Metoo Behind Bars: Sexual Violence Against Incarcerated Women and Anti-Rape Activism

#MeToo Behind Bars: Sexual Violence Against Incarcerated Women and Anti-Rape Activism

by Nichole Smith

B.A. in Sociology with a Minor in Gender Studies, May 2015, Monmouth University Associates in Liberal Arts, January 2013, Ocean County College

A Thesis submitted

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 19, 2019

Thesis directed by

Daniel Moshenberg Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Dedication

The author wishes to dedicate this work to the faculty of the Women’s, Gender, and

Sexuality Studies Program for their support during the two years it took to work through this degree. They have always been insightful and willing to help. I would also like to thank the program’s former staff, Ms. Naeemah Raqib, who was nothing but supportive to me throughout the process of writing this.

I would also like to thank my mother, sister, and my Grandma Eileen and my Nanny, whose strength and resilience is what pushed me into feminist studies and feminist theory in the first place. Though we might butt heads you were able to teach me my own self- value and self-worth and to fight when I felt an injustice being done to myself and others around me. Mom; thank you for being a shoulder to cry on when the stress gets too much.

And to all the women in my family that came before me; your strength is what made this family survive as it did for generations to come.

To my Tanty, my 95-year-old aunt, who worked from the moment she was 13 and helped to raise my sister and I so Mom can go back to school, thank you. And thank you for helping to raise Kaitlyn and I into the women that we are today. A little world-wearied, but survivors in our own right. Thank you.

iii

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge my thesis advisor, Dr. Daniel Moshenberg, and first reader Dr. Sara Matthiesen; she would also like to dedicate this work to her former undergraduate professor and mentor in the Sociology and Gender Studies Programs, Dr.

Johanna Foster.

Abstract of Thesis

#MeToo Behind Bars: Sexual Violence Against Incarcerated Women and Anti-Rape Activism

The purpose of this research and this paper is to highlight and analyze the ways in which women in incarceration resist and organize against the sexual violence they experience at the hands of their corrections officers. With the explosion of the prison industrial complex hitting marginalized and working-class communities, women have shouldered the burden of incarceration, increasing at rates exponentially larger than their men counterparts. However, the sufferings and demands of women in incarcerations, unique in a variety of ways has gone unnoticed both by anti-prison activists who are in and out of the carceral state. This research aims to rectify the disparities, to illustrate that women are not passive subjects in incarceration, but are organizing, demanding justice, and building coalitions with other prisoners to create social change for themselves against the exploitation that they face, both because of the subjugation of their labors, and the violence that is being done on their bodies.

Table of Contents

Dedication...………………………………………………………………………...... iii

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….iv

Abstract of Thesis……………………………………………………………………..…v

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: Where are the Women?...... 7

Chapter 3: Sexual Violence Against Incarcerated Women………………………………34

Chapter 4: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………58

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...... 72

Chapter 1: Introduction “But in the new organization of work every woman (other than those privatized by bourgeois men) became a communal, for once women’s activities were defined as non- work, women’s labor began to appear as a natural resource, available to all no less than the air we breathe and the water we drink.” -Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation

Prisoners Go on Strike

On August 21, 2018, a nationwide prison strike was announced by the

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a prisoner-led section of the Industrial

Workers of the World. Organizers around the country were fighting for the end to what they called Prison Slavery, where, “Billions are made annually off our backs.

Outrageously priced or grossly inadequate privatized ‘services’ like health care, food, phone calls, assaults on our humanity—they feed us like animals, suck our families dry, and [t]hen leave us to die” (www.incarceratedworkers.org). Prison slavery is exempt from the United States Constitution, which bans slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (U.S. Const. amend. XIII). The practice of allowing elites to exploit prison inmates, for nothing or near nothing, thus became codified into law; the attention to this exploitation intensified after the California wildfires, where it became known of a longstanding practice where prison inmates were being used by the state to fight the dangerous flames, “Inmates do get paid for the dangerous and potentially deadly work—but the pay is paltry, at $1 an hour plus $2 a day, and the hours are long, with the possibility of 72-hour shifts. Meanwhile, the inmate firefighting program reportedly saves the state $90 million to $100 million a year, according to California officials” (Lopez, 2018). 58 youth offenders, those under the age of 18, were also recruited to stop the fires (Lopez, 2018).

Prisoners earn less than a dollar an hour, are subjected to the abuse of the prison systems, while exploited to continue work, and discourage or even banned from seeking educational advancements that could keep them out of prison. Paid meager wages and forced to do dangerous jobs, prisoners launched a strike that lasted for three weeks in response to the riot in Lee Correctional Institution where seven inmates had died.

According to the Press Release, “

Men and women incarcerated in prisons across the nation declare a nationwide strike in response to the riot in Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in South Carolina. Seven comrades lost their lives during the senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration, and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology. Those men and women are demanding humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform and the end of modern day slavery (“Jailhouse Lawyers Speak”). The demands from the inmates include an improvement in the conditions of the prisons and policies; the payment of a minimum wage that corresponds to the state’s mandated minimum wage; the end overpopulation of predominantly black and brown bodies; and the reinstating of the voting rights of all citizens who are released from prison, to name a few.

On August 21, prisoners at multiple correctional facilities went on strike to protest and demand changes to the prison industrial complex. For three weeks, protests were planned in at least 17 states, where inmates took part in work strikes, hunger strikes, and sit-ins. For those on the outside, they called, “for boycotts against agencies and companies that benefit from prisons and prison labor” (Lopez, 2018). Amani Sawari, a spokesperson for the protest, concluded that inmates had nothing but themselves to put on the line for better treatment in prisons. “The main leverage that an inmate has is their own body. If they choose not to go to work and just sit in in the main area or the eating area,

2 and all the prisoners choose to sit there and not go to the kitchen for lunchtime or dinnertime, if they choose not to clean or do the yardwork, this is the leverage they have.

Prisons cannot run without prisoners’ work” (Lopez, 2018).

The work stoppages and strikes lasted until September 9, symbolic for the anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising, where prison inmates overtook the Attica

Prison for four days straight in response to the abuse from staff and prison guards, ending where New York State Police officers, National Guardsmen and assorted volunteers swarmed the prison, killing 33 prisoners and 10 hostages (Oppenheimer, 2016). Human rights abuses and the demand for a more humane treatment were a direct result of the prison uprising. The demands of improvements to prisons for inmates would continue to today as strikers stopped working and called for an end to the exploitation and chattel slavery that came about because of the prison industrial complex and for-profit prison industries.

Aftermath

The direct aftermath and the results of the strike are a bit harder to decipher.

Firstly, it is easier for guards and state legislators to outright deny that the strike had taken place, as members of the public cannot witness the strikes happening and inmates’ ability to communicate about work stoppages; corrections departments also have incentives not to publicize large scale strikes or direct action by prison inmates. A New

York Times article, published in the first week of the strike, highlighted the suppression of information about what goes on behind the bars of correctional facilities:

Officials in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New York and South Carolina, where protest activity had either been reported or rumored all denied on Sunday that anything was amiss at their facilities. Officials in Ohio, New Mexico and at the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to

requests for comment. “There are no strikes occurring in Georgia,” wrote Joan Heath, a corrections spokeswoman there, in a message that was typical of the other states. “We have been, and will continue to monitor the situation (Smith, 2018). Still, the importance of the strike, through the strategy of the strikers’ themselves, have been to coordinate and gain mainstream publicity where denials from officials would often fail. The organizers hoped that by publishing the demands and grievances in more radical publications, such as Shadowproof, a publication focused on marginalized communities, and the San Francisco Bay View, a black-liberation newspaper, “would focus on the strikers’ message, about unjust prison conditions and what should be done about them. That message could be amplified online, and picked up by bigger publications” (Vara, 2018). The strategy was effective, as The New York Times, The

Washington Post, and NPR began covering the protest despite public denials of the strike. “People are talking about the strike and, by extension, about poor prison conditions across the U.S. and prisoners’ demands to see them change” (Vara, 2018).

And while not many politicians openly talked and supported the strike—those who did, including Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have spoken their support of ending the exploitation of prisoners’ labor—organizers were not deterred because, “Any gains have typically been achieved as the result of policy change or legal action” (Vara,

2018). Consequently, the goals of activist and organizers, to bring about some marginal changes are being realized.

Policy changes are coming though, maybe some as the result of the strike and work of activists and organizers in and out of facilities. In Florida on November 6, constituencies voted Yes on Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to people with prior felonies, amending the state constitution and giving back, “full citizenship rights of the

4 state’s 1.5 million ex-felons who were convicted of past crimes” (Gallup and Stancil,

2018). Such work would not have been possible without the work of formerly incarcerated individuals and momentum from the aftermath of the strikers and organizers.

Most overwhelmingly, the issue of criminal justice reform has reached the federal government, with bipartisan support from both Democrats and Republicans. The

First Step Act which will be brought to a vote by Senate Majority Leader Mitch

McConnell, includes provisions to improve rehabilitation programs for former inmates, home confinement for lower-level offenders, over supervised early-release for low-risk prisoners, barring the use of restraints on pregnant inmates unless they pose a threat.

Finally, and probably one of the more important aspects of the bill, included in the list of demands from the prison strikers themselves, the First Step Act would, “Allow inmates to request reviews of their cases retroactively under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The disparity has particularly hurt African-American men, who were more likely to possess crack than the more expensive cocaine” (Berry, 2018). Time will tell, however, whether lobbying from for-profit prisons or other industries would have a hand in killing the bill or watering down its effectiveness.

On August 21, 2018, prisoners around the country went on strike. But besides the inclusive language from the press release by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, where were the voices of women in the unique and oft troubling experiences while weaving through the criminal justice system? For women’s incarceration, sexual violence and exploitation of women’s bodies became another missing gendered piece of the strike. Have activists

5 done enough to address the persistence of women’s incarceration? Or will they remain calling for help while we cover our ears and refuse to hear them?

Chapter 2: Where Are the Women?

So where are the women in the stories of the criminal justice system? The explosion of mass incarceration, abuses and critiques of the prison industrial complex have often exposed the deeply racist histories of prisons, though the stories of exploitation are of men—especially on the subjugation of black and brown men in prisons and jails—and women’s voices are notoriously silent. And while whole generations of poor men and men of color have been affected by the criminal justice system, women have also been forced into incarceration but have not been the foci of attention like men. Women, according to Sarah Healey (2016), like Eliza Cobb who was convicted of killing her baby under questionable evidence, were also sentenced to harsh labor exploitation, “Many of the women with whom she lived at the prison farm had experienced the deprivation, violence, and agonizing labor of plantation life under slavery. Now they found themselves under the gun, lash, and debilitating grind of farm labor under white control in freedom’s aftermath. In their younger fellow prisoners […] they saw dashed dreams of a future in which black girls would never know such deadly relations of violence and exploitation” (17). Years after the Civil War incarceration rates increased for both black men, and black women; in Atlanta a year after emancipation women accounted for 17.4 percent of arrests. Of those arrested, 776 were black women and 195 were white. In the late 19th century black women were almost 6 times more likely to be arrested than white women (Haley, 2016, 29). The crisis of incarceration became a tool for white supremacy to continue the practice of chattel slavery and labor for black men and women both.

Today, women are not the largest population in prisons, but their rates of incarceration have exploded to percentages that outnumber men. Between 1980 and 1997 women in prison had grown to nearly 573%. Women of color fare worse in prisons, often being overrepresented to the point where black women are four times more likely to be incarcerated than white women (Lawston, 2008, 2). Currently, of the 207,700 women in facilities, 67,800 women identified as black and 33,400 identified as Latina (VanNatta,

2010, 30).

Over the past year, the rates of sexual violence reported against these women have drastically increased. While society’s image of prison rape is inmate on inmate assault perpetrated by men inmates, incarcerated women are facing a substantial threat of sexual violence and assault committed against them by corrections officers in charge of supervising and monitoring them. Four women’s prisons around the country have been the focus of federal investigations: Edna Mahan Corrections Facility, Lowell Correctional

Institution in Central Florida, the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama. These women have faced sexual coercion, abuse, rape and isolation from the re-victimization that comes from reporting their stories and filling PREA complaints.

