JANE cROW & WOMEN’S ISSUES WITHIN PRISONS

Theepidemic of incarceration has become a growth industry, and the increase in incarcerated women has brought forth a plethora of related issues and avenues of oppression that occur while women are incarcerated. An era of laws intended to suppress women’s reproductive and civil rights mirrors that of Jim Crow, leading to incarceration rates for Black women, immigrant women and transgender women at higher rates than white women. Jane Crow describes the intersectional experience of gender and race based discrimination which is magnified within prisons. The experience of incarceration for Black, Trans, and other marginalized women is one of intersectional struggle – within these government facilities, they face medial neglect and racism, violations of their reproductive rights, poor living conditions, unpaid labor, and institutional violence. For certain groups, the injustice and violence begins before their sentence. Black women are currently 13% of the general population but constitute almost a third of the prison population. The increase in the incarceration of Black women has almost double the rates of Black men, and they receive harsher sentences than their white or male counterparts. Black women make up a third of women serving life sentences and a fourth of women on Death Row. This means Black women are not only incarcerated at higher rates but remain incarcerated longer, exposing them to the harshest violences of carceral punishment. Black women’s reproductive systems have been under state control since the breeding plantations of American chattel slavery, to the scientific experiments on Henrietta Lacks and other Black women’s bodies, and now, to the forced sterilization of Black and Latina women in prisons (9). This state-sanctioned birth control is inherently violent and continues to perpetuate a legacy of white male surpemacy and eugenics. Additionally, women within prisons are under the purview of their guards, which is traditionally majority male – these guards are rarely held accountable for abuses of power. For Black and transgender women, this experience can be terrifying, as defined in the case of Robin Lucas, a transgender woman inmate held in a male prison where she was repeatedly raped, sodomized, and made a sex-slave by guards in 1996. (8) Women of color come forward daily with stories of forced sterilization, neglect of critical medical treatment and medication, sexual assault, and race-based mistreatment within prisons. Unfortunately, social issues within prisons often mirror the social conditions of greater society, where Black and Transgender women are the most vulnerable populations to race and gendered violence. The women within prisons share some demographic characteristics with incarcerated men, including poor living conditions, lack of education, sexism, and racism. Within prisons, these conditions translate to high suceptibility for sexual abuse and abuse within the prison workplace, including forced labor and labor as punishment. Identifying the issues within prisons brings us steps closer to destablizing and abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex, which makes profit from the suffering of human beings. I wrote this piece to remind us that the women inside are just as impacted, if not more, by the violence and inhumanity of the criminal justice system. These are our friends, sisters, wives, mothers, community, family. They should not be disregarded or forgotten in the fight for justice.