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T A B L E++T A L K What do you do when you're forced to choose between child and career? Weigh in on the challenges working parent face in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Breathing lessons Shunning and shaming Your call is important to us. Not. I want you so bad Drama Queen BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATUREARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
Lucas and I are sitting on the cold concrete basement floor of a board and care facility for the developmentally disabled she now manages in Tiburon, Calif., as she assembles a gleaming new lawn mower she bought to tame the property's few patches of green. It is in this concrete room with a low stucco ceiling, and two file boxes filled with letters from friends in prison, that Lucas feels most at home. An African-American woman with eyes set wide apart, kinky hair cropped short, broad shoulders and an expression that is by turns stern and personable, Lucas speaks with a deep, steady voice. "I'm still institutionalized in some ways," she says, standing and crossing to a desk placed diagonally between two concrete walls. "Four o'clock was count at the prison, and I still sometimes stand up then." There are many habits of prison life as well as memories that will fade over time, but others, like the assaults, will be impossible to forget. "I made a mistake that cost me 30 months of my life," she says, "but I'll be doing that time for the rest of my life." There are some 78,000 women in more than 170 state and 10 federal prisons for women nationwide, plus another 60,000 who are doing time in thousands of county jails across America. Perhaps Lucas' story seems like an extreme example of custodial misconduct, but attorneys who work with incarcerated females say that the vast majority of the more than 138,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails today have been exposed to some form of sexually related intimidation or assault by correctional officers while serving their time. This means rape; it means coerced sex in exchange for cigarettes, tampons or phone calls to their kids; it means guards who stand outside showers, cells and bathrooms leering and making lewd remarks about the women's bodies; it means guards who stop women in the halls, in the cafeteria, on the yard to perform pat-searches that include groping of breasts and groins; and it means guards who corner women to conduct strip-searches 30 times a day. The horrors of life in men's prisons are already part of our common currency -- prison fights, riots, prison gangs, inmate-on-inmate rape, the threat of contracting HIV. Our lens on women's prison has a softer focus, largely contrived by B movies in which tough, curvy broads with sharp tongues and snake tattoos start cat fights in the cafeteria. A few trays are thrown and peas tossed, but in the end, the matronly guards restore the order. It's titillating, lurid, harmless. The truth, of course, is much more alarming. When women enter prisons and jails they essentially become invisible. Statistically, women inmates are much less likely to be visited by their friends and family, in part because their facilities are in remote locations. Women have less money at their disposal than most men when they enter prison, since the crimes that land them in prison in the first place -- drug offenses, theft and welfare fraud -- are crimes of poverty. Slave wages for their labors behind bars don't help them achieve any level of self-sufficiency, even to buy basic goods like aspirin or toothpaste. Stripped of their rights, money and contact with the outside world, they are powerless, helpless and easy to manipulate. Add male guards, with little training and absolute power, to that equation, and you've got a potentially lethal combination. Unless the prison administration takes an organized, active role in discouraging sexual misconduct, it is known to run rampant. And why not? No one is watching. The inmates have no reliable means of voicing complaints. And even if they did, who is going to believe the word of a convicted felon over a correctional officer anyway? As a result, women behind bars are saddled with an added level of punishment, which is, of course, not sanctioned by any prison system, but is so overlooked and so common as to be essentially institutionalized. The sheer magnitude of the problem is hard to fathom. "I have never worked with a single woman in prison or jail who has not reported some form of sexual harassment or abuse," said Ellen Barry, who has spent 20 years working as an attorney and advocate for inmates and is now co-chair of the National Network for Women in Prison and director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco. "Sexual abuse and a climate of sexual terror -- the fear of being daily harassed and assaulted by male guards -- is pervasive throughout the entire prison system." Lucas and two other Dublin inmates, Valerie Mercadel and Raquel Douthit, filed a class-action suit in U.S. District Court in August 1996, alleging that they were "sexually assaulted, physically and verbally sexually abused and harassed, subjected to repeated invasions of privacy and subjected to threats, retaliation and harassment when they complained about this wrongful treatment." They sought unspecified damages and changes to correctional procedures and staff training to protect other inmates. Lucas was released from prison in July 1996 and returned to her home in Tiburon. The other two women were transferred to different facilities. These three women's highly publicized, successful suit has helped bring some of the most lurid forms of abuse to light, but there are many women who've been subjected to similarly horrendous acts, whose voices we've never heard. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women represented in class-action suits across the nation have similarly horrific stories. Right now, the U.S. Department of Justice has two federal suits pending against the departments of corrections in Michigan and Arizona, alleging sexual misconduct on a broad scale in their facilities. In recent years, similar legal actions have been brought on the state and county level against the District of Columbia, Colorado, Louisiana, Georgia, Washington state, California and the jail system in Santa Clara County, Calif. In December 1996, Human Rights Watch, the international human rights watchdog agency, published a report called "All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons." It painted a grim picture of life in 11 state women's prisons in the District of Columbia, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and New York. "We found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them," states the report. "We found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male officers have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for having done so." The findings and recommendations of the Human Rights Watch report were so scathing, in fact, that they prompted a rare visit by the United Nations rapporteur on Human Rights, who began a tour of America's women's prisons on May 20 to look into sexual abuse of women behind bars. Brenda V. Smith, senior counsel and director of the Women in Prison Project of the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., said the U.N. investigator will find substantial evidence of violations of inmates' civil and human rights. "I would say that every jurisdiction has a problem with it," she says, "and to the extent that they say they don't have a problem it is a problem." Again and again, those who have investigated conditions in women's prisons walk away with the same conclusion: In women's state and federal prisons, and in women's jails nationwide, sexual misconduct, assault and harassment are ubiquitous and persistent facts of life. N E X T_ P A G E: Sexual politics behind bars |
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