Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex

 Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex

California and Beyond

ANGELA Y. DAVIS AND CASSANDRA SHAYLOR

Women's Rights as Human Rights

A central achievement of the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Confer-

ence on Women in Beijing was the emphatic articulation of women's

rights as human rights. In specifically identifying violence against

women in both public and private life as an assault against women's

human rights, the Beijing Conference helped to deepen awareness of

violence against women on a global scale. Yet, even with this increasing

attention, the violence linked to women's prisons remains obscured by

the social invisibility of the prison. There, violence takes the form of med-

ical neglect, sexual abuse, lack of reproductive control, loss of parental

rights, denial of legal rights and remedies, the devastating effects of iso-

lation, and, of course, arbitrary discipline.

Recent reports by ipsernational human rights organizations have

begun to address the invisibility of women prisoners and to highlight the

severity of the violence they experience. For example, Human Rights

Watch and Amnesty International have specifically focused on the wide-

spread problem of sexual abuse in United States' prisons. In 19gg the

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women issued a

report on her findings -which were even more disturbing than prison

activists had predicted---from visits to eight women's prisons in the U.S.

In general, although international human rights standards rarely have

been applied within the context of the U.S., particularly in the legal arena,

UN documents (such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

and the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners) have been used

The Prison Industrial Complex

As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional

assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause has been widely

contested. Activists and scholars who have tried to develop more nuanced

understandings of the punishment process-and especially racism's

role- have deployed the concept of the "prison industrial complex" to

point out that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly

linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than

to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb "crime." Indeed, vast

numbers of corporations with global markets rely on prisons as an

important source of profit and thus have acquired clandestine stakes

in the continued expanyion of the prison system. Because the over-

whelming majority of U.5, prisoners are from racially marpinalized com-

munities, corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment

necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures of racism.

Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although

women comprise a relatively small percentage of the entire prison popu-

lation, they constitute, nevertheless, the fastest growing segment of pris-

oners. There are now more women in prison in the State of California

alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970 (Currie

1998). Because race is a major factor in determining who goes to prison

and who does not, the groups most rapidly increasing in number are

black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous women.

Globalization of capitalism has precipitated the decline of the welfare

state in industrialized countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, and has

brought about structural adjustment in the countries of the southern

region. As social programs in the U.S. have been drastically curtailed

imprisonment has simultaneously become the most self-evident

response to many of the social problems previously addressed by insti-

tutions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In other

words, in the era of the disestablishment of social programs that have

historically served poor communities, and at a time when affirmative

action programs are being dismantled and resources for education and

health are declining, imprisonment functions as the default solution.

Especially for women of color, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of

social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these dra-

conian strategies--ever longer prison sentences for offenses that are

often petty -tend to reproduce and, indeed, exacerbate the very problems

they purport to solve.

There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact

of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial

complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both sys-

tems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is

beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in

these systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized

communities throughout the world. In the case of the prison industrial

complex, the transformation of imprisoned bodies of color into con-

sumers and/or producers of an immense range of commodities

effectively transforms public funds into profit, leaving little in the way of

social assistance to bolster the efforts of women and men who want to

overcome barriers erecid by poverty and racism. For example, when

women who spend many years in prison are released, instead of jobs,

housing, health care, and education, they are offered a small amount of

release money, which covers little more than a bus ride and two nights in

an inexpensive hotel. In the "free world," they are haunted by the stigma

ofimprisonment, which renders it extremely difficult for a "felon" to find

a job. Thus they are inevitably tracked back into a prison system that in

this era of the prison industrial complex has entirely dispensed with even

a semblance of rehabilitation.

The emergence of a prison industrial complex means that whatever

rehabilitative potential the prison may have previously possessed (as

implied by the bizarre persistence of the term "corrections") is negated.

Instead, the contemporary economics of imprisonment privilege the

profitability of punishment at the expense of human education and trans-

formation. State budgets increasingly are consumed by the costs of build-

ing and maintaining prisons, while monies dedicated to sustaining and

improving communities are slashed. A glaring example of the misplaced

financial investment in punishment is the decreasing state support for

public education; for example, in California in 1995 the budget for pris-

ons exceeded that for higher education.

Corporations are intimately linked to prison systems in both the pub-

lic and the private sector. The trend toward privatization is only one man-

ifestation of a growing involvement of corporations in the punishment

process. While a myopic focus on private prisons in activist campaigns

may tend to legitimate public prisons by default, placing this develop-

ment within the context of a far-reaching prison industrial complex can

enhance our understanding of the contemporary punishment industry.

In the U.S., there are currently twenty-six for-profit prison corporations

that operate approximately I50 facilities in twenty-eight states (Dyer

2000). The largest of these companies, Corrections Corporations of

America (CCA) and Wackenhut, control 76.4% of the private prison mar-

ket globally. While CA is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, its

largest shareholder is Sodexho Marriott, the multi-national headquar-

tered in Paris, which provides catering services at many U.S, colleges and

universities. Currently, CCA, Wackenhut and the other smaller private

prison companies together bring in $1.5 to 2 billion a year (Dyer 2000).

