Women's Day, violence, and Arizona's state prisoners...

FAMILIES: I've been hearing you. Here's my response. Feel free to download the PDF copy here, print, and send it into as many people you know in the prisons. This has been circulating for two weeks already, and the free men inside are beginning to write back...

International Women's Day
March 8, 2013

To the men who inhabit Arizona's state prisons...

As some of you may know, through my blogs and art for the past several years I've been challenging the escalating level of violence, deliberate indifference, and despair in Arizona's state prisons under the directorship of Charles Ryan - the man I've raged at the most in this time, and demanded accountability from. Only recently has it really sunk in that he is not – and never really was – in control of the prisons he administers. You, the prisoners are. Ryan, therefore, is not the man I need to be talking to about all this – the guys who run the gangs and the yards are. So are the people who listen to them.

And so, today, on International Woman's Day, my appeal to end the violence and transform the culture and politics of Arizona's state prisons goes to all you guys who set the tone in there. Specifically, I'm writing to ask for your help stopping the violence against women and children being perpetrated from behind prison walls.

I know that our welfare is something the gangs and yard leaders care about these days because you're putting a green light on every guy accused of committing a crime against a woman or child, among other things. Word has it that there's a “sweep of the prisons” going on right now to target those guys for assault, extortion, and murder. Based on all the calls I've received from the sisters, mothers, lovers and daughters of these men, however, the effect of this approach has been largely to victimize the women and children who love them.

I know you can't see that kind of unplanned consequence the same way I can – I get at least ten calls a week from women being directly terrorized by prison violence, which is why I've come to talk to you all myself, face to face, so to speak. I've come to amplify their voices, which I hope you care enough to hear. They want you to know that they're tired of losing their men and burying their children, and they want to know who among you has the courage to try to stop it.

If anyone has the power to, it's you.

Some people have told me I'm crazy for trying this – that I'm just making myself a target for gang violence in the process, and that your expressed concern about the welfare of women and children is nothing more than an excuse to justify more violence against us by way of attacking our families, which is no different from what the state does. If I don't ask for your help, though, who will? I learned a long time ago from my father that some things are worth taking a stand and fighting for, even if with it comes risk.

If all that is said about you guys is true, then my public critiques of prison gangs, my aggressive efforts to have you all prosecuted for your crimes against other prisoners, and the number of victims I've rescued from your clutches have already made me a target, anyway, and it's just a matter of time before you send someone after me. So be it: I'm not too hard to find, and won't live in the shadows in fear. I'm just hoping that down to the last man you realize that someday you or your family may need my help, as well, and let me express myself unharmed, so that I can still be here for you should that day ever come.

What I'm really counting on connecting with is your humanity and integrity, though, not your self-interest. I've heard from enough guys who have run with you to know that you're not all just products of your environment or driven solely by greed or fear. Most of you, I bet, don't even buy into the racist garbage that the state tries to divide and conquer you with, treating you as if you're all stupid – I know that's just how the politics break down in there. In a foxhole, under fire from a common enemy, a rival gang member may even come to count on you as a comrade and friend...you know, you're all under pretty heavy fire now, come to think of it.

What I've seen in my relationships with state prisoners is that most of you find ways to defy the dehumanization, and are constantly trying to survive the world you've been exiled to without eternally compromising your souls. I always thought you guys had some kind of code of honor, but I see so many guys who have felt the only way to live with themselves was to leave their gang behind, which brought them into conflict with other values, like loyalty. When ordered to harm someone they had no business with or be harmed themselves, they felt they were given no choice but to walk away.

I'm hopeful that with Arizona's prison gangs' apparent commitment to reduce violence against women and children now, though, there's room for dialogue about how you guys can help change the overall culture in there and stop chasing men of conscience from your ranks along with all those guys you don't want. Prisoners are the only ones with the power to starve the state from within of what it feeds on (and feeds us) to perpetrate brutality against you and your families: if you could confront and defy the misogyny, heteropatriarchy, racism, classism, and other bullshit that keeps us all down, you would be the heroes of this revolution.

