Badass Book Review

For anyone who has not had the amazing experience of indulging in the writings of Angela Davis, I highly recommend you grab the closest copy of Are Prisons Obsolete? and get learnin!
This kickass activist/author points out the relationship between historical expressions of racism/patriarchy and the role of our current prison system. In this book, (that is quickly becoming my favorite), she explores how after chattel slavery and lynching and segregation ended, incarceration became yet another institution that oppresses women and people of color. From its beginning, it has been intertwined with other forms of social/economic control and domination/subjugation.

The Mississippi Black Codes, for example, declared “anyone who was guilty of theft, had run away from a job, was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and … all other idle and disorderly persons” to be vagrant. And vagrancy was a crime. In this way, certain crimes became more applicable/relevant to blacks who were more at risk for fitting any of these images or breaking these laws. Of course, their punishment landed them in jails, or forced them to labor on plantations (that once profited off of slave labor)... And the subsequent chain gangs that these institutions created were oftentimes more harmful to individual blacks than slavery had been.

While women of all colors have been specifically punished within the domestic sphere, they have been also subjected to punishment- and torture- within the prison-industrial complex too. There are layers to their oppression that lead to being re-victimized regardless of any position inside or outside prison walls. In the seventeenth century, women could be punished by husbands with the use of a gossip’s bridle, and be chained to the wall of a house until a lesson was learned: that lesson always being one in the art of submissiveness/passivity. The North American colony of Georgia was settled by transported convicts from England, and one in eight of these convicts were female. The forced labor they had to perform was prostitution, quite often- (and don't get me started on the bullshit line "Prostitution is the world's oldest profession"- because no, PIMPING of women by men is the world's oldest profession, if you really take the time to think about it).
Women were, for a long time, also placed into mental institutions because to be criminal or deviant in any way (and those terms were used loosely with women) meant that they were mentally ill. If they did not wish to resign themselves to living a life the way others wanted (or demanded) them to, it was assumed they were insane. And the asylums women were placed in (often against their will) were designed as another form of imprisonment.
Now women are locked up in prisons that are designed by men, originally for men, and once there, they are abused by people in positions of power. To be treated “equally” does not mean “the same as,” and yet behind these bars, women are treated as property or as sexual objects, and then treated as if they are men when it is convenient for making profit. They are, in fact, being treated like men when they are not allowed decent access to things they would need during their menstrual cycles or pregnancies. Or when they have their children taken from their arms immediately after giving birth. Things most men would not even think about, because they are used to looking at life through their collectively sexist lens, are causing physical and mental health issues for women in America’s prisons. Half the time, issues that are specific to their gender are being disregarded, and for the other half, they are being conveniently used as the objects of guards’ predatory behavior. Cavity searches are just another example of this state-sanctioned violent degradation, which abuse women who have already been sexually assaulted—(frequently that is why they have ended up in jail in the first place, but who cares, right?)
This book really made me question some of my convictions and reevaluate America's definitions of, (and ways of effectively coping with), crime... If you don't have time to check out her book, at least glance at some of her stuff online. Here's one interesting interview with her that examines our country's institutional memory- the collective psyche- that refuses to let us believe we live in a "post-racial" culture, merely because we let Obama and Clinton work in the White House. True equality is a long way off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU-PNWxhjr8