Formally, the emphasis of man on man inmate rape does much to silence and cover the hidden problems of women who are inmates experiencing rape and sexual violence. An article by Carine Mardorossian (2014), explains the suppression of women’s voicing about experiences of sexual assault while in prison:

Like the Human Rights Watch Study, the nationwide call to end the “cruel and usual punishment” of prison rape was focused on the treatment of male prisoners in correctional institutions. This is so much the case that today the gender-neutral phrase “prison rape” automatically evokes male prison rape,

to the exclusion of female inmates. The sociological context of the introduction of laws to combat (male) prisoner rape was drive by a public outrage that contrasts with the normalization of victimization of female inmates. The public discourse of institutionalized male rape has overshadowed sexual violence against women, in part because men are seen as victims of homosexual rape and hence as “undeserving” victims of sexual violence. By contrast, views of rape of women in prisoners subscribe to heteronormative understandings of women somehow deserving rape (91). The studies presented both have attempted to understand the forms of sexual violence inmates of all genders experience while incarcerated. However, the rhetoric of has been overpowered, both in the mainstream and in policy, of the inmate on inmate prison rape, of a cisgender male prisoner overpowering a weaker one, effectively silencing the number of women who have been abused by the corrections officers and prison staff. It also illustrates how our society have viewed women as complicit and deserving of their victimization or with so little worth that they are not part of the equation at all. Women, if they are negotiated into the sphere of prison rape reform rarely see justice because their rapists are excused and they themselves are at fault. Then the punishments tend to follow,

“There was a penalty for reporting sexual abuse under PREA; a stiff penalty. Everyone knew this. So there was a decision to make. Speak up and go to the hold for months only to be found incredible. Speak up and be returned to prison to stay in the hold until your release date. Speak up and paint a great big target right on your forehead. There was no winning when you spoke up” (Reid, 2013, 2086). Women, under the law’s provisions, tended to be inadvertently penalized when speaking against their accusers because the law was formulated and passed under the epidemic of sexual violence between inmates.

Women, who’s perpetrators wear the badge, have no formal protection and are treated like the guilty party.

And yet, there are multiple ways that black women specifically resist, organize collectively to file grievances and demand justice in the criminal justice syste,, as Patricia

Hill Collins (2000) argues in her work Black Feminist Thought, “Historically African-

Americans’ resistance to racial and class oppression could not have occurred without an accompanying struggle for group survival […] Without this important part of Black women’s activism, struggles to transform U.S. educational, economic, and political institutions could not have been sustained” (202). They have been at the forefront of social justice movements although their efforts have been hidden by history or prejudices even among their ranks. They are contributors, leaders, and activists both because of the threat to their livelihoods and their precariousness in today’s market. Black women have had to continue to contend with the dual oppression of their race and the hidden nature of their gender, especially when organizing.

Historically, women’s contributions have notoriously gone undocumented and glanced over, even while they themselves have been the most affected by changing social relations and injustices. The attacks upon women have been in response to their resistance to changes that would degrade them or confine their movement into the public sphere. Silvia Federici outlined an argument where the witch-hunts culminated in the movements towards the development of capitalist relations, a shift towards agrarian capitalism beginning as early as the late fifteenth century that fenced off common lands that were a means to people’s overall survival and wellbeing (Federici, 2018, 15). The witch-hunts corresponded with the rise of enclosures and forced evictions because those who were accused of witchcraft and pacts with the devil were:

Women who resisted their impoverishment and social exclusion. They threatened, cast reproachful looks, and cursed those who refused them help:

some made nuisances of themselves by sudden, uninvited appearances on their better-off neighbors’ doorsteps or made uncalled for attempts to have themselves accepted by giving small gifts to children. Those who prosecuted them charged them with having an evil tongue, with stirring up trouble among their neighbors, charges that historians often accepted. But we may wonder if behind the threats and the evil words we should not read a resentment born of anger at the injustice suffered and a rejection of marginalization (Federici, 2018, 19). Economically, women were beginning to lose footing in the public spheres as workers because of increasing, “misogynous institutional policy that confined women to a subordinate social position with respect to men and severely punished any assertion of independence on their part and any sexual transgression as a subversion of the social order” (Federici, 2018, 19). Therefore, the accusations and violence committed against women were created to punish women who did not conform to the new subordinate positions that were demanded of them through capitalist relations. Using violence, women and women’s bodies became uses of capitalist accumulation for centuries.

Black and brown women have become the sites of such accumulation and exposed black women to the threats of harassment and abuse from white men, “A black woman’s body, in slavery and freedom, was treated as though it were not her own, nor even the conventional prerogative of her father or spouse. White employers’ displays of disgust toward interracial contact in public in the age of segregation did not match their behavior in private. Black women were the victims of sexual abuse in their workplaces, yet they were accused of being the aggressors” (Hunter, 1997, 106). Black women have not and do not have control of the decisions of their bodies, their sexual partners, nay even their labor decisions have been confined to the domestic sphere under the demands of white women and men.

The marginalization of women and black women is even more pronounced in

American society, wherein law is presumed to deliver justice equitably throughout all social classes and races. On his Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin further goes identify the ways that, though criminality is punished equally, de facto punishment has always been suffered by marginalized, “Here appears, in terribly primitive form, the mythical ambiguity of laws that may not be ‘infringed’ to which Anatole France refers satirically when he says, ‘Poor and rich are equally forbidden to spend the night under the bridges.’ It also appears that Sorel touches not merely on a cultural-historical but also on a metaphysical truth in surmising that in the beginning all right was the prerogative of kings or nobles—in short, of the mighty; and that, mutatis mutandis, it will remain so as long as it exists. For from the point of view of violence, which alone cannot guarantee law, there is no equality, but at the most equally great violence” (296). For law has always been a guise to create and maintain power, through the creating of the initial violence through the lawmaking body, and the maintaining violence through such legislation. The phrase, that the bridge is forbidden both for the rich and the poor will only affect the impoverished, for the rich have no desire or need to live under a bridge anyway. And yet the poor will be punished immensely for using the bridge as shelter. For black and poor women, and largely in marginalized communities, the laws prohibiting certain acts will be enforced and affect all differently. This then leads to those women’s incarceration and their precariousness towards violence by the power imbalance between the staff who are constantly monitoring them.

Women have fought back against such exploitation. From movements opposing slavery, globalization, capitalist exploitation, misogyny and homophobia, to anticolonial

12 and anticapitalist movements such as Occupy Wall Street and organizing against the

Dakota Access Pipeline, women have been important pieces in the struggles. Black women, especially, in the fight for black liberation, have played important parts in demands for recognition for their labor and their humanity. Black women working in the domestic sphere, a job notoriously hidden because the labor being completed was considered part of the private sphere, women’s work. In Atlanta, for example, domestic washerwomen used their rising image of the New South to strike and expose their hypocrisy, “Yet the cornerstone of this apology to Northern capital was the institutionalization of white supremacy through the segregation and subordination of black labor. African-American women threatened to expose the tyranny in the New South by disrupting this celebration of new-found harmony at an early stage of its public relation campaign” (Hunter, 2997, 96). In the demand for better wages and better working conditions, these women habitually called for strikes and work stoppages, collectively organized to support each other during the strike, or made the decision to migrate away from abuses in the South:

Through the use of formal and informal community networks in which they shared work routines, work sites, living space, and social activity, the strikers organized thousands of women and men. The importance of these everyday networks and sequestered social spaces were thrown into relief by the strike: they not only promoted quotidian survival, but also built a base for political action. The areas of everyday survival, on the one hand, and resistance and large-scale political protests, on the other, were mutually reinforcing; both were necessary parts of a collective cultural whole of working-class self-activity (Hunter, 1997, 97). Domestic workers in Atlanta used the leverage of exposing white supremacy and racism in the South to rally the community to air grievances about poor working conditions and lack of good pay. They organized and continued the strike in the face of deep-seated racism. When threats of violence and lynchings became almost unavoidable, when social

13 justice and equality in the South could not be guaranteed, African Americans migrated

North hoping for better circumstances and a more welcome place to live and work. Their ability to leave provided a much-needed reality check on the necessities of black labor in the South because, “For a fleeting moment, many white Southerners openly welcomed the Great Migration, hoping that the ‘race problem’ would be solved by ridding the regions of blacks. But this fervor soon waned in the face of the harsh reality of the region’s dependence of black labor” (Hunter, 1997, 236).

However, while domestic workers were given opportunity and had the freedom to leave their employment, women in incarceration are not given that choice; prison and jails have forced black women where their labor is demanded of them; leaving prison is not optional. Put into positions where they are constantly monitored and labeled criminals, their exploitation is considered justified. For incarcerated women, the ability to strike and organize presents itself in unique ways given the circumstances. Domestic workers ultimately had the chance to migrate north because of abusive treatment from their employers, that choice is not available to incarcerated women. Their collective struggles must be done within the confines of their imprisonment, where their options are limited, and retaliation seems almost certain from guards and staff. But they do, in fact, coordinate and organize to better their living conditions and stop the abuse from those in charge of supervising them.

Some of the methods of women resisting in incarceration has been documented by activists working around the criminal justice system. Victoria Law (2012), in her research

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, has illustrated the ways women inmates have, throughout history, organized and fought for better conditions and

14 against sexual abuses by staff and prison guards. Her research highlights the extensive issues of sexual abuse in women’s prisons, especially in regard to women’s prisons where, “In 1996, Human Rights Watch released All Too Familiar, a report documenting sexual abuse of women prisoners throughout the United States. The report, reflecting the organization’s two and half years in research, found that sexual assaults, abuse and rape of women’s prisons by male staff were common and that women who complained incurred write-ups, loss of ‘good time’ accrued toward an early parole and/or prolonged periods in disciplinary segregation” (Law, 2012 60). Survivors of abuse by prison staff, should they report, have the threat of retaliation by segregation or the loss of privileges that put them out of the abusive environment that is the criminal justice system.

According to Law (2012), women who have had a history of sexual abuse are, “more likely to accept sexual abuse and misconduct from prison staff because they arrive in prison already conditioned to respond to coercion and threats by acquiescing to protect themselves from further violence” (61).

An activist who told her story of being raped by a corrections officer after her release, pointed to the ways that women are treated during such allegations as one of the reasons why she did not come forward. Elizabeth Reid (2013) spoke on how, when an inmate made accusations against a staff member, the inmate would immediately be moved to segregation while the prison investigated. This would be the same if the inmate was on a work release program, and she would be stripped of the privilege of the work release and immediately be placed in segregation (2086). For Reid (2013), “There was a penalty for reporting sexual abuse under PREA; a stiff penalty. Everyone knew this. So there was a decision to make. Speak up and go to the hole for months only to be found

15 incredible. Speak up and be returned to prison and stay in the hold until your release date.

Speak up and paint a great big target right on your forehead. There was no winning when you spoke up” (2086). Women face the threat, just like incarcerated men, of revictimization if they do have the courage to come forward about their sexual assault.

For men, the threat lies with the hostility of other inmates and the gross incompetence or lack of empathy from the prison guards. For women, the threat lies in those same guards holding power and forcing women to perform sexual acts, and then putting them into solitary if they come forward against them. Black and poor women who are already pushed into the criminal justice system through zero tolerance policies, and inequalities, leaves them vulnerable to sexual assault by privileged staff who are more likely to abuse those women’s precariousness through threats of loss of privileges or the promise of more such privileges.

Because of the demands for prison staff and guards from the large population of incarcerated peoples, such staff tend to not be vetted or trained improperly, and are thereby putting the women that they are told to supervise in dangerous situations:

In some instances, male staff members have been placed in female facilities with little to no training on cross-gender supervision and no procedures for investigating, or disciplining staff for sexual misconduct. In Michigan and other states, untrained male officers were assigned to positions where women dress and undress, shower, and use the toilet. Male guards have also been given the task of performing body searches on prisoner, which includes patting down women’s breasts and genital areas. They also transported women to medical care and were required to observe gynecological and other intimate medical procedures (Law, 2012, 61). Women inmates face large levels of sexual violence and abuse, as well as improper observations from their men staff and guards, who are improperly vetted and trained to undertake the supervision of prisoners and inmates. What’s more, because of the law allowing men officers unequivocal access to employment within women’s correctional

16 facilities, women will continue to be subjected to constant monitoring and inappropriate contact with them. Because of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting gender discrimination in employment, “Both male and female guards have the right to gender-neutral employment in prisons housing prisoners of the opposite gender. Given that most state have only one to two prisons but many more male prisons, this has been applied to female guards’ right to employment in male facilities. However, Title VII also prohibits discriminating against male officers with female prisons” (Law, 2012, 61).

When survivors organize and collectively, they are going against a system demanding their silence and compliance. They are also surviving a system that sees not use value in their lives besides exploiting their labor and their bodies. It is important to conceptualize the instances of abuse, of resistance and activism from imprisoned women to understand how policy and law are not there to administer justice for marginalized communities. Instead, laws hierarchize and drive those communities into what has been historically placed in “death-worlds” as Achille Mbembe (2003) would call such locations, “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40).

Women are neither seen nor heard, where they are continuously exploited for their labor and for use of their bodies, and where laws and policies continue to subject them to violence, both from the state and from the corrections officers made to guard them.

Therefore, survival alongside refusal to go quietly into these zones of death can be considered one of the ways in which they resist.

Resistance does not have to be consistently attacking a structural system in place, it does not mean striking and work stoppages or picketing; sometimes, and especially for

17 incarcerated women, resistance is survival; it could mean compliance as a way to see family, to have money in commissary, as a means to continue living, especially in an area that is disconnected from the everyday. It might mean sharing stories with other survivors for the means of shared empathy and shared experiences. The women in the criminal justice system who have experienced sexual abuse use every means of survival to get through, and that in and of itself is resistance.

What is Law? What is Justice?