Instead you risk coming off to the world as nothing more than criminal gangs whose power and creativity is limited to extorting grandmothers for a fix or a fast buck...which is the reason Arizonans are so quick to support the building of new Supermax prisons and further sentencing enhancements for men the state can so label. You have so much more power and potential than to settle for exploiting vulnerable people and their families, though.

Some prison gangs across the country have taken a second look at their ethical codes and begun to use their influence and organizational capacity to their people's advantage: calling out the prison system on abuses in custody, imposing statewide moratoriums on inter-racial violence, secretly teaching each other to read and to litigate the state themselves, and so on.

In some prison yards, loyalty and community is being built not through the imposition of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, but through informed and thoughtful struggle against your common oppressor. A fundamental value is growing for the kind of fairness and justice that the state deprives you of; men are no longer being condemned to additional punishments for the crimes that brought them to prison, much less for the unchecked narrative of what they were accused of that was written by the media and the state.

Instead, in some places men are being judged for the values they live in prison by and the skills they have to offer to their community – like teaching, jailhouse lawyering, and caring for elders and the very ill. Those are the kind of people I'd be recruiting as my brothers (and my sisters) – those who can help cultivate collective resistance to the real threat, state violence, not just those who may be good at collecting on debts until they get taken out by younger men like themselves.

Some prison gangs are making a point of finding and reaching out to young guys who can lead with integrity, instead of continuing the dynamics that encourage and empower those who seek “respect” or their own safety by hurting or killing the most vulnerable or detested prisoner they can find. I'm sorry if I offend any of you, but I'd have a real hard time trusting any of the latter to watch my back, and I wouldn't call them brothers, whatever color they were – nor would I have much respect for those whose interests they represented.

In places like Georgia and California in recent years prisoners have used cell phones and their extensive statewide communication networks to organize massive hunger strikes and labor stoppages in protest of their conditions of confinement, their “sedentary diets” and chronic hunger, and the deliberate indifference shown them by health care providers. They've circulated “illegal” petitions and staged solidarity actions with politicized prisoners in solitary confinement. They've called for an end to violence in their home communities, and for mobilization against the police state oppressing us all instead.

Some of you know that I'm a prison abolitionist – a position which causes State Power and prisoners alike to think I'm absolutely out of my mind. “Real criminals” know (better than anyone, I'm told) that some people just need to be locked away from the rest of us forever, and I'm delusional to think that will ever change.

What I advocate, however, is not just the demolition of prisons across the country – it's the deconstruction of the entire prison industrial complex and the creation of community-based, non-heirarchical mechanisms for promoting the values of collective liberation, shared power, and social justice. Anyone who truly wants a world in which there are no longer victims of war, poverty, rape, or other forms of violence should share in such a vision, because those paths are fundamentally inseparable.

Out of an ethical foundation which places humanity, not corporate profit, at the center of our worlds would naturally evolve more productive ways of not only dealing with addiction, mental illness, poverty and political resistance than chaining and caging people up, but that also confronts and stops those among us who harm others for nothing but their own gain or entertainment.

We are ingenious beyond our ability to imagine – surely we can come up with better solutions to our social problems than simply exiling our deviants and transgressors to a netherworld in which they and their families will be preyed on by sociopaths in orange, brown, and business suits alike while they serve sentences formulated to promote political careers, not further the cause of truth or justice.

Reinforcing institutions of state violence is a major problem, not a solution to our problems, in any case. The prison industrial complex is composed of entities and networks which consume valuable life energy and community resources while going to great lengths to justify their survival beyond their obsolescence. It depends on the perpetuation of many evils to keep us all in chains, both literally and figuratively with our fears and diminished expectations of each other.

