I picked up a publication titled “Heresies #6” at a used book store a couple of weeks ago. It was a special issue of the publication focused on women and violence. There is a lot in it that is interesting. As part of my ongoing commitment to highlight the ways that feminism addressed prisons in the past, I am sharing an article from Heresies today in its entirety. The essay is instructive because it shows how some feminists engaged the realities of prison at a particular historical moment. As you read, what would you change to make the essay more applicable to the 21st century? What would you keep the same? Finally, as a fun activity, count the number of times the word “patriarchy” appears throughout the text.

On Being Inside: Violence in Women’s Prisons
[Heresies is free upon request to women in prisons and mental institutions.]

Dedicated to our friends of Bedford Hills, without whose constant strength and guidance we couldn’t go on

If you want to understand what Hell is all about, take a short trip into the barred realm of a women’s prison. This is a journey in time and space, a reality appearing so Kafkaesque that it resembles science fiction, a different dimension. Here a whole colony of women live in oblivion; sleepwalk, more dead than alive. In the total absence of attention from the outside world, they become easy targets for a system which feels free to treat them like animals, to harass them while they are too powerless to fight back. Those who do decide to fight take the brunt and serve as disciplinary examples to the rest, the faster for everyone to learn how to survive without making trouble, without dignity, without the memory of what it is to be yourself, a human being, a woman.

Prison is a cage. Yet so is a tenement in the ghetto. So is the typing pool of a corporation. So is a factory. So is even the isolation of a suburban dollhouse. There are cages and cages. Prison is the cage where even the illusion of freedom is removed from your dreams.

Women are targets of violence on the streets, in the family, at work, on welfare. Their assailants are men they don’t know and men they love, the state, the system, society at large. This violence grows like cancer and becomes itself a powerful prison from which there is no escape. It is perhaps easier to jump the fence at Bedford Hills than to overcome the societal dictatorship which deprives women of their self-respect, their integrity, their safety, their means for survival. These invisible bars to self-fulfillment and survival are unbending and hard; they are the reasons why women ultimately end up in prison. One prison simply leads to another.

Prisons in general are concentration camps. They are the places where the poor, those with the wrong color of skin, the wrong kind of language, the wrong background, the wrong political ideas can be contained, isolated and held responsible for the failures and crises of society at large.

The ultimate hypocrisy of our system is that it creates a class of oppressed and desperate people and then turns around and blames these very people for the tragedy of their situation. Blaming the victim is a ploy the system— any system— uses in order to round up and put away the unwanted elements of the population and make it look like justice. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful, who commit big-time murder through war, big-time robbery by living off the oppression of the poor-they go free and prosper. All poor and Third World people are subject to this ploy. But those who have it worst are Third World, lower-class women. To them, even the restricted prospects available to women of higher classes, especially white women, such as education, better jobs, some leisure, some freedom from constant responsibility and worry — all are denied. What they get instead is the threat of forced sterilization aiming at the ultimate genocide of their race or class, children they can’t feed, menial jobs, slave wages, the superpatriarchal oppression of the welfare system.

It is no wonder that, at least in New York State, 90 percent of the women in prison are poor, Black, Spanish-speaking.

What did these women do?

They had something to do with drugs, either as users or as small dealers; they were prostitutes; they shoplifted or were involved in some sort of robbery; they forged checks or perjured themselves; some killed a man in self-defense; in some sad cases, they killed their children.

What mother would kill her children were she not maddened by the effort to keep going, keep providing, keep the children alive, keep them from trouble, keep herself from sinking under the weight of too much effort? What does it mean to kill in self-defense except to kill in order to avoid or avenge rape, to save oneself and one’s children from being beaten to death, to call a halt to the violence done to us by taking matters into our hands and actively fighting back? Why would someone poor steal, forge, shoplift, but for the fact that she is in need of essentials she can’t otherwise get? Why do women become prostitutes? It’s another job, dictated by the ease with which men give money to women for the use of their bodies as opposed to the reluctance with which they give them money to be creative and productive as human beings. Why does anyone turn to drugs, except to shut reality out, the dread and horror of having to live powerless and victimized? How dare we put a moral clamp on the highs, the obliviousness which can be purchased for a short while from dope?

“Crimes” such as these arise out of the despair of poverty and female oppression, and were nailed on the offenders by society. These “criminals” are not criminals at all— they are the victims. The ultimate stage of being a victim is to end up in prison.

Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women may not look quite like a concentration camp, nor do the women look emaciated and starving. The institution takes good care to fatten them with poor-quality , carbohydrate-saturated food, which, it has been proved, keeps one lethargic and passive. But look again, talk with the women, and the grim reality will start unveiling itself.

From the time women enter the gates to the moment they leave, no one will let them forget who they are, where they are, what they are there for. They are “problems,” constantly to be watched out for, contained and tamed.

