-determination and dignity for all; and, critically, a world without imprisonment, policing, and other forms of punishment and control.

Over the past decade, the movement to eliminate the PIC has faced tremendous challenges. We have witnessed rising levels of imprisonment in the US and around the world. We have endured passage of the USAPATRIOT Act of 2001, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, increasing surveillance and policing in our lives. Meanwhile, US-led wars continue to ravage communities around the globe. We have witnessed the increased repression and criminalization of migrants and immigrants, people of color, young people, and queer communities. We have seen California prepare to embark on the biggest prison building project in history as the Gulf Coast region continues to struggle and to prevail in spite of ongoing neglect and militarization.

We have seen only the beginning of what we can accomplish together. CR10 promises to propel this momentum forward, with united, strategic force.

I'll leave you with one statistic that really struck me and inspired me to go to this conference: The United States accounts for 5% of the world's general population and 25% of the world's prison population.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report yesterday afternoon on the prevalence of sexual violence in juvenile detention centers. An estimated 4,072 accounts of sexual violence were reported during 2005 and 2006:

An estimated 36 percent of the allegations of sexual violence in juvenile facilities were youth-on-youth nonconsensual sexual acts, such as rape and forcible sodomy; 21 percent were youth-on-youth abusive sexual contacts, such as unwanted touching or grabbing with the intention to exploit sexually.

About 32 percent of all allegations of sexual violence reported in state juvenile systems and local or private juvenile facilities involved staff sexual misconduct, defined as any act of a sexual nature directed toward a youth, either consensual or nonconsensual; 11 percent involved staff sexual harassment, including repeated comments or demeaning references of a sexual nature to a youth.

Victims of substantiated incidents of youth-on-youth sexual violence were more likely to be male (73 percent) than victims of staff-on-youth violence (49 percent). Females were more likely to be victims of staff sexual violence than victims of youth-on-youth sexual violence (51 percent versus 27 percent).

Check out the entire report.

Regina McKnight - the South Carolina woman who was who was convicted of homicide after she gave birth to a stillborn baby - has had her conviction overturned.

McKnight was the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse due to a stillbirth. Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), says that McKnight "was convicted on junk science and was not fairly represented at trial."

NAPW, who has been instrumental in bringing attention to cases like McKnight's (of which there are far too many), has the full story.

Feministe, the Oklahoma Women's Network Blog, RH Reality Check and the ACLU also have more.

Remember the Jena 6 situation of 07? Well it hasn't gotten much better, just off the radar of the mainstream media. But that is why we blog. Jesse Ray Beard, the youngest of the Jena 6, is fighting to have the notorious Judge J.P. Mauffray and District Attorney Reed Walters removed from his case. I am going to reprint the press release here and you can read more about it here, here and here. It is clear that this situation is really fucked up and a very real example of how racism is still very vibrant, both in nuanced ways and in institutional-oh that's so 40 years ago-ways. Will keep you posted on any developments.

This is awful. I don't even know where to begin with it, but it is wrong on so many levels. A teenager who is pregnant is being held in custody so she can testify against her boyfriend who has abused her.

A judge ordered her to be placed in jail on a material witness warrant after the Crown prosecutors in her boyfriend's case expressed concerns she wouldn't testify at his trial.

The warrant was issued after police said they tried several times to serve her with a subpoena to attend court.

Mowatt is expected to be released after she testifies at her boyfriend's trial on Friday. Christopher Harbin, 25, is facing eight charges, including assault and forcible confinement.

Did it occur to the court at all that she might be afraid?

via.

Check out Samhita's post over at The Nation on the prison industrial complex. It's damn good.

A Northern California man was recently sentenced to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to exposing himself to a woman on a train.

Prosecutors sought the lengthy prison sentence because Burton already had two prior convictions for indecent exposure and a previous conviction on six counts related to sexual assault, San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said. [...]

"Our concern was, 'Are we being too lenient? Are we adequately protecting the public?'" Wagstaffe said. "We have a person here who has done this for many, many years. And with all likelihood, he will be doing it again."

This raises some questions for me. For all of our (warranted!) complaining and consciousness-raising about street harassment and public-transit perverts, we devote very little discussion to what (if any) penalties there should be for such behavior.