How can one live in a society that creates and sustains the critical rise of mass incarceration for marginalized communities, as well as giving those in positions of power the right to abuse said power through acts of sexual violence upon women’s bodies? How are those privileged from not having to have direct contact with the criminal justice purposefully made ignorant of its atrocities and instead clamor immediately to its defense? How is compliance from the population maintained and continued?

Jacques Derrida (1989) in his analysis entitled Force of Law: The “Mystical

Foundation of Authority” theorizes on the violence that is predominant in the creation and the maintenance of law. This violence is diametrically contradictory to what is considered just and unjust in our society, predicated on violence of marginalized communities, the perpetual walking dead, non-humans for exploitation:

How are we to distinguish between this force of law, this “force of law,” as one says in English as well as in French, I believe, and the violence that one always deems unjust? What difference is there between on the one hand, the force that can be just, or in any case deemed legitimate (not only an instrument in the service of law but the practice and even the realization, the essence of droit), and on the other hand the violence that one always deems unjust? What is a just force or a non-violent force? To stay with the question of idiom, let me turn to a German word that will soon be occupying much our attention: Gewalt. In English, as in French, it is often translated as “violence” […] Gewalt, then, is both violence and legitimate power,

justified authority. How are we to distinguish between the force of law of a legitimate power and the supposedly originary violence that must have established this authority and that could not itself have been authorized any anterior legitimacy, so that, in this initial moment, it is neither legal nor illegal—or, others would quickly say, neither just nor unjust? (6). Derrida contextualizes law, justice, and violence in the contradictory sense, where the legislative powers of the state define what law means, what justice is and who enacts violence and who can do violence onto others. Elite classes are given the powers of God to perpetuate such violence onto others, “No anthropology, no humanism, no discourse of man on man, even on human rights, cane be proportionate to either the rupture between the mythical and the divine, or to a limit such as the final solution” (Derrida, 1989, 61).

He goes onto to explain that, those in power have, a mythical power to decide who they will let die and live, “Destiny, divine justice and that which can bear witness to it, in other words man insofar as he is only the only being who, not having received his name from God, has received from God the power and mission to name, to give a name to his own kind and to give a name to things” (Derrida, 1989, 61). In this way it is the Godlike power that enables man to claim divinity to enact violence onto others, including women and other marginalized men. Derrida also contends that law, created and sustained through violence, is the ability to maintain and subordinate large groups of people. Law privileges certain groups over others, at the expense of the violence of the marginalized, creating large groups of specters or walking-dead, “There is something decayed or rotten in law, which condemns it or ruins it in advance. Law is condemned, ruined, in ruins, ruinous, if we can risk a sentence of death on the subject of law, especially when it’s a question of the death penalty. And what is on the death penalty that Benjamin speaks of what is “rotten” in law” (Derrida, 1989, 39). We can see that law has always, and always will, be the site of the decrepit continuation of power structures that forces women of

19 color and poor women to interact with the criminal justice system, and then uses violence to commodify them, “Apparently subjects of this droit [law] declare war in order to sanction a violence whose object seems natural (the other wants to lay hold of territory, goods, women [emphasis added]; he wants my death, I kill him” (Derrida, 1989, 39)

In this sense, prisons became the sites were large populations of women who, forced into dead-zones, become nothing more than the living-dead, in the name—defined by godlike specters—of law and justice. Thus, violence against them becomes invisible, ghostlike, unfathomable to understand and comprehend, with the voices of the marginalized unable to come through to the public sphere. As Foucault (1977) has contended when the transition of punishment moved into the shadows, public punishment became unacceptable, since the convicted and the executioner became the same; the condemned became a sympathetic martyr in the violence of the public torture/execution or humiliation (8). Thus, punishment moved into a place of hiding, where law and justice coincide and the convicted become the ultimate villain in the story, having thusly broken through a law put in place for the maintenance of the social hierarchy. There is no sympathy for the convicted, as they are hidden in the penal system and the damage and violence of the punishment has thus been viewed as justice:

Punishment, then will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms[…] Now the scandal and the light are to be distributed differently; it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, rendering always to entrust it to others, under the

seal of secrecy. It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence that double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes (9-10). Thus, punishment and violence on the side of the state, becomes indisputably the sympathetic character in the charade of subordination. It is difficult to dispense justice, and the justice itself takes on hidden characteristics; violence and subjugation of the body of the condemned becomes hidden and therefore acceptable. Any extra violence done upon them seems fitting, both because they are criminals deserving of some vengeance under the guise of punishment no matter the crime, and because they are sufficiently moved away from the public’s purview that any act of sexual violence committed from the prison guards and staff remains detached from the population’s eyes.

Thus, how can women successfully organize within a system that is inherently dehumanizing and othering? For law creates the conditions through which a person’s incarceration humanity is hidden and the violence done upon them is justified. However, for the women organizing to end their sexual violence, the law and policy in play is being used with the hopes that our perception of justice will be served for the survivors and punishment will be enacted on the abusers. Women are still writing complaints, they are still using lawsuits and going to policymakers asking for an end to the victimization. The most prominent piece of policy to eliminate sexual violence in prison is the Prison Rape

Elimination Act, or PREA, research has gone into some of the negative aspects of how

PREA has a gendered bias to it when it comes to advocating for the end of rape in women’s prisons (Buchanon, 2010; Capers, 2011; Dorr, 2009; Freedman, 2013; Jackson,

2013; Reid, 2013). While the policy has had good intentions, it ultimately falls short because it insistently defines who deserves justice for sexual violence and who does not.

It unfairly punishes the accuser when women inmates are involved and allows the

21 corrections officers to evade punishment until it becomes a scandal for the prison and falls under federal scrutiny. As such, PREA does not effectively address the power imbalances within women’s prisons especially, because women are constantly being observed and objectified by corrections officers, who are men (Cain, 2008). They are subjected to strip searches by the officers in what may then be excused as standard policy

(Periera, 2001).

While Derrida would suggest—correctly—that those methods can be futile, there is one important aspect of going to the law that can actually help to cultivate meaningful change: the possibility that media and press pick up on the stories and report them, shining a light on a subject that those in positions of power would rather keep quiet. What

Foucault argues in the beginning of Discipline and Punish, of the torture and death of an individual considered as justice being served, illustrates a gruesome inhumanity that no one is deserving of. A public display of death makes one question whether the crime is befitting of the punishment involved, and that the villainy of the act turn away from the criminal and onto those who were carrying out the justice. When torture moves public, then the focus of anger turns to the law which allows this kind of injustice. The survivors use this concept to their advantage; lawsuits and investigations brings public the type of torture that has moved within the walls of the penal systems. High-profile cases, local media investigations and committee hearings are a response to the turnings of private torture public, eliciting the horror of the people and shifting the focus from the criminal and onto the state-sanctioned act, onto the state. Consequently, the women are creating the conditions where injustice and horror from the justice system is now being moved back to the public, where once it was hidden to avoid such condemnation.

What is Resistance? And What Does It Look Like for Incarcerated Women?

What do we view, in the context of today’s political environment, as resistance?

Is it marching in permit acquired marches, chanting, demanding justice and an end to violence? Is it storming capital buildings and ending the continued subjugation and exploitation from capitalist classes? How does one define what resistance and justice are, especially when women are being subjugated in punitive settings because they have violated law? And when we consider the ideas that law and justice are subjugating and exploitative as described by Derrida, what does the mere act of survival for incarcerated women mean when they are subjected to sexual violence?

Throughout this paper I will contend that we need to find a different metric system to how we quantify organizing and how we view resistance, especially given the unique and troubling circumstances that women in incarceration face when they are resisting unwanted sexual advances from prison staff and guards. The power imbalance makes it difficult, nearly impossible, to resist, to demand punishment, to demand change and fight for the punishment of the offender. One can see, that even women surviving in situations where they are meant to be subjects of dead-zones, nearly living dead subjects of an exploitative system, means they are resisting.

Attempting to maneuver the laws and the justice system to ironically find justice oftentimes creates more problems for incarcerated women. However, we should not see them as failures of the women but of the multiple bureaucratic hoops women have to jump through to satisfy the criminal justice system when filing concerns about sexual violence. There are two very predominant ways at the federal level that women organize and collectively demand changes to the violence that women are subjected to while

23 incarceration: filing grievances and official complaints about their conditions, and at the legislation level and action with court litigations to for reparations and changes to the ways sexual abuse is handled in women’s prisons. PREA has done very little to help women who are assaulted by prison staff and guards. The Prison Rape Elimination Act was signed into law in 2003 to address prison rape, calling for a gathering of national statistics about rape and guidelines on how to address prison rape. In that study, according to Law (2012), 152 male and female prisoners nationwide were interviewed, but the cases focused predominantly on prisoner-on-prisoner rape in male prisons and hardly addressed women in prison, and the rape they experience by staff in the facilities.

She later goes on to conclude, “Not only does PREA neglect the situation specific to women in prison, but it has also had adverse effects on women who attempt to alleviate the isolation of incarceration by forming intimate relationships with their fellow prisoners. Prison rules penalize women for any physical contact” (69). Not only are women completely ignored with the persistent issue of rape by prison staff, but any intimate contact with other inmates themselves are subject to being punished for sexual misconduct under the law.

Grievances, though not as prevalent in mainstream as lawsuits or media exposure, are one of the ways women inmates have attempted to challenge and change poor prison conditions. Grievances and complaints tend to remain behind prison walls themselves, but women continue to file because of, “their conditions of confinement, including the abuse and neglect by the prison administration” (Law, 2012, 111). However, though grievances are used by prisoners, women have been disenfranchised because the grievances are rarely taken seriously and faces apathetic staff and review board that will

24 never take a complaint from a prisoner seriously, especially because it is criminals filing the grievances themselves. Especially in regard to sexual misconduct, a prisoners’ word would never be believed against a member of the staff (Law, 2012, 112). One prisoner understood that filing grievances might be unhelpful but was necessary to take more pervasive action to change prison conditions, ‘“Most women know the grievance process is futile, unfair, and not complied with so they won’t use it,’ stated a woman in Illinois.

She, however, files grievances because, under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a prisoner must exhaust the facility’s grievance system before seeking court intervention”

(Law, 2012, 112).

Retaliation is also an issue that women face when they report sexual violence from staff, often by the entirety of the staff, where they face segregation, write-ups and intimidation. Women reporting face the double burden of this revictimization and retraumatizatoin where even their possibilities of leaving the prison itself is threatened:

Women raped by prison staff face not only a lack of justice, but also risk administrative harassment and retaliation for complaining. Dawn Amos stated that when two women were physically and sexually abused, they were transferred from the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility (CWCF) in Canon City to a prison in Denver while the offending officer remained, unreprimanded, on the job. A prisoner at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) stated that, for prisoners who report sexual misconduct, staff makes their lives “a living hell.” Staff often strike back at these women by “tearing up your room” or arbitrarily “making restrictions.” Former ORW staff corroborated prisoners’ testimonies, stating that women who reported sexual abuse were intimidated by staff members and subjected to lengthy periods of time in solitary confinement, where cells often had feces and blood smeared on the wall (Law, 2012, 66). Women have also faced more violent retaliation, including segregation and involuntary transfers after disclosing sexual violence. One inmate, after being transferred for reporting a rape, was held down and choked by seven to eight officers while they spat in her face. Another was found with contraband and drugs, and though she demanded that

25 she be tested since she had no drugs in her system for the eight years she was in prison, she was prosecuted by the district court, which was ultimately dropped (Law, 2012, 66-

7). The criminal justice system often overlooks the inmates and their stories because they have committed crimes and were then labeled bad, “The lack of support and the very real threat of retaliation, both officially and informally, are often compounded by the perception of prisoners as ‘bad girls’—because of both their crime backgrounds and the assumptions that they have granted sexual access to man in the past. In addition, prison administrators often presume that incarcerated women are more likely to false charges”

(Law, 2012, 68). As such, women are often overlooked and not believed when there is legitimate credibility to their stories of sexual violence and are blamed for having any sexual contact with guards, on the premise that they may have desired it.

In such a way, coming together in lawsuits to demand changes has become one of the possible ways that women have been able to demand justice, and even recognition that their stories were legitimate and that the state itself is neglectful of punishing the offenders, while the inmates are protected from retaliation from the staff at the correctional facilities. For example, according to Law (2012) “Women have filed lawsuits to stop conditions that allow staff to sexually abuse and prey upon them. While these suits have not stopped sexual abuse and exploitation altogether, they have established that staff sexual misconduct does occur and draws public attention to these realities” (73-4). Women work together, often pooling resources and telling stories, so that a successful lawsuit can be litigated. For instance, five women filed a lawsuit in

Washington State; three women in California filed where there were held in a male detention center, held down by the male prisoners and raped by the male prison staff; in

1996, women in Michigan filed two suits against the MDOC, Neal v. MDOC and Nunn v.

MDOC, where 440 women signed on to Neal, stating that they had been suffering from sexual violence and invasion of property, along with retaliation for reporting staff misconduct (Law, 2012, 74-5). In Nunn v. MDOC, 31 women in two prisons filed, stating that they had been sexual assaulted, raped, and have had threats of physical assaults, “The women also claimed that MDOC officials had been aware of the sexual assaults, but had done little to either investigate or to discipline their employees” (Law, 2012, 75). Not only were the women able to file lawsuits against the guards and staff for their sexual assaults, they were also able demand changes to policy regarding the offenders who were not charged with sexual misconduct and were able to continue working in the facilities.