All of that is to explain the main reason I've finally decided to come to you for help stemming all this violence – other than Chuck Ryan's impotence, as evidenced by his lack of solutions to gangs seizing control of his prisons other than to build more Supermax cells for you all. I don't want to spend any more of my energy trying to make the very system I'm a sworn enemy of stronger than the potential resistance to it. Abuse of state power manifests in far more egregious offenses against humanity than that which we throw so many people into prison for.

Furthermore, you fellows are the ones who have the most control over your environment and your destinies, not the AZ DOC or prison gangs, despite all the illusions to the contrary. Asking the state to quell the violence is only inviting them to invest in more guards, more cages, more tools of domination, and more weapons of repression. I won't do it anymore.

If you are men of honor – which I have taken considerable risk on the confidence that you are - and really wish to stop the violence against women and children, then exercise the control you already have and do the one thing Ryan himself can never hope to do: stop the violence that originates with you and your brothers. Only then will you and others begin to fully realize how much more power each of you have to transcend both the chains and the lies that make you think resistance to this state, and all the attendant evils of incarceration, is futile. It is not. I know this because I have met free men in prison already on this journey. They are organizing quietly among you – and they are everywhere.

If you are a free man, too, please write to me, and tell me how you think we can work together to help liberate the rest from the chains that try to bind us all – help me before their mothers, sisters and daughters are called to bury them instead.

Thanks for your time and concern for our welfare. May the women and children who love you never know the heartbreak of losing you to this madness, too.

Respectfully, 
 

Peggy Plews

Please reply to: Arizona Prison Watch / PO Box 20494 / Phoenix, AZ 85036

for good stuff about women, violence, and the prison industrial complex, see:

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

Prison Abolition and Resisting Gender Violence.

International Women's Day

Blessings and thanks to our good comrades at Angola 3 News for this.

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Resisting Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex --An interview with Vikki Law

by Angola 3 News

Friday, 12 November 2010 11:21

Victoria Law is a longtime prison activist and the author of the 2009 book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). Law’s essay “Sick of the Abuse: Feminist Responses to Sexual Assault, Battering, and Self Defense,” is featured in the new book, entitled "The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism," edited by Dan Berger.

In this interview, Law discusses her new article, which provides a history of radical feminist resistance to the criminalization of women who have defended themselves from gender violence. Furthermore, Law presents a prison abolitionist critique of how the mainstream women’s movement has embraced the US criminal justice system as a solution for combating violence against women.

Previously interviewed by Angola 3 News about the torture of women in US prisons, Law is now on the road with the Community and Resistance Tour.

Angola 3 News: In your essay “Sick of the Abuse,” you write that “a woman’s right to defend herself (and her children) from assault became a feminist rallying point throughout the 1970s.” You focus on the four separate stories of Yvonne Wanrow, Inez Garcia, Joan Little, and Dessie Woods. All four women were arrested for self-defense and their cases received national attention with the support of the radical women’s movement. Can you briefly explain their cases and why they were so important for the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s?

Victoria Law: Yvonne Wanrow was an American Indian mother of two living in Washington State in the 1970s. In 1972, her 11-year-old son was grabbed from his bike by William Wesler, a known child molester. He escaped and fled to the house of a family friend named Shirley Hooper, whose 7-year-old daughter had been raped by Wesler earlier that year. When Hooper called the police, they refused to arrest Wesler.

Understandably shaken, Hooper called Yvonne Wanrow and asked her to spend the night. Wanrow, who was 5 foot, 4 inches, and had recently broken her leg, brought her gun. At five in the morning, Wesler came to their house. When he refused to leave, Wanrow went to the front door to yell for help. She turned around to find Wesler, who, at 6 foot 2, was towering over her. She shot and killed him.

At her first trial, the judge instructed the jury only to consider what had happened at or immediately before the killing. This omitted (1) Wesler’s record as a sex offender; (2) Wesler’s assault on Hooper’s 7 year old; (3) His attempted assault on Yvonne’s son

Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years.