I'm still figuring out exactly where I stand on this. But I do know that sending the occasional flasher to prison isn't going to solve this problem. Mainly because many harassers/flashers are not in fact "perverts," they're just regular dudes who like to, you know, occasionally assert their patriarchal authority -- not generally thought of as a danger to society (outside of the feminist blogosphere, of course. Har har). We can't (and shouldn't) send all of these guys to prison for a decade.

How should our criminal justice system treat chronic harassers, then? Make these guys go to some sort of therapy, perhaps? Ban them from public transportation? Make them read some feminist literature in an attempt to teach them all women aren't their sexual property? The list of potential "punishments" goes on and on. But adding to an already bloated prison population doesn't seem like the right answer to me. I think there should be penalties for public harassing and flashing. I also think we (as a society) use incarceration too often. What do y'all think?

Two incredibly awful stories recently about young Latina transwomen and their run-ins with the U.S. criminal "justice" system:

Via Jessica Hoffmann:

Victoria Arellano/Arrelano (the spelling of her name varies from story to story), a trans woman with AIDS who died in a California immigration facility for men in July after being denied medication and otherwise improperly treated, was one of three immigrants to die in federal custody in a month, according to the Washington Post.

And from Amnesty International (via AngryBrownButch):

My name is Mariah Lopez. I am a young, transgender person of color. I also am an activist who does street-based outreach in the West Village, where I also socialize.

Let me tell you how the police often respond to this.

With verbal abuse.

Sexual harassment.

Unwarranted arrests.

Withholding food, water and medication in detention.

Humiliating and inappropriate strip searches.

Physical assaults.

This is what I have endured at the hands of police and corrections officers - and not just once. What occurs is a systemic abuse of power, one that is seemingly inflicted on whim. For my friends and me, it seems that something as inconsequential as an officer's mood can dictate whether we spend time in jail.

Read her whole statement. It's gut-wrenching.

I don't mean to diminish the injustices suffered by these two women by lumping their stories together. Rather, I think it's important to recognize that what's going on here is systemic. For each story like Mariah Lopez's or Victoria Arellano's that bubbles up through the alternative media or queer/feminist blogosphere, there are countless more that don't even make the radar. Jessica Hoffmann (who has been tirelessly pushing for more coverage of Arellano's story) summed it up nicely: "Immigrants' rights struggles and trans struggles and health-care struggles and feminist struggles and HIV/AIDS struggles--and all other struggles for justice--are interconnected. If we believe in justice, these struggles are ours." (Which is also why I apologize for not posting on either of these stories sooner.)

AI has an online action alert calling for an NYPD investigation into the abuses suffered by Mariah Lopez while in custody. I'll post updates on Victoria Arellano's case as I get them.

Currently, most California State Prisons do not have any policy regarding transgender inmates. I know you are shocked. In a climate where sexual violence is a norm, one would think that highly vulnerable populations would receive special treatment, but clearly this is not the case.

So I suppose this story is not shocking, but upsetting nonetheless. Alexis Giraldo, a formerly incarcerated trans woman at Folsom State Prision, lost her case against several prison employees (nurses, guards and social workers) when her charges of rape were dropped. Her lawyer said it was a "clear indication of rape" and that she had asked many different people for help, but no one came to her aid.

However, the San Francisco court ruled in favor of the prison staff.

Deputy Attorney General Jose Zelidon-Zepeda said there was no evidence of violence in Giraldo's communications with guards, counselors and nurses.

He pointed out that Giraldo had also engaged in consensual sex with her cellmate, argued that many of her assertions were contradicted by evidence, and attacked her credibility, saying her lawsuit was driven by greed.

The power differential between inmates fighting against injustices done to them within the system is already so great it tragically distorts the outcomes. Who are the courts going to support? It will cost them so much money to audit a prison or fire people and it will make the state look very very bad. It is so much easier to just let them go.

Now if they are not guilty of the crime at hand, I suppose I could have more empathy. But if one of the rationales for ruling in favor of the prisons was that she had already HAD consensual sex, well pardon me if I am not that impressed. You can have consensual sex and be raped by the SAME person. Just because you had sex with someone before, it does not mean you owe it to them again. If you are forcibly raped against your will, you deserve the protection of the law, irrelevant of past encounters. Men rape their wives. That actually happens and it is rape, and it doesn't matter whether they had consensual sex in the past. Furthermore, if you are locked in a cell, it is not like you can runaway.