New policies were enforced regarding strip searches, pat downs, as well as limiting the transportation of female inmates by male guards and their ability to remain in the medical examining rooms with them. In even more extreme cases, lawsuits like the

1996 Lucas v. White in California against the Bureau of Prisons ended in changes to the ways women inmates were safely able to report sexual misconduct, “The settlement agreement also forced the BOP to make system-wide changes to its protocol for investigating claims of staff misconduct. Under the settlement, the BOP was ordered to set up a confidential hotline or other confidential reporting mechanism, provide medical and psychological treatment for women who had (or have) been abused and establish new training programs on sexual misconduct for both staff and prisoners” (Law, 2012, 75). In accordance with Derrida, these agreements seem superficial to the inherent violence that law and justice creates for the inmates in the prison; blanket proposals of change force the conversation away from the systemic oppression that is created from incarceration

27 and the prison industrial complex. While these stories may be successes, they hide the ways the laws create the conditions for women’s sexual violence in prisons and jails.

Where lawsuits might fail or taking extended periods of time and resources to resolve, media pressure and reporting their sexual assaults publicly has had the same effect as signing onto lawsuits especially when there may not be enough resources to pool for long litigations; negative press tends to be the way for prison reform, especially when facilities refuse to change or update policies to remedy the situation. One woman, by the name of Barrilee Bannister, along with 77 other women were shipped to an all-male private prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in Arizona after the passing of Measure 11 in Oregon led to an explosion in the women’s prison population. While in the prison, staff demanded strip teases in exchange for marijuana, and became more aggressive to the point of guards raping several of the women;

Bannister had been placed in segregation after reporting and refused food, “Once out of segregation, Bannister called outside friends and told them her story. They, in turn, informed the media. The media attention led to the return of some of the women to

Oregon, where they filed a federal suit, resulting in public apology, a promise of stricter rules concerning sexual abuse, and the reimbursement of attorney’s fees. The negative publicity also led to suspension and dismissal of several CCA staff members” (Law,

2012, 73). Because women were able to tell their stories on the outside with media picking up the stories and the negative press to for changes and which led to public lawsuits against the for-profit prison industry.

Media is an extremely useful tool in reporting injustices that are being done on women in prisons. It is necessary to break through the apparent mythical invisibility of

28 women’s experiences in prisons, especially when mainstream media tends to remain silent on the plight of women inmate and focuses solely on men’s experiences in incarceration. However, news segments and media streaming to the public is an important part of garnering viewers’ attentions and outrage, often leading to changes in policy for sexual misconduct and abuse against the women. As was the case for Bannister and the women in for-profit male prisons, garnering public attention was vital in changes to the prison and the return of some of the women to Oregon:

The power of the media became evident when, in 1999, national television journalist Geraldo Rivera’s report on official sexual misconduct in prison was cited several times during a House debate about prison-related legislation. In response, the MDOC adopted a new rule the following year: “a news media representative shall not be allowed to use or possess a camera or other audio or visual recording device while on a visit with a prisoner.” The rule applies only to individual prisoners. The rule allows media representatives to interview prisoners by telephone or on a visit, but telephone conversations can (and will) e monitored and recorded. In addition, prison rules only allow prisoners to call the 20 phone numbers on their approved telephone access list. Phone numbers can only be added or deleted every six months. MDOC rules also limit a person to being on a visitor list of only one prisoner to whom she is not closely related. Again, list changes are only allowed every six months (Law, 2012, 122). If media coverage on what goes on behind prison bars is not as important, then rules and stricter policies regarding visitation, and who could speak to reporters and journalists would not have been implemented. Media has the potential to change the ways in which women inmates are viewed on the outside, giving them a voice where they would have remained voiceless, and outing the dangers that face women while in prisons. Where mainstream media has failed, women have attempted to find new ways to breaking the strict monitoring from staff and guards to get their stories to the outside, “Instead of waiting passively for others to take note of and report their concerns, women in prison are telling their own stories; some have used pre-existing alternative media, whether radical

29 feminist journals or prison publications, while other have created their own outlets”

(Law, 2012, 128). The meanings behind women sharing their stories, and airing their grievances help are twofold, “They challenge existing stereotypes and distortions of prisoners and prison life, framing and correcting prevailing (mis)perceptions. They also boost women’s sense of self-worth and agency in a system designed to not only isolate and alienate its prisoners but also erase all traces of individuality” (Law, 2012, 128).

While resistance always seem less than what is successful, the methods and results of the collective actions incarcerated women do is successful in that it pressures those in powers to demand changes to policies and reforms in the ways women are being treated or can report sexual violence while in prison. Although, objectively, any reforms or litigation that has been put into place has not effectively changed the experiences of women inmates, it is symbolically representative of the decay of the law and violence that subjugates women in mass incarceration; if law’s sole purpose means incarcerated women’s oppression and exploitation, changes in the law represent how pressure has demanded that exploitation’s end. The decay of the violence that maintains this legislation as it decays and loses its power of control over people, has transformed into calls for reform and changes to policy, a transition to maintain those powers, instead of the destruction of the social institution that routinely exploits women’s bodies and women’s labors:

Rather, fear of the latter and mistrust of itself indicate its declining vitality. It begins to set itself ends, with the intention of sparing law-preserving violence more taxing manifestations. It turns to fraud, therefore, not out of moral considerations, but for fear of the violence that it might unleash in the defrauded party[…]For, in prohibiting fraud, law restricts the use of wholly nonviolent means because they could produce reactive violence. This tendency of law has also played a part in the concession of the right to strike, which contradicts the interests of the state. It grants this right because it

forestalls violent action the state is afraid to oppose. Did not workers previously resort at once to sabotage and set fire to the factories? To induce men to reconcile their interests peacefully without involving the legal system, there is, in the end, apart from all virtues, one effective motive that often enough puts into the most reluctant hands pure instead of violent means; it is the fear of mutual disadvantages that threaten to arise from violent confrontation, whatever the outcome might be (Benjamin, 290). As such, one can see both the concession to using both the legal means to fight injustices and policies changing the treatment of inmates, both in reporting sexual abuse and preventing sexual harassment and violence from happening because the powers in play do not want to resort to more legitimating violence to maintain exploitation from the state. As Benjamin contends, the concession comes from both players; the ability to strike was agreed upon by labor workers and legislative powers because of previous, more extreme measures to air grievances and demand better pay and working conditions.

Likewise, women’s abilities to file complaints and participate in lawsuits about the assaults and harassment they are experiences are concessions where the state allows some measure of reporting with the hopes given to women so that they can expect change or justice. However, it is notable that women have not conceded themselves to this concession. Because the state is adamant on keeping what goes on in prison secluded inside the prison walls, women go to the media in complete disregard for these concessions that the state has made. As Foucault has made the distinction of punishment in prison a private venture, where women do not garner the sympathies of the public and the state is not held accountable for their violent actions against prisoners’ bodies.

Women have continued to push forward towards demanding media write their stories, their experiences, and the violence they face as a result of their incarceration.

Lastly, even the ways in which survivors have come together, pooling resources, is indicative of resisting methods of exploitation. In her new research, Silvia Federici

(2018) speaks of the commons, where women in situations of marginalization can pool resources and, more importantly knowledge, for survival in subjugation in capitalist economies. For survivors in prison, the commons of both resources and knowledge help women to file grievances and to come together to afford lawyers for lawsuits against the prison facilities and the state. Federici also understands that the commoning for historic social justice movements has enabled the remembering of such movements, to bring attention to those who had historically been marginalized and had their extermination, the stealing of their land and then poisoning of their resources. She highlights such importance in the communing with regards to the Standing Rock Movements to oppose the pipeline running through their lands:

Appropriations of urban and rural spaces are being constantly reenacted, resulting in an increasing number of settlements where space and resources are shared, decisions about daily reproduction are collectively taken, and family relations are redefined. Moreover, the communing activities that are created under emergency conditions do not disappear without leaving some traces, although not always visible to the naked eye. The great camp at Standing Rock, where thousands went in a sort of political pilgrimage, to help, learn, and witness with their own eyes this historic event, has produced a new awareness in the U.S. social justice movements and a connection with the struggle of indigenous people that so far had only been achieved at local levels at best. Similarly, the communing reproductive activities organized in more than six hundred U.S. cities in the fall of 2011, at the height of the Occupy movement, has begun to change how politics is done in ways that were only typical of feminist organizations. The need for a politics that refuses to separate the time of political organizing from that of reproduction is a lesson that many Occupiers have not forgotten and is one of the mains themes of this volume (Federici, 2018, 5). One of the important conceptions of commoning in social justice movements is the coming together of activists and organizers, of survivors and others, is to learn the struggles of the marginalized in movements. For Standing Rock, the essential fight was for the purification of their water and the protection of their land from corporate greed that would poison their water through oil pipelines. In it the public learned of the ways in

32 which indigenous populations and their land was still being exploited by the United

States Government and, by extensions, the citizens who deem it acceptable to ignore their plight. The same can be said of incarcerated survivors who aim to expose to the public the abuses that they face, which whether explicitly or not is endorsed by the United States

Government.

Chapter 3 Sexual Violence Against Incarcerated Women

Over the past years, rates of sexual violence reported against incarcerated women have drastically increased; while society’s image of prison rape is masculine, inmate on inmate assault, incarcerated women face a substantial threat of sexual violence that is committed against them by the corrections officers in charge of supervising. Four distinct women’s prison facilities, New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Corrections Facility; Lowell

Correctional Institution in Central Florida; Julia Tutwiler Women’s Prison in Wetumpka,

AL; and the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, Pa., have been placed under federal investigation after it was revealed that prison guards were sexually abusing their female inmates. For Edna Mahan, the number of adult inmates reporting instances of sexual abuse or harassment rose from 9 to 97 in just two years (Hernandez, 2018). At

Lackawanna County, six corrections officers and one former officer were charged with sexually abusing female inmates (Haag, 2018). In Central Florida, the federal investigation against Lowell came after a 2015 Miami Herald investigation, where three dozen former and current inmates were forced to trade sexual favors for such necessities as soap, toilet paper, and menstrual products:

The women described a system of flagrant sexual extortion and other abuses. They said guards illegally smuggled drugs, tobacco and other contraband into the facility, used excessive force against inmates for minor infractions such as talking in the chow hall and forced women to perform degrading acts, such as exposing themselves. Among other allegations: Officers spit in their faces, slammed them into concrete walls, and often came into dorms and rampantly destroyed all their personal items, including family pictures, by pouring coffee and bleach on them (Brown, 2018). The cases from Central Florida illustrate a trend of prison officers, usually men, using their power to control women and demand sexual services from them. If they refuse the sexual advances of the officers, there is retaliation that could be loss of privileges, even

34 the loss of necessities to survive in prison. As such, women inmates are likely to be revictimized and traumatized twice; once by the offending officer who makes advances on her, and by the system if she resists such advances. In Alabama, the staff was charged for sexual misconduct at the Julia Tutwiler’s Prison for Women by the nonprofit group the Equal Justice Initiative and asked the Justice Department to conduct investigations alleged incidences of sexual abuse and rape that occurred at the prison between 2009 and

2011 (CNN, 2012).

Prisons across the country have had instances of large-scale scandals of sexual misconduct against women inmates that have resulted investigations by the Department of Justice, arrests and changes to prison policies, as well as formal apologies from the state’s where the prisons reside. While women are still being victimized and face the fears of retaliation from the same staff that are abusing them, they are using the various ways discussed in previous sections to resist and hold both the offenders—and in the larger scope, the state and the prison industrial complex—accountable for the failure of their safety and demanding justice.

Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women

The Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women was opened in December 1942 in

Wetumpka, Alabama. The prison was named after prison reformist Julia Tutwiler, called the “Angel of the Stockades” who was a noted Alabama educator and activist for inmate education, classification, and improving prison conditions. According to the Alabama

Department of Corrections, “Tutwiler serves as the receiving unit for all female inmates coming in to the state prison system. The facility has a mental health unit, medical infirmary, and units for inmates who are pregnant or aged and/or infirmed. Additionally,

Tutwiler has an auditorium, a chapel, and offers substance-abuse treatment and administrative ancillary services” (“Tutwiler Prison,” 2019). The prison’s capacity caps at 975 inmates, and includes a female death row unit, and is considered a close custody facility.

