Sexual abuse of women in United States prisons: a modern corollary of slavery 1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sexual Abuse of Women in Prison: A Modern Corollary of Slavery
2006
I initially began working on this paper in connection with a project that looked at the transatlantic abolition movement in the United States and Europe from 1830 to 1870 with a focus on early feminist efforts. ... This paper addresses the sexual abuse of women in custody as a more contemporary manifestation of slavery. ... Part III will discuss the congruencies and the differences that exist between the sexual abuse of women in custody and slavery. ... Sexual Abuse of Women in Prison and Slavery: Congruent Oppression(s)? Slavery and sexual abuse of women in prison share many congruencies and certainly obvious differences. ... Slavery and the sexual abuse of slaves that occurred as a result of it were legally sanctioned in the United States, while arguably sexual abuse of women in custody is not. ... Thus, a congruency of both sexual abuse of women in prison and women in slavery is that sexual abuse was and is used as a tool of oppression. ... The Thirteenth Amendment applies both in letter and spirit to the protection of slaves and prohibits slavery-like conditions or treatment, even if the "slave" is a woman prisoner subjected to sexual abuse by the state and its agents; well beyond the boundaries of punishment for her crimes. ... In the struggle to address sexual abuse of women in custody, national feminist organizations have been slow to react. ...
Lessons on Abolition from Inside Women’s Prisons
2018
We learn early on in women’s prisons that involving the policeor prison officers to resolve conflicts won’t make the situation any better. My friend and fellow abolitionist Hakim Anderson recently expressed, “We don’t go to the cops most often in here. So what we try to do is resolve it in a way where really and truly the cops won’t have to get involved. I think that the same thing can happen outside of prison.” Looking at the outcome of involving officers explains why we choose to avoid any police involvement: it makes things far worse. We often find that someone is wrongfully accused, abused, or victimized by the people that are supposed to be there to bring the peace. Their presence creates a hostile/dangerous environment for the person who contacted them for resolution. Their goal is not to seek peace. That is not what the prison environment is designed for.
Dangerous women, dangerous times: Women at the Nevada State Prison, 1890-1930
1995
This work examines the treatment Nevada's female prisoners received from Nevada's press, courts, and the Nevada State Prison from 1890 to 1930. It argues that gender perspectives held hy Nevada's criminal justice officials caused them to treat female criminals both benevolently and harshly. This *hesis also compares the treatment of minority women with Anglo women and finds minority women also received mixed treatment. Factors used to judge treatment include the sentences women received, how much of these sentences they served, the living conditions they faced at the Nevada State Prison and the conditions of their paroles and pardons.
Review of All Our Trials AND Women in American Prisons
Hypatia, 2024
It is peculiar to write a review essay on books that could not be more dissimilar in their ideology or anticipated audience. A book that offers thanks to “the activists whose organizing efforts … build a world free of violence” (Thuma, vii) and a slim handbook that is dedicated to violence workers: “directors, commissioners, and employees of state corrections agencies” (Fleisher). Both books concern women in US prisons and chronicle ethnographic research from very different perspectives. Mark Fleisher is a former guard at a co-ed maximum security federal prison; trained as an anthropologist, he now teaches social work at Case Western Reserve University. He was commissioned by the U.S. National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to study rape culture in prisons after the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. Emily Thuma became interested in critical carceral studies while joining Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) in 2000 and now teaches gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Irvine. While Fleisher’s book defends state’s carceral policies and practices, Thuma’s book presents a critical carceral study "from below."
Theorizing the Moral Performance of Women's Prisons: From Reformation to Abolition Democracy
Unpublished PhD Comprehensive Project, 2019
This paper offers a critical analysis of a penal evaluation tool that I aim to expand by theorizing on its potential to contribute to abolitionist praxis. In this paper, I develop a framework for the expansion of a moral performance (MP) evaluation tool that accounts for the experiences of diverse groups of criminalized women that can be used to bolster prison reform efforts, while working towards the long-term goal of abolition. Specifically, my guiding research questions for this project are: How can Liebling’s (2004) “Moral Performance of the Prison” measure be extended to work within an abolitionist-oriented framework? Secondarily, is it possible for a prison to be moral? Can an oppressive, undemocratic, inherently violent social institution designed for punishment operate in a moral way? Through this investigation I aim to elucidate a connection between the evaluation of a prison’s moral performance and abolitionist-oriented social change.
2006
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a wound that had been festering in American corrections finally received examination and treatment. For decades, there had been reports of the "[c]ruel and [u]sual" [FN1] punishment of prisoner rape which had broken forth in the national media and in scholarly journals, raising the alarm about what some called "America's most ignored crime problem." [FN2] In 1996, Struckman-Johnson, Struckman-Johnson, Rucker, Bumby and Donaldson reported that twenty-two percent of Nebraska's male prisoners were the victims of sexual pressuring, attempted sexual assault or completed rapes [FN3] and that one in ten prisoners were victims of a completed rape. [FN4] Human Rights Watch decried the sexual abuse of women in state prisons in the United States. [FN5] The National Institute of Corrections also initiated a training program to address staff sexual misconduct that same year. [FN6] Ironically, *143 however, until 1999 "sexual abuse of prisoners by correctional officials was not even a criminal offense in 14 states." [FN7]