The key words in prison are Security, Revenge and Brainwashing.
The women are treated with contempt, harassed and humiliated daily. Their privacy becomes secondary to security, their labor belongs to the prison, their ties with their families are inhumanly disregarded, their need to relate to other human beings, to each other, is impeded at every moment by the authorities who dread that communication among the women will lead to resistance and revolt. Lesbians who keep to themselves, out of trouble, i.e., those not openly “out” and not involved in any political activity, are usually, though not always, left to themselves— just as on the outside. Conversely, strong relationships among the women are often labeled “lesbian” and destroyed, because any strong relationship is to be feared and avoided. To be in prison is to be considered not human, to have none of the usual physical and emotional needs people have on the outside.

Without family, with friendships requiring a hassle to make them last, all that’s left is eating the horrible food provided, sleeping under constant disorienting surveillance, doing the daily chores for as low as 30C to $ 1.50 a day and attending the poor-quality, limited programs the institution may offer. Most important of all, the women must keep up with the rules.

From what we know at Bedford and from accounts around the country, women, as soon as they arrive at the prison, are confronted with a long list of rules and regulations that make no sense and reduce life inside to a series of monotonous exercises in boredom and drudgery. A woman once said to us:

In here you have to forget how to function on a normal day-to-day basis; you are expected to get up, regardless of whether you have anything to do or not, to get counted, to eat, to do your prescribed chores, and then go back to bed. All sense of responsibility is removed from you, all is done for you, even the things you don’t want done. You are regressing back to infancy.

Indeed, the guards, the warden, everyone considers the women as children who don’t know anything, to be rewarded or punished according to whether they follow the rules. And since the rules are so arbitrary and change from day to day, a woman is at a loss to know what is expected from her; she can break the rules, and not even be aware that she’s doing so. In fact, it is strongly suspected that this is exactly the raison d’etre of these rules: to confuse, harass and drive crazy, to disorient.

Disorientation is the first stage of brainwashing, as it leaves you shaky and unsure of what you want and who you are. You become malleable material for the authorities to shape as they please.

Disorientation is also achieved and promoted by artificially inducing boredom. In the absence of anything worthwhile to fill in one’s day with, each and every moment seems an eternity, and the prospect of ever reaching the time to get out becomes blurred in the anonymity of time. One’s will to resist, the desire to live, goes out little by little, like the sand in a huge hour glass. This truly is Dante’s Hell, a bleakness more frightening than many more overt forms of violence. Disorientation is complete when one completely loses one’s sense of time as well as one’s sense of oneself.

What the authorities desire is to mold women into weak, obedient, “feminine” slaves who will be content to serve forever, to be ill-treated and victimized, without complaints. To that end, they offer the women little more than high school courses and typically “female” vocational training, i.e., secretarial, beautician courses, etc. Often they have the audacity to call the chores the women must daily perform (in order to maintain the prison budget at a minimum) vocational training—as if the women didn’t already know only too well how to scrub floors, wash dishes, do the laundry, sew clothes. Meanwhile, men in prison can at least do electrical wiring, plumbing, carpentry — higher-paying, skilled jobs not available as a rule to women in prison.

If you refuse to do your chores, you are labeled a troublemaker and punished. Then a more overt cycle of violence begins to operate against you. First comes “counseling” or “group therapy”— how to lead you back to the path of virtuous hard labor. Then come the drugs. Drugging is such a prevalent feature on prison campuses that one wonders why the prison establishment isn’t given the honorary title of “Big-Time Pusher.” A lot of the women seek the drugs themselves, as a relief from the frustration of prison life. But there are also those who are forcibly’ drugged because they are disciplinary problems. The drug industry often experiments with their newest, most harmful drugs on women in prison. We have known women who were forcibly injected with Prolixin, a mind-altering drug with long-lasting effects, because they were termed “dangerous.”

Then there is sterilization. The prison, hand in hand with the medical profession, has found the ultimate means of rendering women, especially poor Third World women, harmless in the long term: they stop them from being able to reproduce themselves. This is racism in the raw, compounded on sexism, and one of the types of physical violence specific to women in prison. It is tied in closely with the emotional violence done to a woman when her children have been snatched away from her. There is nothing like the despair of a mother separated from her offspring. And only a woman can experience the full savagery of such a torture. Often, in the visiting room, seeing her weep with joy when she re-finds her child, and seeing her weep with anguish when it’s time to separate again, I grow violently angry inside and demand what right these men in the Corrections Department have to do this to a woman. Of course, this type of cruelty is also part and parcel of the same racist mentality that sterilizes Third World women: breaking up the family has always been a white supremacist policy against people of color, a way of furthering genocidal policies, the destruction of one of the few sources of strength and solace Third World people may have in this racist society.

The other major type of physical violence done to women behind bars is the presence of male guards, and the threat of brute male physical power always looming over their heads. Both men and women prisoners experience the racism of the Correction Department in the form of guards who belong to the Ku Klux Klan — a horrifying and very little known ‘fact of prison oppression. Women have to put up with KKK guards, but, actually, any male guard is oppressive in a woman’s prison. Male guards, often of all colors, “goon squads,” the “superior male muscle,” are called in to quell riots and fights, and under that excuse, they beat the women up and sexually abuse them, though this is not always as publicized as in Joan Little’s case. But male guards serve another function, not as overt as all that. In a recent suit brought by the Bedford Hills women against the institution, which sought the removal of the male guards, it came out in the state’s testimony that male guards were “desirable” because they were a “stabilizing, humanizing factor”! In their presence, women acted more “ladylike,” dressed better, used less “vulgar” language, got into fewer fights. In short, we surmise, they acted more feminine,” passive and submissive.