In 2007, the Justice Department report found that Tutwiler maintained the highest rates of sexual assault among prisons for women and 11th overall of those evaluated across the Unites States. In 2012, the Montgomery-based nonprofit organization, the

Equal Justice Initiative asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged incidents of sexual abuse and rape of female inmates at the prisons that occurred between 2009 and

2011, “The group claims that more than ‘20 Tutwiler employees have been transferred or terminated in the past five years for having illegal sexual contact with prisoners’” (CNN

Wire Staff, 2012). According to the Equal Justice Initiative [Henceforth, EJI], between

2004 and 2011, the Corrections Department, “has received ‘dozens of complaints of sexual misconduct’ between male staff and female inmates and reports of women becoming pregnant after being raped by guards. Between 2006 and 2011, according to the report, several women inmates were sexually assaulted or coerced into sexual favors in exchange for contraband such as food and toiletries” (Sayre, 2012). According to the report by EJI, inmates were subjected to harassment including touching, taunting and verbal abuse; the Department of Correction failed to report the number of sexual assault incidents; women who had reported abused were retaliated against by prison officials; and that the prison failed to enforce restriction of male guards being around inmates as they use restrooms (Sayre, 2012). The report also included instances were certain officers were considered a sexual predator by one inmate, demanding oral sex from prisoners in

36 exchange for gifts, new uniforms or underwear; an officer raped a prisoner, leaving her pregnant, and spent only 180 days in jail for confessing to the crime; and highlighted certain blind spots in the prison where sexual assaults and activity can occur without detection from cameras (Boyle, 2012) Around a third of employees at Tutwiler have raped female inmates and a quarter of the prison population reported abuse including sexual harassment, dehumanizing behavior, excessive use of force and inadequate medical care; and over several years multiple women have made similar abuse allegation which were corroborated by current and former staff. In the conclusion from the report:

Altogether, 36 percent of all staff members were involved in some form of sexual abuse, creating a “toxic environment.” Of 223 letters from prisoners, 25 percent of them described sexual misconduct, and 55 percent mentioned “vile and degrading language directed at prisoners.” Nevertheless inmates are hesitant to report the systemic abuse because of backlash for filing complaints. In cases when women did speak up, they “were placed in segregation with limited or no access to a telephone, visitors, or programs for an extended time period,” forced to undergo polygraph tests to determine if they were lying, and “verbally harassed” by staff members (Townes, 2014). On January 22, 2014, Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels for the Civil

Right Division concluded, “Our investigation has revealed serious systemic operational deficiencies at Tutwiler have exposed women prisoners to harm and serious risk of harm from staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse and sexual harassment. These problems have been festering for years, and are well known to Alabama prison officials. Remedying these deficiencies is critical to ensuring constitutionally protected treatment of women prisoners at Tutwiler and will promote public safety” (Department of Justice, 2014). The report argued that prison official at the Alabama Department of Correction and the

Tutwiler Prison violated the women’s constitutional rights by failing, “To take reasonable steps to protect them from hard due to sexual abuse and sexual harassment caused by

37 correctional staff. Specifically, the Justice Department found that prison officials have long been on notice of the risks to women prisoners and have chosen to ignore them”

(Department of Justice, 2014)

During the investigation by the department, dozens of prisoners were interviewed in April and, “Investigators also received more than 200 letters from prisoners, roughly a quarter of Tutwiler’s prison population at the time, detailing a range of inmates’ concerns about sexual abuse and harassment, according to the report” (Boyle, 2014). It is no wonder, however, that more inmates came forward to the investigators, since the reports to prison officials about the claims of rape and sexual abuse went unreported and unresolved. According to the Associated Press (2014), “When prisoners at a notorious

Alabama women’s prison came forward to complain of sexual abuse and harassment, state investigators time and again classified the complaints as unfounded or unsubstantiated and often recommended that the matters be closed without further action.” In three years, only a small fraction of the cases were considered fully credible

(Associated Press, 2014).

Several prisoners came forward with their own stories of sexual harassment and sexual abuse from the staff, including former inmate Stefanie Hibbett, “‘It’s an ongoing thing, a daily thing,’ said Stefanie Hibbett, 31, a former Tutwiler inmate. ‘You see women raped and beaten, and nothing is ever done.’ Hibbett said she was the victim of sexual assault in November 2010. She said she told the prison’s warden about the assault, but no charges were ever filed against the prison guard she says attacked her. An

Alabama Judge dismissed a civil suit she filed in the case in August” (CNN Wire Staff,

2012). Another inmate, Monica Washington:

Was raped by a prison guard and gave birth to a daughter three years ago. State officials decided to charge the guard, Rodney Arbuthnot, with ‘custodial sexual misconduct’ rather than a more serious crime and served only six months in jail. In a telephone interview from Tutwiler. In a telephone interview from Tutwiler, Ms. Washington told the Times that prisoners are still fearful and that conditions remain bad. “Right now, for me personally, it’s still the same as far as the officers,” she said. “It’s like an act of Congress to get the things you need just to live. It’s inhumane for inmates to be here, period (Equal Justice Initiative, 2014). Washington, who was a current inmate at the time, braved retaliation to tell her story to the EJI, especially criticizing the ways in which prison officials are still ignoring survivors of sexual violence in the prisons themselves. Even with the fears of staff abuses, segregations and other punitive measures, more than 200 prisoners wrote letters to the Justice Department during their investigation to air their concerns about the sexual violence that continues to take place at the Tutwiler Prison. The women both speak to officials, investigators, and even went to other forms of media such as blogs from the non-profit watchdog EJI if they felt more comfortable speaking of their experiences to activist oriented organizations. It was the reports and accusations from the EJI that launched the Justice Department Investigation, and subsequently shined the light upon the injustices that the women at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.

Lowell Correctional Institution

The Lowell Correctional Institution and Annex is a women’s prison, housing inmates as young as fourteen years old in Ocala, Florida, as a part of Marion County. The facility houses 2,696 inmates though the prison itself has a capacity of only 1,456 inmates

(“Lowell,” 2018). Amidst the overcrowding, it has become the largest women’s prison in the United States. For the women of Lowell, the abuses they have faced at the hands of prison guards and staff has culminated in activists and organizations going public and demanding the launch of a federal investigation, which was successful in May. In April,

“John Gore, acting attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice, sent a letter to

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, informing him, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Julie

Jones, secretary for the Department of Correction, that the department had launched a federal probe into conditions at Lowell” (Brown, 2018).

In December of 2015, The Miami Herald published an investigative report into the abuses and dehumanization of the women at the Lowell Correctional Institution entitled, “Beyond Punishment.” For the women of the facilities, the abuse has been nearly intolerable, ranging from physical, emotional, and sexual. One inmate, Casey Hodge, during her entry into the prison, was forced to remove her glass eye, to make sure she didn’t have any contraband hiding in her eyes socket. When she pulled it out with her fingers, “The officers nearly fell off their chairs, she said, mocking her like children and pretending to vomit. ‘I felt like I was a kid, being bullied all over again,’ said Hodge, who had never been in trouble with the law before her arrest on drug trafficking charges in 2012” (Brown, 2015). However, some of the worst abuses has been guards and staff forcing the women into having sex, for basic necessities like soap or sanitary pads or some extra privileges; women who don’t comply with the officers’ demands are often punished with job terminations, threatened separation and segregation, loss of belonging or even worse, loss of privileges of visiting their families (Brown, 2015). According to the investigation from The Miami Herald:

Documents show inmates have complained that officers from the Florida Department of Corrections spit in their faces, threaten to slam them into concrete and call them whores, bitches and porch monkeys. They say male prison staffers tramp them through the showers, make them flash their breasts on a whim and force them to beg for basic necessities, like toilet paper, soap and sanitary napkins. But the worst indignity of all, women say, is that the officers—both male and female—use their positions of power to pressure inmates to have sex and to perform indecent acts. Women alleged

in complaints, filed between 2011 and May 2015, that the sex happens in bathrooms, closets, the laundry and officers’ stations. Sometimes officers go into dorms in the middle of the night, taking women to isolated areas of the prison, they say. “We’re prey. It’s like a lion with a bunch of gazelles. It’s a perfect breeding ground for sexual predators, and it’s a game to them who is f—ing who and who is involved with who (Brown, 2015). For nearly ten years, however, the abuse of the women has gone unnoticed, unreported, and unbelieved. Accordingly, Lowell had been on the Justice Department’s radar for several years. ‘“It appears that Lowell has a huge problem with sexual abuse of prisoners.

Normally, at women’s prisons, you get one or two bad actors, but it seems that Lowell has a real cultural problem, and the Florida Department of Corrections, in general, has a huge cultural problem in the way they handle sexual abuse,’ said Julia Abbate, the former deputy chief in charge of corrections in DOJ’s civil rights division” (Brown, 2018). It becomes apparent, as the discussion on Derrida’s critique of law and justice, that sexual violence is par for the course of the culture of the criminal justice system, and not inherently about one or two individuals causing problems.

In April, the investigation was launched into whether there was evidence to suggest that the inmates were being subject to conditions that were in violate of their

Eighth Amendment rights against Cruel and Unusual Punishment; the conclusion of the

Miami Herald investigation found that there was no protocol for punishing corrections officers for sexual misconduct. Those with repeated offenses were simply transferred to other prisons, and most complaints by inmates were either not investigated at all or were closed as unsubstantiated (Brown, 2018). In a statement by then warder Angela Gordon, along with other FDC officials, contend “That the alleged abuse—physical, mental and sexual—is not as widespread as inmates suggest. Prisoners, they say, tend to lie and manipulate to get officers in trouble or to get something they way” (Brown, 2015). It is

41 this belief—that prison staff and guards were being unfairly targeted by prisoners—that allow many of them to get away with sexual violence with nothing more consequently than a transfer to another facility. All the while, the women are being punished with segregation and lack of necessities to survive in prison.

But there is a deeper, and darker history at Lowell that illustrates the extent to which the women’s prisons will cover-up sexual misconduct and abuse from guards, and how women will continue speaking out against the abuse, even after the threat of retaliation.

On October 1, inmate Latandra Ellington was found dead at Lowell, from repeated blows to the stomach. Her aunt had received a letter from her a week prior, stating that she was concerned for her life and safety after an officer, Sgt. Patrick

Quiercioli, was threatening to kill her after walking in on him having sex with one of the other inmates and threatening to file a report on him. And according to attorneys an independent autopsy, “show[ed] blunt force trauma and hemorrhaging to her body from what appeared to be punches and kicks” (Sanburn, 2014). After Ellington’s death,

Quiercioli had been investigated in her death, and has been arrested twice before starting his position with the DOC, and has a filing of 22 complaints for use-of-force while working for the DOC (Sanburn, 2014). According to investigative reporters in the Miami

Herald, it had been unclear whether or not Quiercioli had faced disciplinary actions for the 22 complaints:

Although he has 22 use-of-force incidents in his file, it is not clear whether he has a disciplinary record. The Department of Corrections had not released his personnel file as of Wednesday. Nor did it respond to question whether he—or any other officers—had been suspended or placed on leave in connection with Ellington’s death. Ellington’s aunt, Algerine Jennings, said in an interview with the Herald that she feared that her niece was being

sexually abused or knew about the abuse of other inmates and had complained to some of the commanders at the prison and feared retaliation. The department said on Wednesday it had no record of any complaints or grievances filed by Ellington. Jennings said her niece was too afraid to tell her why the sergeant was terrorizing her (Brown, 2014). Women who have seen sexual abuse from prison guards often face the threat of severe retaliation for wanting to report the offending officers. Ellington, in her attempt to do what was right and stop someone from using their power over other inmates, was killed.

In July of 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a federal civil rights investigation into sexual abuse of inmates and other constitutional violations at Lowell.

Part of the investigation, besides tours of the prison and interviews with the inmates, was a community meeting organized by the investigations, “Who wanted to hear from families as part of their probe into whether there is a pattern or practice of civil rights abuses and other unlawful conduct at the prison” (Brown, 2018). At the community meeting, about 100 people attended, some wearing “I survived Lowell” t-shirts, to discuss the treatment they and other loved ones have received at the facility. They were able to confirm how rape, assault and smuggling of contraband was routine behavior by officers (Brown, 2018). Some parents of the inmates came to describe both the physical and sexual abuse that their daughters had received at the hands of the prison staff, some who were teenagers and feared reprisal from the officers and the staff in charge of the prison. One former inmate, Rachel Kalfin, told the investigators, “She spent 165 days in confinement—isolation from other inmates—after reporting that she was sexually assaulted by a corrections officer. She filed a complaint that was dismissed, she said.

‘They called me a liar, and then my mail to my family was being thrown away,’ she said.

‘I have friends there who are afraid to speak up because they’re afraid their parents aren’t going to get their mail” (Brown, 2018). Despite the fears, many former inmates, and their

43 parents spoke out to the investigators, demanding tangible changes for the women who were there. Even with the threat of revenge, and punishment from those in the prison, many came to the meeting and spoke of not only the sexual abuse that was happening consistently, but of the subpar nutritional foods being served, along with the medical neglect that has led to the injuries and deaths of inmates.

The call from survivors and their loved ones was not only about the changes in policies that could prevent future abuses from happening, but also a demand for justice and punishment for those who were still being protected by the Florida Department of

Corrections despite being offender. Because though the Laura Cowell, from the

Department of Justice assured many that the investigation would be how inmates report sex abuse and how the facility responds while also expanding their investigation to other constitutional violations, “That prompted one family member to question whether the investigation will produce any substantive changes since it will not hold officers and staff responsible for inmates who have been beaten, raped, or died as a result of medical neglect” (Brown, 2018). While the investigation is still ongoing as it could take nearly three to five years to conclude, the investigation had started because the survivors and their families saw injustice and violence being done onto them and others and demanded those in power to investigate and change how the toxic environment.