Though private prisons represent a fairly small proportion of prisons

in the U.S., the privatization model is quickly becoming the primary mode

of organizing punishmint in many other countries (sudbury 2000),.

These companies have tried to take advantage of the expanding popula-

tion of women prisoners, both in the U.S, and globally. In 1996, the first

private women's prison was established by CA in Melbourne, Australia.

The government of Victoria

adopted the U.S. model of privatization in which financing, design,

construction, and ownership of the prison are awarded to one con-

tractor and the government pays them back for construction over

twenty years. This means that it is virtually impossible to remove the

contractor because that contractor owns the prison. (George 1999,

IqO)

However, to understand the reach of the prison industrial complex, it

is not enough to evoke the looming power of the private prison business.

Of course, by definition, those companies court the state inside and out-

side the U.S. for the purpose of obtaining prison contracts. They thus

bring punishment and profit into a menacing embrace. Still, this is only

the most visible dimension of the prison industrial complex, and it

should not lead us to ignore the more comprehensive corporatization

that is a feature of contemporary punishment. As compared to earlier his-

torical eras, the prison economy is no longer a small, identifiable and

containable set of markets. Many corporations, whose names are highly

recognizable by "free-world" consumers, have discovered new possibili-

ties for expansion by selling their products to correctional facilities.

In the rggos, the variety of corporations making money from prisons

is truly dizzying, ranging from Dial Soap to Famous Amos cookies,

from AT&T to health-care providers.….In 1995 Dial Soap sold

$100,000 worth of its product to the New York City jail system alone

....When VitaPro Foods of Montreal, Canada, contracted to supply

inmates in the State of Texas with its soy-based meat substitute, the

contract was worth $34 million a year. (Dyer 2000, I4)

The point here is that even if private prison companies were prohib-

ited -an unlikely prospect, indeed -the prison industrial complex and its

many strategies for profit would remain intact.

Moreover, it is not only the private prison -CA and Wackenhut in

particular--that gets reproduced along the circuits of global capital and

insinuates itself into the lives of poor people in various parts of the world.

Connections between corporations and public prisons, similar to those

in the U.S., are currentif emerging throughout the world and are being

reinforced by the contemporary idea, widely promoted by the U.S., that

imprisonment is a social panacea. The most obvious effects of these ideas

and practices on women can be seen in the extraordinary numbers of

women arrested and imprisoned on drug charges throughout the world.

The U.S.-instigated "war on drugs" has disproportionately claimed

women as its victims inside the U.S., but also elsewhere in Europe, South

America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa (Stern 1998). In what can be

seen as the penal equivalent of ambulance chasing, architectural firms,

construction companies, and other corporations are helping to create

new women's prisons throughout the world.

Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex

Activist opposition to the prison industrial complex has insisted on an

understanding of the ways racist structures and assumptions facilitate

the expansion of an extremely profitable prison system, in turn helping

to reinforce racist social stratification. This racism is always gendered,

and imprisonment practices that are conventionally considered to be

"neutral" -such as sentencing, punishment regimes, and health care-

differ in relation to the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect,2

The women most likely to be found in U.S. prisons are black, Latina,

Asian American, and Native American women. In 1998, one out of every

10g women in the U.S, was under the control of the criminal justice sys-

tem (Greenfeld and Snell 199g). But where these women are located

within the system differs according to their race: while about two thirds

of women on probation are white, two thirds of women in prison are

women of color. An African-American woman is eight times more likely

to go to prison than a white woman; a Latina woman is four times more

likely. African-American women make up the largest percentage of

women in state prisons (48%) and federal detention centers (35%), even

though they are only approximately 13% of the general population

(Greenfeld and Snell 1999). As the population of Latinas in the U.S.

grows, so does their number in prisons. In California, for example,

though Latinas comprise 13% of the general population, they make up

around 25% of women in prison (Characteristics of Population in California

State Prisons 2000). Though there is no official data maintained on the

numbers of Native Amefican women in prison, numerous studies docu-

ment that they are arrested at a higher rate than whites and face discrim-

ination at all levels of the criminal justice system (Ross I998).

Given the way in which U.S. government statistics fail to specify racial

categories other than "white," "black," and "Hispanic" (figures regard-

ing women who self-identify as Native American, Vietnamese, Filipina,

Pacific Islander, or as from any other racially marginalized community,

are consolidated into a category of "other"), it is difficult to provide pre-

cise numbers of women from these groups in prison (Greenfeld and Snell

2000). However, advocates for women prisoners report that the numbers

of Asian women, including Vietnamese, Filipinas, and Pacific Islanders,

are growing in women's prisons.3

The vast increase in the numbers of women of color in U.S. prisons

has everything to do with the "war on drugs." Two African-American

women serving long federal sentences on questionable drug charges-

Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines~-were pardoned by President Bill

Clinton during his last days in office. In the cases of both Smith, who

received a twenty-four-and-a-half year sentence, and Gaines, whose sen-

tence was nineteen years and seven months, their sole link to drug

trafficking was their involvement with men who were accused traffickers

(Newsome 2000).

Considering only the federal system, between I9go and 1996, 84% of

the increase in imprisoned women (2,057) was drug-related. In the entire

complex of U.S. prisons and jails, drug-related convictions are largely to