However, various groups and people involved in the women’s movement and the American Indian movement had taken up her cause. They recognized that a woman had the right to defend herself and her family from assault. They held events that raised awareness, educated people, and tied her case into issues of violence against women and the systemic violence against Native people in the US. They also raised funds for her legal defense, which enabled her to have a better defense than she might have been afforded otherwise.

As a result, in 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court granted her a new trial, partially on the basis that the jury should have considered ALL relevant facts when considering self-defense. At her new trial in 1979, Wanrow pled guilty to reduced charges & received a suspended sentence, 5 years’ probation and 1 year of community service. The court decision also established that that women’s lack of access to self-defense training and to the “skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons” made their circumstances different from those of men.

Two years later, in 1974, Inez Garcia shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape from rape. She was arrested and charged with 1st degree (or premeditated) murder. Like Wanrow, her cause was taken up by the women’s movement, which organized teach-ins and fundraisers and galvanized popular support with the recognition that women had the right to defend themselves against rape.

During her first trial, the judge did not allow testimony about the rape as part of the evidence. After her conviction, the women’s movement continued to rally on her behalf and hired feminist attorney Susan Jordan to take over her defense.

Two years later, an appeals court reversed her conviction because the trial judge had instructed the jury not to consider the rape.

During the re-trial, Susan Jordan challenged potential jurors about their preconceptions of rape, making the assault an integral part of the case from the beginning. Garcia was acquitted. The entire jury agreed that the rape and threat of further harm were adequate provocation for Garcia’s action.

That same year, Joan Little, a black woman and the only female prisoner in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail, killed Clarence Alligood, a sixty-two-year-old white male guard, after he had entered her cell, threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little was charged with first-degree murder which, in North Carolina, carried a mandatory death sentence.

Again, there was a HUGE outpouring of support from various movements, including people and groups in the women’s liberation and Black Liberation movements as well as more mainstream groups. During her trial, Little’s defense exposed the chronic sexual abuse and harassment endured by women in the jail and prison system. Countering the prosecution’s argument that Little had enticed Alligood into her cell with promises of sex, the defense team called on women who had previously been held at the jail. They testified that Alligood had a history of sexually abusing women in his custody.

Little herself testified about Alligood’s assault.

After seventy-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury acquitted Little, establishing a precedent for killing as a justified self-defense against rape.

Dessie Woods was a Black woman in Georgia who shot and killed a man who tried to rape her and her friend while they were hitchhiking. She was sentenced to 22 years. Black nationalist women took up the case of Dessie Woods, framing it as a case of colonial violence. Radical (White) feminists also took up her cause and used it as a way to challenge white feminists to examine not only sexism and patriarchy but also racism and colonialism.

However, unlike the cases of Little, Wanrow and Garcia, the larger White feminist movement(s) did not rally to her cause.

Even though she did not have the massive outpouring of support as the other three women, the prolonged support that she did have eventually won Woods her freedom in July 1981. A lawyer from the People’s Law Center challenged the use of circumstantial evidence and the use of a special prosecutor (hired by the dead man’s family). The U.S. Court of Appeals determined that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and imprison her.

The first three cases were groundbreaking in that they established legal precedents stating that women had a right to defend themselves (and their children) from sexual assault. In the case of Inez Garcia, her lawyer Susan Jordan extended the legal interpretation of “imminent danger” beyond the immediate time period, thus laying the groundwork for battered women’s defense - that a woman who kills her abuser is acting in self-defense even if she is not under attack at that time.

A3N: What impact did activism have in these four cases?

VL: The activism and organizing around those four cases enabled the women to have better legal defenses than they would have otherwise been afforded. For example, $250,000 was raised for Joan Little’s defense. Almost $39,000 was spent on social scientists who devised an “attitude profile survey:” designed to detect patterns of (racial) prejudice. The defense used their findings to win a change of venue from conservative/racist Beaufort County to Raleigh, which was key in her acquittal. Without the money garnered by supporters, Joan Little, a poor Black woman, would never have been able to have that kind of legal support. Instead, she would have been convicted and executed.

