Bitter Gall of Injustice: Women in Prison

Excerpt No. 8 from The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (released, Nov. 1, 2015)

This excerpt is from a section on “The Bitter Gall of Injustice” in chapter one’s treatment of Lockdown America’s dissemination and implanting of terror. The photo at right is from Oklahoma Watch and shows rows of double-stacked bunk beds lining the main floors in the housing units at Eddie Warrior Correctional Facility, a minimum-security female prison, in Raft, Oklahoma. Photo Tom Luker, Tulsa World.
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As to the tasting of bitter gall, the plight of women in the prisons today is especially acute. Especially onerous are the rates and extreme suffering of women of color.

Even a quick reading of the ACLU’s overview of women in U.S. prisons should startle.[1] Its carefully documented report states that nationally, the number of all women in prisons and jails has grown by more than 8 times since 1980. Two-thirds of imprisoned women in the U.S. are women of color. Black women represent 30 percent of all incarcerated women, and their incarceration rate since 1986 has increased by 800 percent, more than twice the increase of 400 percent for women of all races.

Only 36 percent of all women imprisoned in 2009 were for violent crime; the rest are enduring the violent ordeal of imprisonment for nonviolent offenses.

The vast majority of incarcerated women are mothers to over 1.8 million children. With the average minimal length of incarceration being 36 months, that is more than enough time for governments, following their rules, to declare the parental bond to be broken with one’s children (usually 22 months is the maximum). One should recall, also, that most imprisoned women have been brutalized by domestic and sexual abuse before imprisonment, that nearly all of them were deeply embedded in poverty, that in some 23 states they can still be shackled in childbirth, and that the very victims for whom women are sentenced for wounding or killing are often the same ones that abused them. Given all this, who can wonder if many a Chandra, María, and Elizabeth lift their voices in lament, “Whatever I did or you think I did, I do not deserve to lose these decades of my life, losing also my opportunities for education and professional development, my bodily and mental health, and my children!” The factors that create inevitable bitterness and senses of injustice are examined by numerous analyses, supplementing those undertaken by the ACLU and the Sentencing Project.[2] While this bitter gall is there, spirited resistance and perseverance by women is not absent,[3] a point I emphasize in later chapters.

The essential matter here is that the majority of people in prison for nonviolent offenses—poor men and women, the poor of all racial/ ethnic backgrounds —are being exposed to spirit death for committing non-violent crime. By “spirit death” I do not mean a death of “only” some inner power or nonmaterial faculty of the human, which would then leave untouched the prisoner’s body and material existence. Instead, I use “spirit” in the sense of its Latin derivation (spirare), thus pertaining to breath, that fragile often resilient but also conquerable life-force of the entire body-mind-will complex of a person’s powers. This very material being is what all too often is destroyed by “spirit death” in U.S. prisons.

It is this destruction that creates or exacerbates a bitter gall of injustice in the confined particularly among those confined for long years for nonviolent crimes. To have that gall poured into one is part of the terror visited upon the confined in Lockdown America. For those critics who think somehow that prisons are “coddling” prisoners, that they have it too easy, I suggest such critics spend some time reading the court cases investigating prison conditions, showing the deprivations of even the most basic requirements of mental and physical health. These cases are now too numerous and the practices of degradation too entrenched to ignore.[4] In most cases of the confined, whether one is guilty or not, the terror is greater than the error.

A few of the confined, especially with succor from the outside as well as inside, will tap the grandeur of mind and spirit to fight off this spirit death and guard their humanity. Many others, though, will descend into the hellhole of prison-life to become themselves, even if released, a hell-making force. Or perhaps as is even more frequent, they remain so steeped in trauma and the prison’s pervasive dread that they are without resources for life when released. They are, as James Baldwin wrote of one of his novel’s characters after imprisonment, even afraid to “hit the streets”—indeed, “terrified of freedom” itself.[5]

The effects then ripple outward as the bitter gall and its bile generate collateral consequences for the entire society.[6] Many families of the imprisoned lament, “He [or she] came out of prison worse than when he went in.” In part, that is due to the suffering of prison that does not reform but is a spirit-death.

This bitter gall of injustice, arising from an often outrageous disproportion between one’s “offense” and suffering, becomes all the more a terrorizing assault when compounded by other unjust practices that characterize “criminal justice” systems within which prisons are inscribed. To these we now turn.

[The text continues with a section, “Mass Incarceration as White Racism’s Bitter Fruit”]
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[1] ACLU, “Words from Prison . . . Did You Know . . . ?,” June 12, 2006, accessed June 20, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/womens-rights/words-prison-did-you-know .

[2] Angela Y. Davis, “How Gender Structures the Prison System” in Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 60-83; Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Stephanie R. Bush-Baskette, Misguided Justice: The War on Drugs and the Incarceration of Black Women (Bloomington, IN: Universe, 2010). For important historical perspective, see Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2015). See also Marc Mauer, “The Changing Racial Dynamics of Women’s Incarceration.”

[3] See Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance (http://www.womenandprison.org/); and Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

[4] Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial, especially his chapter “Torture on the Installment Plan,” 87-108.

[5] James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (New York: The Dial Press, 1974), 105-106.

[6] On the “collateral consequences” of mass incarceration, see James Samuel Logan, Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 65-100; and “Collateral Consequences,” The Sentencing Project, accessed June 20, 2015, http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=143 .

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