Lackawanna County Prison

The Lackawanna County Prison is located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The prion, originally built in the mid 1880’s for a population of 110 prisoners, was renovated and expanded in 1999 to house approximately 1,200 inmates. Both men and women pre-trial detainees, along with those who are sentenced to one day less than five years are housed

44 within the facility. The mission of the county prison, according to their website is the,

“Incarceration of person(s) adjudicated as offenders or suspected of being offenders of the law” (“Lackawanna,” 2019). The county prison boasts, like many other prisons noted here, several rehabilitation programs, such as Drug and Alcohol Counseling, Alcoholic

Anonymous meetings, Anger Management while also offering Parenting Classes and computer trainings, as the goal of the prison itself is to, “Act as both a deterrent to criminal activity and to act as a force for the rehabilitation of the individual”

(“Lackawanna,” 2019). Accordingly, the website has resources about PREA compliance investigations going back to 2015. For between 2015 to 2017, only one instances of staff sexual harassment or sexual misconduct has been considered credible and founded. In

2015, there were no incidences of staff misconduct report; for sexual harassment reports, there were only 6. In 2016, there were seven reported incidences of misconduct, with only 1 being proven founded, and sexual harassment by staff had 5 reported, with all complaints being labeled as unfounded. In 2017, the Lackawanna met and exceeded expectations in PREA compliance (“Lackawanna,” 2019).

But those stories are only the surface, since trouble and staff misconduct has been brewing in the county prison for almost twenty years, culminating in a multi-year investigation and several arrests within the community of Scranton. In 2018, six corrections officers, including one former officer, were charged with sexually abusing female inmates at Lackawanna County Prison; some officers had been assaulting inmates for over a decade. The abuse was a known routine within the prison, “where guards alerted one another if supervisors were approaching while they were having sex” (Haag,

2018). Inmates who may have wanted to report were then threatened to make their lives

45 miserable if they did report the abuse; the resulting charges for the seven corrections officers, were, “A result of a yearlong investigation by the attorney general’s office and a statewide grand jury. Mr. Shapiro said that many of the women who came forward with abuse allegations were reluctant to talk, leading him to believe there may be other women who were afraid to tell their stories” (Haag, 2018).

The subsequent arrests have been the second in a string of malicious corrections officers abusing their power to assault and abuse women. In 2014, suspended corrections officer Joseph Black was brought into court after two years of an investigation where he had been accused of sexually assaulting seven women inmates between 2002-2011. He had been facing 22 separate charges (Lange, 2014). According to newspaper reports on

Black:

Detectives filed 22 different sex charges, saying Black used his position of power to bribe female inmates into sexual relationship even raping them in secluded areas of the prison[…]Black was charged with rape and institutional sexual assault. Court papers list seven female inmates as Black’s alleged victims. The women told police Black would buy them gifts for sex. One woman said Black handcuffed her and raped her in her cell. According to court papers, the inmates and other corrections officers at first didn’t come forward because they feared retribution from Black (Lange, 2014). Ultimately, Black pled guilty to indecent exposure, unlawful restraint and official oppression. The deal had been a part of the plea deal set by prosecutors, and afterwards the judge had sentenced Black to three years and nine months in state prison with a maximum of eight years, followed by 10 years of probation. Had Black had gone to trial and been found guilty of sexual assault he would have been facing a 40 to 50 years sentence (Lange, 2015). Though Black did not serve the time he was supposed to, he did receive a harsher punishment for the charges that he pled guilty to. According to Bill

Fisher, from the Lackawanna County District Attorney’s Office, ‘“You’re responsible for

46 the care, custody, and control of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Our obligation is to protect them and I think that’s what our investigation was about” (Lange,

2015).

In 2016, a lawsuit was filed from four inmates and former inmates against the county prison, alleging sexual abuse and sexual harassment, which prompted the opening of a criminal probe and raid of documents at the Lackawanna County Administration building and County Prison, spanning almost twenty years back (“Attorney General,”

2017). In accordance with the lawsuit, the four women described being sexually assaulted, raped, and forced to strip for corrections officers for certain contraband, while others would demean and deride them. For example, former inmate of Lackawanna

Joanne Perri, was sexually harassed by corrections officer George McHale, along with others and was threatened if she did not comply:

During Perri’s incarceration in 2009 through 2010 c/o George McHale, during the week between Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, stuck his penis into Perri’s cell, and forced her to masturbate his penis, threatening to take her shower and recreation privileges away if she did not comply. During all of Perri’s incarcerations prior to that time, she had been constantly sexually harassed by McHale and other guards, being told that they wanted to ‘bend her over and hit that’ and ‘shove [their] dick in [her] mouth.’ Perri was specifically between the years 1999 and 2011 by officers Walsh and Slobodnek, forcing her to show them her private parts. In 2009, Perri began experience similar harassment from Maguire. This harassment began as verbal but escalated into groping and her being placed in the hole when she did not comply with the groping. Perri complained to c/o Snyder and c/o Shedlock, but they didn’t listen, telling her that she was dumb and that all she did was sleep all day. Perri filed multiple grievances, but they were destroyed and/or never responded to (Tammy Fox, 2016, 25-6)

Other defendants had clear understanding of the normal and routine abuses that were happening at Lackawanna and failed to properly investigate and punish corrections officers for clear violations and punished outsiders who attempted to help report the

47 sexual assaults happening at Lackawanna. “The John and Jane Doe County Employees intentionally and willfully, in conjunction with County Officials and Prison Officials mishandled, botched, and covered-up investigation the investigation with the aim of protected the Prison and [corrections officer] Schnipes, allowing Schnipes to continue to work at the prison and assault the Plaintiffs in this matter” (Tammy Fox, 2016, 33). When the subject of sexual violence in the prison was commented on and investigated, other officers used every means at their disposal to protect the accused, allowing them to continue working and abusing women at the prison; employees, themselves, who wanted to disclose sexual misconduct was punished through employment related retaliation

(Tammy Fox, 2016, 35). For women who would want to report, inmates at Lackawanna can be pushed in solitary or threatened with probation/parole violations; some women were physically and emotionally abused by the prison staff as retaliatory measurements and others were sexually abused again (Tammy Fox, 2016, 35). The lawsuit highlighted many of the ways that the staff and others at the prison continued the abuse of the inmates and cover-ups to protect the offenders so that they may continue to work there.

From the beginnings of the reports sexual abuse that was occurring at

Lackawanna, to the investigation that ended in the arrests of almost eight corrections officers, the inmates at Lackawanna County Prison have been working to tell their stories, both to the administrators at the prison and their families, in the hopes that changes would be made and women would have better protection and corrections officers would be held accountable for their actions. One prison inmate Mary Sloboda had held a sign up in the visiting room at Lackawanna to her mother, asking for assistance because she was being raped by corrections officers (Tammy Fox, 2016, 33). Though Black

48 himself was convicted, for nearly two years he was suspended with pay and was able to make bail during his arrest. Other corrections officers were able to continue work within the prison even though complaints had been made against them and their abusive behavior was considered an almost normal routine. For the women at the prisons, they have faced sexual assault and rape, and have almost lost their ability to go home and be with their families and have been put into isolation where they lose contact with their loved ones and others around them. Yet many have reached out to their families, to lawyers, to activists and even to the prison’s administration all in the hopes that their stories would be heard and believed. The system of incarceration allowed privileged and elite groups who were accused of the abuse to either go free or continue their abuse; women became routinely ignored or punished for writing their complaints, because they were stripped of their humanity by an institution that had othered them into the label criminal. When abuse becomes public, the bare minimum was introduced to offer the guise of justice, while protecting the cycle of abuse the women were facing. Marginalized groups maintain their positions in prison and exploitation, but privileged members are prioritized and kept safe from it.

Edna Mahan Correctional Facility

The Edna Mahan Correctional Facility is the state’s only women’s prison located in Clinton, New Jersey. The prison houses minimum to maximum security inmates and has a third unit that houses offenders with special mental health issues. The capacity of the prison is around 1,000 inmates and holds inmates that are of the ages of 16 years or older. The prison is famous for briefly holding Assata Shakur before she was broken out of prison and fled the country.

Sexual misconduct charges in Edna Mahan range back nearly thirty years, the most recent allegations have come to light in a slew of lawsuits, arrests, federal probes and a statewide investigation and investigation into the women’s prison in the state of

New Jersey. Stories of women being raped, sexually assaulted and harassed and abused by officers with little to no punishment or accountability, and retaliation of the inmates itself. This is a common theme throughout the detailed experiences of women telling or filing grievances, telling higher ups or other state investigators, and getting routinely ignored at best, and revictimized with physical and emotional abuse. Women continuously are in danger of even losing their freedom, their ability to go home through probation or parole if they come out and speak. Yet many speak up, to reporters and to other prisoners about their abuse. The same has happened and is continuing to happen at

Edna Mahan, despite the threats of retaliatory behavior; through media and lawsuits, the state was forced to hold a hearing on the abusive behavior and toxic culture surrounding the power imbalances between the guards and the inmates at the women’s prison.

Some of the earliest reporting on women coming forward detailing sexual assault at the prison was in 2008, when an inmate alleged being sexually assaulted by an officer who came into her cell on the pretense of a routine head count, and demanded she touch herself in front of him. When the inmate, Rocio Leon refused, it escalated:

Leon said the officer had done this before, asking whether she was “a freak.” Whether she ever had oral or anal sex. Whether he could perform sex acts on her. “No,” she told him. “Get out of my room.” Instead, Leon claims, the officer stuck his hand inside her sports bra and, amid a struggle, jammed his arm down her pants. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said in a recent interview, “whether to say something or scream.” It was December 2008, and Leon was just starting a 15-year sentence for manslaughter. The senior corrections officer had power over every facet of her life, and Leon said she feared what he would do with it. So she kept quiet. It would be her word against his. Over the next 18 months, more than a dozen women at the

Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County said they, too had been abused by the officer, Erick Melgar (Sullivan, 2018). These women, though they faced the abuse in 2008, feared so deeply that the corrections officer would make their entire existence at Edna Mahan miserable, decided not to file complaints at the offender, Melgar until well in 2010. In all, 16 women claimed they were being beaten or sexually abused by Melgar in between 2008 and 2010, and seven of them have formally accused the officer of the abuse in two separate lawsuits filed in state and federal court; in 2010, the state’s DOC went through proceedings to fire the corrections officer, not have him arrested and criminally charged. The official reason for

Melgar’s arrest was, “Conduct unbecoming of an officer and ‘undue familiarity,’ a vague, outdated term that experts say whitewashes serious allegations of sex abuse and keeps the public—and the officers’ potential future employers—in the dark” (Sullivan, 2018).

Accusations at the prison have only escalated; the report details the ways in which

Melgar was able to evade punitive measures with the help of other officers who were then fired for helping Melgar, who swapped posts with him and warned him when someone else was on the staff was headed in their unit (Sullivan, 2018). The firing of the officers went unnoticed, and prosecutors dropped any investigation of the incident until an advocate found the two lawsuits and posted them to his blog. Because the act and the accusations were then made public, local press began investigating and interviewing inmates, many of whom came forward and went public with their names, “The inmates are some of New Jersey’s most powerless women and, because of their criminal histories, the least likely to be believed […] NJ Advance Media does not typically identify alleged victims of sexual abuse. The six women who had filed the state lawsuit, as well as Leon, who is not a plaintiff, said they wanted to be named and go public” (Sullivan, 2018).

Despite the fear of retaliation, the women were not afraid to have their real names out into the public as they documented the abuse that they had faced in the hands of Melgar alone.

The lawsuit was against the women’s prison in December of 2017, charging that state officials had turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse and harassment by the guards on the inmates for years; the prison had been given high marks on PREA audits in 2016, despite inmates complaining of abusive behavior by the guards and staff. The lawsuit charges claim as above that sixteen inmates had been sexually harassed and assaulted by at least four guards, and that the state and the facility had did nothing to address their abuse, which the suit claimed was endorsed by the state’s DOC, which is now being accused of underreporting or not reporting sexual assault claims (Sherman, 2017). The state ignores the problems and claims of women, and many are fearful or despondent because their claims of harassment then do not go substantiated:

Bonnie Kerness, who heads the Prison Watch program for the American Friends Service Committee in Newark, said the administrators at Edna Mahan have had a long history of ignoring complaints. “In the over 25 years of monitoring, my experience has been that men in prison will call, write, have families let us know exactly what is going on. The women rarely do,” she said. “Sometimes this is complete fear, sometimes it’s the quid pro quo” (Sherman, 2017). The inmates at the prison have been living in a culture of fear, where their grievances tend to be ignored or worse, being punished for speaking up and speaking out. Other lawsuits, the one filed in Hunterdon County Superior Court, have claimed that more prison guards had propositioned women for sex, asked them to strip, walking into showers or rooms unannounced while the women were naked. Prison officer Jason

Mayes had threatened an inmate with punishment if she did not strip; when he did so,

Mayes had masturbated in front of her (Muscavage, 2018). Criminal investigations

52 ultimately indicted five corrections officers, one former officer, and one trade instructor on more than two dozen charges of sexual abuse and official misconduct; those indicted include Ahnwar Dixon, Brian Ambroise, Thomas Seguine, and Joel Mercado. Thomas

Seguine was convicted of second-degree official misconduct and sentenced to three years in prison. Former guard Ronald Coleman Jr. was arrested and charged with, “seven counts of second-degree official misconduct, two counts of second-degree sexual assault, two counts of second-degree conspiracy to commit sexual assault, one county of second- degree pattern of official misconduct, and three counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual contact” (Muscavage, 2018). The trades instructor, who has been at the prison since

2003, pleaded guilty to official misconduct in 2016 and was sentenced to three years in prison (Muscavage, 2018).