Conditioned as all women are by the patriarchy to compete with each other for men’s favors and attention, because we are taught that all the improvements we’ll ever get in life come through the protection and grace of a man, it is small wonder that such a subtle technique of brainwashing is used in women’s prisons. So, it’s not only a threat to have male guards around, it’s a promise that, while inside, you’ll fare better if you play up to them, if you behave in the manner prescribed to you by the patriarchy. This, along with the demeaning chores, the drugs, the “counseling,” the sterilization, the possible rape, serves to implant deep in a woman’s consciousness the lesson she mustn’t forget in and out of prison, that we are the chattel of men, we have to serve them and to entertain them, according to their needs.

The patriarchy, however, forgets that women have a tremendous capacity for psychic survival and a great will to resist. While a lot of the women in prison learn their lessons well, a lot more remain fully conscious of what’s being done to them, and put up a constant struggle to remain women, strong and unbroken.

Prisons have always been fermentation grounds which gave birth to a lot of revolutionaries.

Women, already toughened by a history of aggressive survival in the streets, more often than not turn into the strongest, most courageous revolutionaries of us all. Their high consciousness is an example for all of us who are fighting not only to survive but also to bring down the forces that keep us oppressed.

It is not surprising that a lot of these women are lesbians, because lesbians already made their first revolutionary step when they broke the rules of patriarchy: that woman will sleep with man and will depend on him for her survival. Lesbians in prison form structures of support, entire families, in order to fight alienation and to give each other the solace and the strength to survive in prison. Lesbians do not fall for the games the administration plays by using male guards, they have no interest in playing up to men. Thus, while lesbians are by no means the only ones to rebel, they are usually at the core of the rebellion.

Lesbians and straight women, who refuse to submit and who resist the authorities, the brainwashing, even the male guards, are all labeled “dangerous,” “ring leaders,” “troublemakers.” Not only are they themselves an example of strong independent womanhood — the enemy of the system — but they stick their necks way out to help the other women, they inspire others to resist. This can and often does lead to a full-fledged riot, as at Bedford Hills in 1974, and in Frontera, California, last spring. Such behavior is of course severely punished, and most of the revolutionary women end up doing an extraordinary amount of time in segregation — the prison within prison where, for all intents and purposes, you are lost to the world. Also, another result of prison resistance is the lengthening of your prison sentence, often indeterminately, until it becomes vague when you will ever get out. These women who defy all odds against their bodies and minds in order to fight for their freedom as well as that of their sisters should be our heroines and guiding lights.

Instead, the system tries to present them to us as bad. They want us to believe these women, and indeed all women in prison, are evil, dangerous and violent. These are the myths the system weaves for our benefit, so that their experience, the experience of all incarcerated women, will seem completely alien to ours, a different reality.

There is a purpose to this. Just as the prison authorities don’t want the women to talk to each other, to inspire each other, to help each other build a resistance movement, so also the system in general fears our getting together with women in prison. Because, as we begin to understand the threads that connect our existence with that of incarcerated women, as the outlines of their experience begin to look more and more familiar, the Kafkaesque reality ceases to be so science fictional! Prisons appear increasingly as microcosms of our society which represent in a highly intensified form the sexist, racist, classist structures which keep women everywhere oppressed. The more conscious we become of the similarity between our fate and the fate of our sisters in prison, the more we break down the division between “us” and “them,” the “good little girls” and the “bad women,” the more we have the potential to unite and to combat efficiently our common enemy.

Here lies the importance of our understanding the commonality of our experience with that of our sisters in prison. At the same time, it is imperative that we make a huge leap in consciousness in order to understand the extremity of their situation, and also the extremity of the situation that brought them to prison in the first place. We need to unite our struggles with those of incarcerated women. We need their strength, and they need ours. Together, we will form a power that the patriarchy will find hard to crush.

— Charoula

Note: The Rockefeller Drug Law is the harshest drug law in the U.S. It affects primarily small users rather than big time dealers (who are tried in the federal courts and receive remarkably milder sentences). The people convicted under this state law receive harsher sentences mandatory life sentences with a minimum of 7-25 years— than those convicted under all other felony classifications except first-degree murder. “Mandatory” means that the judge cannot exercise any personal discretion based on the person’s relationship to the crime, his or her past criminal history, or other mitigating circumstances. It also means that no parole is available before the minimum is served in full. Under this law for example, a first offender and mother of 3 can get 15 years to life for passing a package of drugs at her man’s request, in complete innocence of the contents of the package. Compare this to a first offender who can murder his girlfriend and gel to 7 years with parole at 18 months.