A3N: How are things different today, in 2010?

VL: We don’t see the same outpouring of support for women arrested for self-defense today. We can look at the case of the New Jersey Four, who are four Black lesbians arrested and incarcerated for defending themselves against a homophobic attack on the street. Their case has garnered support from groups working around incarcerated women’s issues and queer issues, but it hasn’t been taken up as widely as, say, the case of Joan Little or even Dessie Woods. Women who are incarcerated for defending themselves against partner violence receive even less public attention and support.

A3N: Shifting our focus to the issue of domestic violence, you write that the early women’s shelters formed by the radical women’s movement in the 1970s “utilized the self-help methods, egalitarian philosophies, and collective structures that had developed within the women’s liberation movement, striving to be democratic alternatives in which women had the space to safely communicate, share experiences, examine the root causes of the violence against them, and begin to articulate a response. However, these efforts received nowhere near the amount of attention, publicity, and support that the women’s movement paid to Wanrow, Garcia, Little, and Woods.”

Why do you think these projects, as well as court cases where women defended themselves from intimates, did not receive the attention they deserved?

VL: Then (and now), people saw battering as a “personal” issue and were reluctant to get involved. Some felt that marriage (or partnership) somehow condoned abuse. Others felt that this was not an issue that a movement could be built on. Perhaps it was also recognized that the issue could divide a movement. After all, when reading histories of revolutionary groups during the 1960s and 1970s, we see that abuse and misogyny often went unaddressed.

A3N: What did these radical activists identify as the “root causes” of violence against women were? What is your personal opinion regarding these root causes?

VL: Radical activists identified society’s misogyny and patriarchy as root causes of violence against women. They pointed out that women are most often the ones who are attacked and abused because they are often the ones with less power (both physically and in terms of resources).

I strongly agree with this analysis and feel that only when we radically transform societal attitudes around gender and power will we be able to have a world without gendered violence.

A3N: The number of battered women’s shelters grew (by 1982, there were an estimated 300-700 shelters nationally), but you write that “the increased interest in the issue by those who did not identify with the women’s liberation movement resulted in a watering down of the radical feminist analyses that led to the first refuges for battered women. These emerging institutions emphasized providing services without analyzing the political context in which abuse occurred. There was a shift from calling for broad social transformation to focusing on individual problems and demanding greater state intervention.”

How do you think this watering down and shift towards greater state intervention has since played out in later decades, leading up to today?

VL: Today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.

For example, 29 states have some form of mandatory arrest policy in a DV call. There is also the possibility of dual arrests (in which both parties are arrested). In addition, many states now have “no-drop prosecution” in which the District Attorney subpoenas the battered spouse to testify with threats of prosecution if she recants or refuses.

The shift towards greater state intervention has also resulted in resources such as battered women’s shelters mirroring some of these same abusive practices (such as isolating the survivor). It also ignores ways in which the state inflicts violence upon women. I would greatly recommend the INCITE! anthology, entitled The Color of Violence, which explores various aspects of violence against women.

A3N: If you were dialoguing with those sectors of today’s anti-violence movement that embrace the criminalization approach, what are the key points you would make in arguing that prisons are not the answer? What do you think is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?

VL: The threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing/imprisoning a loved one.

Arrest/imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution (although not one that funders and the state want to see).

A3N: Can you please tell us about recent cases of women who are facing charges or have been wrongly convicted for defending themselves?

VL: There’s the case of the New Jersey Four, whom I mentioned above.

There’s also Sara Kruzan, a 31-year-old woman incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. When Sara was 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. By the age 13, she began working as a child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly molested by him. At age 16, Sara was convicted of killing him. She was sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her background and a finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to treatment offered in the juvenile system.