The arrests, lawsuits and claims of abuse by inmates prompted a state Senate hearing on the cycle of abuse that inmates had faced while incarcerated at Edna Mahan.

The hearings called on inmates, former inmates, former guards, experts, advocates and law enforcement officials to testify on what was happening behind the gates of the facility. The inmates reiterated the harassment and assaults that they had faced at the hands of staff and officers; one inmate, Cynthia Cupe was assaulted during her thirty-year sentence at the facility, right up until her release to a halfway house in 2016, and her complaints remained ignored (Muscavage, 2018). Another former inmate Lydia

Thormton also testified, detailing her experiences within the prison as she helped other inmates file complaints, and raising concerns with just how ineffective the abuse reporting system at the prison is for the women at the facility:

Lydia Thormton, who served four years at Edna Mahan before being released in 2014, testified before the committee recounting the experiences,

and observations she made while locked up. “Having worked in the infirmary for a year as a cleaner and then in the law library as a paralegal, I personally observed many things as well as helping women write complaints and observations,” said Thormton […] She raised issue with there not being an external agency to hear complaints from inmates against the state Department of Corrections, and said that there was a code of silence between guards, who would rather protect themselves than investigate allegations. Edna Mahan, she said, has a special investigations unit, but since it is located on the same compound as the guards the unit is supposed to investigate, conflicts of interest. “The conflict of interest is not only possible, it’s probable,” she said. “It’s impossible to have lunch with someone on Tuesday and then on Thursday read a report that they might have raped someone and actually seriously investigate” (Muscavage, 2018). Thormton’s testimony reveals the inherent difficulties of having investigators within the prison that are continuously working with other, that any type of impartial investigation would be futile when the investigators themselves are still personally connected to the officers themselves. Thormton’s testimony also highlight the ways in which some inmates come together to share resources, even knowledge, to help other inmates who have been experiencing abuse from prison guards. Thormton was able to use her knowledge, working as a paralegal in the prison’s library, in writing complaints or helping other inmates to write complaints. She was also able to use that knowledge to point out flaws in the ways that investigators handled sexual assault, coming forward when other women may have been too afraid to go public.

According to court documents, in Marianne Browne and Judith Vazquez,

Individually and on Behalf of All Others Similarly Situated, Plaintiffs, v. State of New

Jersey Department of Corrections, John Does 1-50 (fictitious names), Defendants (2018), instances of sexual abuses against inmates by corrections officers have dated as far back as 1994, with the women being subjected not only to sexual assault and rape, but with

“constant inappropriate sexual comments and innuendos directs at inmates, based on their gender, made in front of other inmates, corrections officers and administrators at the

54 facility. Female inmates regularly overheard lewd conversations, saw offensives images and witnessed the sexual harassment of other female inmates” (8). The prison has been the subject of rampant sexual violence committed by prison officials, with federal investigations and a lawsuit being leveled against the Defendants and the New Jersey

Department of Corrections. Two women specifically have filed claims against the state and the perpetrators, demanding redress for no action being committed against their assaulters, even though they, “Like everyone else at EMCFW, were well aware of the widespread and inescapable terror and victimizations. Plaintiffs were also well aware of the rampant inappropriate sexual relationships between corrections officers and inmates, as well as sexual harassment and abuse by corrections officers and inmates” (Mercer

County Courthouse 2018, 11).

In November one of the corrections officers, Brian Ambroise was acquitted of 2nd degree sexual assault and 2nd degree official misconduct charges, according to a press release from the Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s office. However, Ambroise is still awaiting trial for two counts of 2nd degree conspiracy to commit sexual assault involving two other victims at Edna Mahan, as well as 2nd degree official misconduct and one count of 2nd degree pattern of official misconduct (“Corrections Officer Acquitted,” 2018).

While Ambroise may have been acquitted, other positive changes have come about from the inmates going public with their stories and their allegations. Other lawsuits and criminal trials are still pending in the state, and state legislatures are presenting some resolutions to help the inmates limit their interaction with the men officers and change the ways the prison reports sexual abuse cases. Both bills were proposed following the public hearing; one bill would require that strip or body-cavity searches be conducting by an

55 officer of the same gender, “Who has undergone special training in the procedure; exceptions would be limited to emergency circumstances (“Lawmakers,” 2018). While some of the same concerns should be raised, because former inmates have explicitly stated that women officers are just as abusive as men, senators in the state have attempted to limit contact with the men. The other piece would require any employee who has reasonable cause to suspect that an inmate is being abused by another prison worker to report (“Lawmakers,” 2018). These more recent pieces of legislation are not the only bills that have passed the senate to help address the sexual abuse that is happening at the women’s prison. According to news reports:

Previously, the chamber approved bills mandating at least four hours of sexual-abuse training for corrections officers; requiring the state Office of Victims-Witness Advocacy to ensure the rights of female inmates who are victimized; and creating a commission tasked with studying the issue of sexual abuse behind bars and recommend reforms (“Lawmakers,” 2018). Lawmakers have attempted to address the issues at Edna Mahan, and while the changes are an attempt to minimize the sexual abuse of the inmates and help empower survivors during the reporting process, if legislatures do not understand the underlying issues of policing, how women inmates are perceived as completely powerless and other once their identity is entrenched in being criminal and how officers, who then see them as nothing but chattel or their bodies exploited sexually.

Women who are currently incarcerated, especially at Edna Mahan, have faced nearly three decades of sexual exploitation and abuse. Like other women in facilities who have spoken up and shared their stories of sexual abuse, the inmates of Edna Mahan have come forward, risked retaliation and put their names out about the abuse they were facing. Many who have been fearful of telling someone, whether because their record would make them less likely to be believed or they’re likely to face anger and violence

56 from the offending guard or those who are protecting that officer. Some had waited until they were free from the threat of continued abuse, and others filed lawsuits with their names to possibly illustrate that they did not fear what other officers could do to them if they didn’t stay quiet. Others were able to use their knowledge as legal aids or their observations on the prison goings on that they could help women write complaints and provide other support to them.

Chapter 4: Conclusion

Women everywhere have gone public about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual violence. Stories of women and girls being exploited at the hands of powerful people who do not face the consequences of their actions, demanding changes be made to the ways we view rape and hold offenders accountable for their actions. Despite years of subjugation where women have been viewed as nothing but chattel and property under the constant thumb of privileged men, women have been forefronts of liberation movements because of the understanding of injustices being done upon themselves and other women.

Inmates in incarceration are no different. They have used whatever means at their disposal to report abuse, see the officers or staff members either fired or been held accountable. That means that women are going off to media outlets, prompting investigative reporting and interviews with other inmates, to lawsuits filed against the state and the facilities, filing complaints and grievances in the hopes of having their accusations substantiated, and the offending officer punished. Even when there is a fear of reprisal, some reach out to other family members telling them of their fears and what goes on in the prisons so that family members can seek help or answers. Others have gone public with their real names in lawsuits and investigations, no longer afraid but demanding answers and reparations for their victimization by what essentially is state- sanctioned sexual violence. Some have also participated in hearings from powerful state legislatures, hoping to stir those with the ability to make changes create policy to address those issues.

By and large, contrasting from the Prisoners’ Strike, incarcerated women fighting sexual exploitation are not striking. The means and the symbolism around the strike were an end to labor exploitation that is common in all prisons but are only viewed as being suffered by men in incarceration. Striking was a tool used to end those labor injustices, to end chattel slavery; it was for the prisons to lose money through work stoppages. News and federal press picked up on these injustices because organizers worked to focus the message on the ways the prison industrial complex uses and extracts prisoners’ labor for profit and wealth. It brought to light the ways prisoners’ bodies become the site for the extraction of accumulation; however, the strikes only brought to the surface labor injustices and media put the stereotypical face of an incarcerated individual; black or brown, and lower class. The lack of use for intersectional approaches to organizing in the prison strikes helped to hide the injustices women were facing; overall, though prisoners striking have a better means of creating justice and awareness because they are stopping the exploitative labor practices that have been promoted in the prison industrial complex.

Incarcerated women are using different tactics to bring their injustices to light; they go through the process and the mechanisms of the legal system in order to make changes; they write to local press and media to report on their abuse and experiences; for those who have exhausted the means of the law, lawsuits shine a light on those injustices which bring in public condemnation of the way the criminal justice system handles cases of sexual abuse. Striking is not a means of ending the sexual violence, because of the view that rape in incarceration is being carried out by criminal individuals. Systemic reasons for the culture of violence against women in incarceration is hidden and a few lone actors are picked and castigated for their crimes. Incarceration offers rape culture an

59 excuse; guards are able extract sexual gratification from those women in incarceration, because they are in positions that make them vulnerable and powerless to resist the sexual abuse.

The tools of resistance of media, lawsuits, complaints, and community and public forums are offered to the survivors and to the families of the survivors that hope to bring to light the violence. However, the problems that arise because media and press create a narrative of lone-wolf individuals acting of their own volitions and not a culture of violence that allows women’s bodies to be exploited for such sexual gratification. The state then becomes sympathetic but offers only surface level solutions; more training for the officers, limiting contact between men guards and women inmates, different policies regarding the reporting of sexual harassment and assault. They do not address the underlying systems of incarceration that allows the abuse to happen; formerly incarcerated people do understand, however, that the system is the problem. When New

Jersey offered the solution of having more women guarding prisoners, Lydia Thormton decried the measures since the gender of the guards was not the issue, but the system,

“Thormton said the issues at Edna Mahan are culturally ingrained in men and women guards […] ‘It is not a gender issue,’ she said, adding that she has witnessed brutality from female guards as well as male guards” (Muscavage, 2018). Thus, while women are now being given the voice to tell their stories, to share and express their concerns, lawmakers continue to ignore the ways that state-institutional criminal justice system has a hand in allowing the exploitation to continue.

The Narrative of #MeToo and Women in Incarceration

The #MeToo Movement initially began over a decade ago in 2006. Created by a black woman, Tarana Burke, the movement was meant to highlight the ways in which black women were overlooked in conversations of sexual violence, and to empower those survivors into sharing their stories (Wolfe, 2018, 2). Considering sexual assaults and misconducts committed by high profile men in power in 2017, the hashtag #MeToo on social media to show just how serious the problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse is to women, as reported by Washington Post reporter Abby Ohlheiser (2018):

The research team collected more than 96 million tweets from 2010 through the end of 2017 that had something to do with the sexual harassment “conversation.” They identified those tweets by searching for keywords and hashtags that were wholly or partially about sexual harassment and abuse […] #MeToo has been, in turns, empowering and exhausting for survivors of sexual assault and abuse. When I reported on its virality last fall, I spoke to one woman sharing her #MeToo story was an epiphany. Another was exhausted by the repetition and pointed out the emotional toll survivor- based hashtags can have on sexual assault victims. Other hashtags, such as #YesAllWomen, #WhatWereYouWearing. #YouOkSis, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyWomenDontReport, had encouraged survivors to share their stories before. Narratives, both in the age of #MeToo and our awareness of sexual violence being committed against women, is both empowering but also exhausting. But the hashtag and the storytelling from survivors, despite the emotional and physical labor required from sharing their stories, also gives back agency to those people, allowing them the ability to share or not share their stories of trauma; it has allowed women to share their stories and prompt empathy and understanding from the details of their harassment (Wolfe, 2018, 5).

In a discussion on agency in the time of #MeToo activism, Katherine Wolfe (2018) has concluded, “Me Too not only has agency and form, but is a response to the inherently unequal status of women in this current culture, using its agency to demand that the culture be changed” (6). The storytelling and the empowerment from the movement has

61 quickly taken form, allowing the demands for substantial changes to the ways in which women are viewed in society.

Have women in incarceration had their #MeToo Movement? I would argue that the movement has not had the effect today for those that it was intended for, but that it plays an important and significant role in something that incarcerated survivors need: a chance to reclaim agency and humanize them in a system that so easily views them as other. Created for marginalized communities for empowerment and solidarity, #MeToo was instead highlighted and co-opted for elite women who had more media power than those who did not; it addressed Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. and brought to the center the culture of harassment and exploitation in Hollywood and media.

