Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex California and Beyond

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 ofthe 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference 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 ofthe prison. There, violence takes the form ofmedical neglect, sexual abuse, lack ofreproductive control, loss ofparental rights, denial oflegal rights and remedies, the devastating effects ofisolation , and, ofcourse, arbitrary discipline. Recent reports by international human rights organizations have begun to address the invisibility ofwomen prisoners and to highlight the severity of the violence they experience. For example, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have specifically focused on the widespread problem of sexual abuse in United States' prisons. In 1999 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 ofthe U.S., particularly in the legal arena, un documents (such as the International Covenanton Civil and Political Rüjhts and the Standard Minimum Rules/or theTreatment ofPrisoners) have been used [Meridians:jèminism, race, transnationalism 2001, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-25]©2001 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. productively by activists to underscore the gravity of human rights violations in women's prisons. The Prison Industrial Complex As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels ofcrime 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 ofprisons 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 expansion of the prison system. Because the overwhelming majority ofU.S. prisoners are from racially marginalized communities , corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures ofracism. Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although women comprise a relatively small percentage ofthe entire prison population , they constitute, nevertheless, the fastestgrowing segment ofprisoners . 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 ofcapitalism has precipitated the decline ofthe 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 ofthe social problems previously addressed by institutions such as Aid to Families with DependentChildren (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. ANGELA Y. DAVIS AND CASSANDRA SHAYLOR Especially forwomen ofcolor, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these draconian 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...