Seven jurors voted to hold the seventh employee, Sgt. Darrel Ayers, responsible for inflicting emotional distress on Giraldo. But in civil trials, nine votes are needed for the plaintiff to win damages. Walston - who said he is considering whether to retry the case - had argued that Ayers failed to act after being told of Giraldo's complaints.

Giraldo asked Judge Chaiton to demand the establishment of laws that protect the rights of transgender inmates, but her pleas dropped as Giraldo is no longer within the prison system. Again, currently California State Prisons have NO POLICY to protect the rights of transgender inmates.

Disgusting.

I am a little late to this, but since the media seems to be spending more time covering Paris Hilton's experience with the criminal justice system over anything else (only to be replaced by the murder of a pregnant woman--a seeming trend--which is a whole different post on how the media has to stop trying cases on TV) it seems that a conversation has failed us about the actual problems in the criminal justice system. And specifically in California, home to proposals that seek to expand prisons as opposed to schools, but also home to several prison abolitionist campaigns.

My colleague, Jeremy Bearer-Friend from Justice Now and Movement Strategy Center, pointed me to a piece he wrote about the fact that the actual problems with the criminal justice system and the populations targeted by it are being ignored for the fate of a famous woman (whether the coverage be unnecessarily cruel or not).

He writes,

“it’s imperative to bring in an abolitionist angle.�

The real scandal here is that women of color are the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, yet this story is never told or reported on. The current media frenzy over Paris demonstrates only the apartheid state we currently live under, with a media that is absolutely uninterested in reporting on the mass incarceration of people of color.

“De-incarceration has been a central goal of prison reform and prison abolition work in California. That Paris has the opportunity to remain within her community and recover from her substance abuse amongst her family is an opportunity that all addicts should be able to enjoy. The reaction to this story is not to lock up everyone for longer and prevent addicts from accessing treatment. The solution is to shut down a broken system and replace it with public health money that can treat addiction and substance abuse in an effective and healing way.�

So, people only want to hear about celebrity gossip? I just want to add to this the media LOVES to highlight the incarceration of people of color, just not from an abolitionist perspective. Often MSM is more focused on recreating some mythical monster beast that must be put behind bars to keep our good white children safe.

Am I wrong?

Photo by Audrey Cho as it appeared in The Chicago Reporter.

Salome Chasnoff is executive director of the alternative media nonprofit, Beyondmedia. Salome is a video and installation artist, media activist and educator, whose work is dedicated to expanding media access for marginalized communities. She has been an arts educator for the past 20 years in university and community settings, and an artist-activist in the prison moratorium movement for 8 years.

Beyondmedia, for the most part, works with young women between the ages of 13 and 25. They also partner with many women’s and queer youth groups.

Here’s Salome…

Rosalie Little Thunder is a long-time Native community and environmental activist. Of the Sicangu band of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota, Rosalie has been on the frontlines to save the wild herd of bison that roams Yellowstone National Park.

I spoke with Rosalie over the phone yesterday about her activism for the new year. There’s a deep trail between her home and Yellowstone. Here’s Rosalie…

I actually don't really know what to say about this (well I always say that, but I guess I can come up with something). But calling a woman a mule is just wrong. Furthermore, what little I know about women who are used as cocaine mules, the conditions are rather abusive. So technically a beauty pageant for cocaine mules could be seen as glamourizing the enslavement of women of color. At the same time, if this is enjoyable for the women, right on. But a greater discussion as to how these women end up in these jobs and what work is going on to support them still needs to happen.

Thoughts?

via Boing Boing.

The fastest growing population of the prison system is women.

Over 950,000 women are currently under some form of correctional supervision. Some prison reform advocates say time behind bars may pay the inmates' debt to society, but society is the loser in the long run, they add, because of the often devastating effect incarceration has on female prisoners' families.

Voice of America looks at the book by New York City journalist Cristina Rathbone, A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars, which gives us an intimate look at one women's prison in Massachusetts.

The question the article asks is a real one. Do prisons punish or rehabilitate? And what opportunties do women have (because from working in the communities I have worked in, I see the options for men are VERY limited after jail) when they get out of jail?