There’s been a letter-writing campaign to the governor urging clemency. Sara is also up for resentencing and needs letters of support. The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) are working on publicizing and garnering support for her case. However, we’re not seeing a fraction of the support from women’s or other non-prison groups that the cases of Wanrow, Garcia and Little received in the 1970s even though you would think that her story would provoke widespread outrage and calls for release.

I recently received an e-mail from CCWP about Mary Shields, a domestic violence survivor incarcerated for nineteen years on a seven-to-life sentence for attempted murder. This past September, Mary was found suitable for release by the Board of Parole Hearings. In 2006, the Parole Board had also found Mary “suitable for release” but rescinded its decision after Governor Schwarzenegger recommended against release. This time around, the governor has until January (when his term will be up) to either let the Board's decision stand or recommend that it be reversed and so CCWP is calling for people to send letters supporting Mary’s release.

A3N: Anything else to add?

VL: I want to remind readers that if we’re not coming up with solutions to gender violence, then the fall-back becomes relying on prisons and policing to keep women (and other vulnerable people) safe. It is also imperative to support women incarcerated for killing their abusers as well as to support battered women on the outside and to remember that abuse isolates people.

We should be working to end violence against women without strengthening government control over women’s lives or promoting incarceration as a solution to social problems.

Check out all the embedded links here:

http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2010/11/resisting-male-violence-and-prison.html

--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is http://www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.

Prison Rape: Our laws will not protect us.

Nor will our silence, so speak out or there will most certainly be neither justice nor peace.

The following post comes from the excellent blog Solitary Watch - appropriate for International Women's Day today, particularly given Arizona's history with the Justice Department on the issue. Men are victims of prison rape all too often too, of course, though we are less inclined to call it what it is. Approximately 300 prisoners will be raped today in America alone. One of every eight children we incarcerate will be sexually abused or exploited in custody.

Please take a few minutes to follow the embedded links and defend those whose voices have been so effectively shut out by our courts and legislatures - and ignored by the communities in which they are imprisoned. If you email us a copy of your comments, we'll probably post it. Send them to prisonabolitionist@gmail.com.

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Prison Rape, the PREA, and the PLRA

March 7, 2011
SOLITARY WATCH

Guest Post by Jennifer Wedekind

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Wedekind is a journalist whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, In These Times, and the Multinational Monitor. She is a 2011 JD Candidate at Georgetown Law.

The public comment period for the PREA regulations extends through April 4, 2011. To submit a comment or read the full text of the proposed standards, go to this page on the website of Just Detention International, an organization devoted to exposing and eliminating the epidemic of prison rape.

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The Department of Justice in early February opened a comment period for proposed regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Passed in 2003, the Act requires the Attorney General to promulgate national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction and punishment of prison rape. While its ultimate aim is to stem the rampant sexual abuse that occurs in prisons and jails across the country, up until now PREA has largely been an aspirational and fact-gathering statute.

The proposed regulations are structured around recommended standards put forth by the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, established by PREA, in a comprehensive 2009 report on the “the penological, physical, mental, medical, social, and economic impacts of prison rape in the United States.” However, subsequent comments by interested parties citing concerns about prison security and inmate “gamesmanship” have resulted in some of the recommendations being largely neutered. Additionally, a statutory mandate that no regulation impose substantial additional costs on prison authorities may limit the types of programs the regulations can implement. However, the comment period will allow for criticism and revision of the proposed regulations and provides an open forum for prisoner-rights advocates to be heard.

The problem of prison rape that PREA is attempting to address is nothing short of staggering. An estimated 88,500 adult inmates — 4.4 percent of prison inmates and 3.1 percent of jail inmates — reported at least one instance of sexual victimization in the previous year, according to a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. At a Hughes Unit prison in Texas, the facility with the highest rates of reported victimization, 8.6 percent of inmates reported being sexually assaulted by another inmate. Sexual victimization by guards is equally as prevalent. In the Crossroads Correctional Facility in Missouri, the male facility with the highest rates of guard sexual misconduct, 8.2 percent of inmates reported being victimized. At the women’s Bayview Correctional Facility in New York, 11.5 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by guards.