Attempts to re-center the movement has been made after the scandal the exposed

Hollywood; TIME Magazine’s 2017 Person of the Year were “The Silence Breakers,” which ran pieces on the stories of the survivors of sexual harassment and assault. The views were of leading actresses and singers, but also brought in the voices of those who would face the loss of everything if they had come forward, “But on the lower right-hand corner of the cover, there’s simply an arm, cropped at the shoulder. It belongs to an anonymous young hospital worker from Texas—a sexual harassment victim who fears that disclosing her identity would negatively impact her family […] She is faceless on the cover and remains nameless inside TIME’s red borders, but her appearance is an act of solidarity, representing all those who are not yet able to come forward and reveal their identities […] Along with Swift and Judd, the anonymous sixth woman is pictured in the company of former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, lobbyist Adama Iwu, and Isabel Pascal, who is a strawberry picker and an immigrant from Mexico whose name was changed to

62 protect her identity” (Chan, 2017). TIME does an admirable job illustrating rape culture on all levels of economic class, where solidarity between all survivors for an end to sexual violence becomes imperative. It also represents where the movement can extend to incarcerated women, and what the shortfalls become:

When movie stars don’t know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for the janitor who’s being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she’ll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won’t take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeep who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can’t escape? […] Like the “problem that has no name,” the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest. Yet it doesn’t have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #Yo Tambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it. […] This reckoning appears to have sprung overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross the boundaries but don’t even seem to know that boundaries exist. They’ve had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackmailed, of being fired from a job they can’t afford to lose. They’ve had it with the code of going along to get along (Docketerman, et. al., 2017). The TIME Magazine was an attempt to re-center the conversations on vulnerable and marginalized women who have everything to lose when reported sexual harassment. The story-telling also cultivate empowerment and create the agency that in turn can be useful for those who are in incarceration to reclaim; for ultimately, incarcerated women are stripped of their agency and their humanity, in the eyes of the public, when their sexual violence is justified. Story-telling becomes the conduit to take back that humanity.

Victoria Law examines this humanizing method of storytelling and narrative when she discusses youth incarceration and harsh penalties for those in prison.

Prosecutors, usually wise to the strength stories and narratives have in courts, use them to

63 their advantage to demand harsher penalties for the accused, “On the other side, advocates also understand and use storytelling to campaign for policy and legislative changes, such as limiting solitary confinement for teenagers and ending the practice of shackling during childbirth” (Law, 2018). For those victims’ families, storytelling allows them to advocate the idea that all victims are not looking for harsh penalties for those being convicted. Bill Pelke, who lost his grandmother to three teenage girls—Paula

Cooper, a fifteen-year-old who had been accused of being the ringleader—advocated for the girl to be taken off death row, and then formed an organization for the end of the death penalty and to rewrite the narrative that victims’ families wanted retribution:

“People will always listen to a story,” he reflected. “You can touch their hearts through a story and get them to change their minds. Sometimes people will feel one way when you start and another way when you finish.” And, as someone who lost a loved one to senseless violence, he knows firsthand that family members can feel as if they are disregarding their loved one by forgiving the person the person who killed them, and that prosecutors often seize on that grief to push for the most punitive sentence. By sharing his story, he hopes to make other realize that healing doesn’t require the harshest punishment (Law, 2018). What the most important aspect of the storytelling is to humanize the people who are sharing their stories. People who are innocent, people who are guilty; it is to see the humanity in them and the reasons behind their incarcerations or the crimes that they commit.

Women in incarceration, black women and especially trans women, are seldom given the ability to voice their stories. All too easily, the identity of criminal is proscribed to the survivor who are incarcerated, and whatever punished they incur is considered apt because they have broken the law (Law, 2017). Take, for example, the stories of women in incarceration across the country. An inmate from Lowell wrote of the ways women were treated and mistreated during their time in incarceration:

I was an inmate at Lowell and YES the fact is that the conditions are inhumane, the treatment is very abusive,mentally and physically. The staff talked to us any kind of way, ALL THE TIME. Specially higher up, there is a huge cover up withing the staff. Every time inspection comes they cover all of the conditions up with new layers of paint and they have the inmates clean up, wax floors, etc. When they do come to inspect, they lock us down so that we cannot speak with them directly, they threaten us not to speak with them and they only take the inspectors to the newer dorms not the dorms that would fail inspection […] Please help these women, we are all mothers, daughters, we are human…everybody makes mistakes. Only one can judge us…These staff members are more corrupt than the actual inmates,especially with all the sexual favors, drug dealings, prostitution, cover ups, murder and so much more going on at Lowell Correctional Institution. When does it end, so many inmates have been reporting these issues and still nothing is being done, how many more must die,how many more must suffer living in these conditions. There are officers that run departments that provide our clothing, jackets, linens and if they don’t like you,you get the worst linen, jackets, no underwear or bra’s…but these same Officer/and her Officer friend who runs the Library hallways are selling cigarettes and drugs like “suboxone” thru the inmates. They have their own drug ring going on” (“Mamacita,” WomeninandBeyond, 2018). Because of their labeling of criminal, women and survivors are therefore seen as other, as animals or slaves, and therefore treated as such. They are forced into degrading positions just because they have lost their ability to be considered human and thus deserving of the dignity and respect that are afforded them. Comments and stories from the inmates in the prisons serve to remind us that, despite their invisible statuses as inmates and criminals, people in incarceration and survivors are still undeserving of their dehumanizing treatment from behind the bars.

The purpose of humanizing those survivors in incarceration, therefore, is to show that despite the criminal identity, a person’s humanity has not been eschewed; people who are incarcerated are still deserving of humanity, dignity. What makes it doubly difficult to advocate for social change for incarcerated survivors is when the perpetrators of the sexual violence are the guards and staffers of those same survivors. When perpetrators constantly guarding and supervising those women; they are the ones that are

65 enforced PREA standards; prisons staffers are the ones adjudicating the survivors who are accusing those staffers. “In one year alone, the Department of Justice found that, in jails and prisons across the country, staff were responsible for more than half of sexual victimization. In state and federal prisons, trans people were more likely to experience abuse by staff than by other incarcerated people” (Law, 2018). Despite the fear, women in incarceration continue to advocate and share their stories, not only to share their stories and humanize them, but to organize to prevent further abuse from happening.

According to a survivor who was released, Stacy Rojas, who continues to speak up to change conditions for incarcerated individuals, ‘“Just because we are in prison doesn’t mean that we should not have our basic human rights protected,’ Rojas stated in a press release after filing suit. ‘I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did’” (Law,

2018). The conditions and fear of retaliation do make it difficult to report, but survivors consistently take such a risk to speak out and create powerful movements to demand justice and changes both how incarcerated individuals are treated in prison and how survivors of sexual violence are treated (Law, 2018).

The premise of the #MeToo is the ability to express empowerment of survivors through empathy and storytelling—from either digital media or not—to express that those stories are not unique, but that many individuals have similar tales of abuse and victimization. From the Lowell County Correctional Facility where survivors and family members came together to discuss the abuse that was happening behind the prison walls,

“One by one, about 100 people—mothers, sisters, daughters and former inmates, some wearing ‘I survived Lowell’ t-shirts—pouring into an Ocala meeting hall Sunday night to do what few Florida inmates have been able to do: talk about brutal abuse, corruption and

66 inhumane treatment behind the walls of Florida’s most notorious prisons, Lowell

Correctional Institution for women” (Brown, 2018), to Edna Mahan, where committee meetings allowed survivors to open up to their legislatures demanding extensive changes to the way New Jersey ran their state prison, the work was the same; to humanize the survivors as more than just criminals, and to give new collective voices to survivors where there might not have been before.

The Power of (Local) Media

Though larger news outlets are unable or unwilling to report on the violence that inmates face daily from corrections officers as prison issues remain perpetually hidden from the public, local media has been reporting on the issue. The ability to keep prisons and punishment of perceived criminality out of the public eyes, to garner sympathy or outrage is part and parcel of making exploitation and abuse of the body acceptable in modern context. Prisoners, therefore, are deserving of that punishment, whatever the punishment may be; society’s ability to ignore those problems and violence done upon inmates is excused because they have committed crime, no matter the degree of the crime that they commit. Their punishment is just, as such because they have committed any kind of criminal behavior.

But women inmates have used local media outlets to garner outrage and empathy from others, forcing the state and the prison to public spotlight and the horrors that go behind the walls of the facilities to the forefront. Simply to acknowledge the existence of the women in incarceration is something that many would never do. They have become disposable, living ghosts that are at the property of the state, who have giving corrections officers carte blanche over their bodies; they are continuously surveilled by those guards

67 at the bequest of the state. As such, the sexual abuse and harassment that the women face, with no punitive measures from the officers themselves, are directly endorsed by the state as well. Women coming forward, especially to local media, brings in the sympathies and rage from local citizens and constituents. For the facilities, it was local media that reported on the problems of the prisons, and state politicians and the prisons themselves could not hide behind false PREA reporting and had to speak up and speak out against the abuse that was happening. For the facilities, it means feeling the pressures to defend themselves; for the state, it meant acknowledging the humanity of the incarcerated and proposing some legislation to combat the issue of sexual violence behind bars. If certain local media sources had not come forward and published investigations into the goings on in the women’s correctional facilities, federal probes and investigations may not have become a pressing need, despite the work of activists and those inside the prisons.

That does not mean, however, that inmates and advocates did not work to bring the issues at the prisons to the forefront of the media’s purview. When Latandra Ellington was killed, it was family and activists that demanded answers and were suspicious of foul play, and it was Ellington’s family that reported that she had feared for her life because she wanted to report the corrections officer’s sexual misconduct; her act of defiance in the threat of retaliation ultimately led to her death. It was the outrage from her death that led to the investigation into Sgt. Quiercioli relationship with inmates with the report of potential foul play into Ellington’s death. It was activists and inmates who were able to tell the stories to local news media in the Miami Herald and NJ Advance Media, those women and their families who attended town halls and committee hearings to document the abuses of themselves and their loved ones that made others listen, that made media,

68 politicians, and people aware of the problems at women’s prison and demand changes while also demanding their humanity, despite their struggles have been in the shadows for decades.

What Resistance Looks Like

For women in incarceration, resistance is any means necessary for survival. That might mean waiting years to come forward with their stories, so that they may be free from the grips of the prison abuse itself. It may mean women coming forward while still incarcerated because physical and psychological scars mean re-entrance into society nearly impossible without a demand for reparations. It may mean moving past the fear of retaliation to tell someone, anyone, about the abuse that they are facing at prisons; whether it’s mentioning fears to family members or writing to local media about the abuse. Women in incarceration are using the tools that they have been giving, however limited the resources, to share their experiences with sexual abuse in the hopes of breaking that barrier where their abuse and assaults are invisible to the public eyes. And sometimes, resistance means a way of surviving the abuse, and coming forward when they are free from retaliation after they are released from prison. Former inmates came forward during the Lowell townhall, and spoke up during the committee hearing for the abuses at Edna Mahan; other inmates, prison researchers and activists also went public when women were fearful of doing the same.

Society has dictated that those in incarceration are neither seen nor heard. Their abuses are hidden behind their label of criminal, prisoner, so no matter their marginalization in the United States they are viewed as deserving of the punishment.

Rape and sexual abuse in prison has become a running joke in the country, used as a

69 laughing deterrent for people who may disobey the law. The truth of the matter is that incarcerated individuals face violence and abuse and no matter their experiences, the exploitation of their bodies should be as inexcusable as women being assaulted in employment, raped in colleges or being subjected to any other kinds of violence and assault in society. Incarcerated survivors, because of their invisibility, remain hidden from the public because of their status in incarceration. Yet they have found the methods and the means to make sure that that abuse remains nearly impossible to remain hidden and invisible to those outside of the prison industrial complex. This means forcing the state to be held accountable and demand structural changes to minimize the mistreatment that they have faced at the hands of corrections officers and staff at the facilities and to empower other survivors to report the mistreatment to make sure their grievances are properly investigated with impartiality and no conflicts of interest.

On August 21, 2018, prisoners across the country went on strike to demand an end to slave-like conditions resulting from the explosive rise of mass incarceration and use of prisoners as a pool of cheap or free labor for corporations. Their actions caused changes in policy and prison reform that would not have been possible had the prisoners not understood their own power to cultivate change and action.

In women’s facilities, inmates are fighting back against the sexual violence and exploitation that are perpetuated against them by the corrections officers and staff, those who have constant contact and supervision of the women for every single minute of the women’s sentence. The women’s life is under the control and decision of the officers in charge and submitting reports on sexual violence and assault against the guards would make it difficult to report their victimization to the same people who are abusing them.

And yet, women are resisting, whether it be through turning to local media outlets with their stories, heading to committee and town hall meetings organized by investigators and state legislatures, filing lawsuits, or even braving those who would retaliate against them by filing complaints and grievances with the facilities themselves. Even when women are free from the abusive situation, when they leave the prisons themselves, they are speaking up about the abuse and coming forward with their names out in public, hoping to hold those who abused them accountable for their exploitative actions.

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