When a prisoner comes forward and reports a sexual assault, he or she is more likely to face retribution than redress. Complaining prisoners frequently face retaliatory harassment, discipline or further abuse. A full 25 percent of inmate victims are summarily sent to solitary confinement, according to the Department of Justice’s own numbers.

Additionally, an inmate complaint will rarely result in legal sanctions for the perpetrator or prison authorities, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has held that placing an inmate at risk of sexual assault with deliberate indifference can be a violation of the 8th Amendment. The main obstacle between inmates and a courtroom is the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Congress passed the PLRA in an effort to prevent “frivolous” inmate lawsuits and created considerable hurdles that an inmate must overcome to see his or her day in court. Significantly, any regulations passed under PREA will have to be in compliance with the PLRA, which may hamper its effectiveness in some areas.

In cases of sexual assault, inmates are most often stymied by two PLRA requirements — an exhaustion of all administrative remedies and a showing of physical harm. If a prisoner fails to comply with the technical and often arbitrary requirements of the administrative procedures, or if the inmate misses one of the filing deadlines — which may be as short as 48 hours — his or her right to sue is forever forfeited. Cases are frequently dismissed because of technical errors, because the wrong form was used or because the complaint was submitted to the wrong entity within the sprawling prison system.

In a notable 2003 case, Human Rights Watch reported that sixteen female inmates filed suit alleging systematic sexual abuse by prison staff, including forcible rape, coerced sexual activity, oral and anal sodomy, and forced pregnancies. The federal court hearing the case refused to address the merits, instead taking nearly five years to conclude that the women’s use of informal reporting procedures provided by the prison resulted in a failure to adequately exhaust all administrative remedies.

The PLRA also requires a showing of physical injury — and many jurisdictions do not consider a sexual assault to constitute a physical injury per se. This provision in particular is frequently relied upon to dismiss claims by victims of sexual assault, who frequently have no proof of physical injury due to delay in reporting, lack of additional violence during the assault, or inadequate prison medical providers, who often do not have the resources or willingness to administer a rape kit.

Advocates hope the final PREA regulations will provide more services for inmates and more accountability for prison administrators. However, while the regulations may be able to ease some of the administrative burdens currently on inmate victims, it will not provide a private cause of action and the PLRA will still dictate access to courts.

The proposed regulations would ban cross-gender strip searches, create minimum standards for investigations following a report, require correctional facilities to provide medical and mental health care, and institute a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault and harassment. The regulations also purport to make the prison grievance systems more accessible, however they don’t go as far as most advocates think necessary. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the regulations will have.

Imprisoned Women's Rights Watch

I stole this post to introduce the new International Prison Watch site, Imprisoned Women's Rights Watch, which my comrades with the Prison Reform Community Center set up to debut on International Women's Day. As you can see, they include friends in Amsterdam, doing a solidarity action for which I did nothing but bury my head that day. Anyway, they're awesome, and we could use some help building this site - contact them if you'd like to become a contributor / imprisoned women's rights watcher.

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International Women´s Day 2010...

Today March 8th 2010 is International Women´s Day. A good day to start this new blog for and with all women who are in prisons everywhere in the world.

This blog is connected to the International Prison Watch Weblogs, which is a growing network of sites where information about prisons, prisoner rights, abuse of prisoners and more is gathered and documented, with the goal to expose human rights abuses and from there to push for reform.

Here a few photos of Amsterdammers showing solidarity with imprisoned women:

At the little square dedicated to thoughts for Peace we showed our solidarity...

And here at the Monument in remembrance of Slavery, Oosterpark, Amsterdam, we showed our solidarity with women who are imprisoned.

Posted by P.R.C.C.