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The world over, when it comes to sentencing and incarceration, the focus
inevitably is on boys and men. We see in the United States, however, that
younger defendants, including girls, are targeted by the criminal justice system. Thanks to the enduring War on Drugsas of June 2011, in its fortieth
yearwomen, in particular black women, are the fastest growing population
in U.S. prisons. Less well known is that girls rates of imprisonment are also
outpacing boys. Here, again, we have to note how race intersects with gender.
Black girls receive the brunt of the policing attention.
uch of the criminalization aspects of youth starts with school suspensions, especially given the Zero Tolerance policies that have accelerated veritable repression across the U.S. school systems. According to a recent
study, black girls are suspended at four times the rate of white girls in middle schools. The racial threat hypothesis has also found renewed attention
vis-`a-vis school sanctions. A nationwide study of 294 public schools notes an
increase of punitive measures such as suspension and expulsion where there is
a proportionate increase of black students in relation to white students. Black
students tend not to receive more benign sanctions such as parentteacher
conferences or guidance counseling. This is echoed in the recent study, Education Interrupted, by the New York Civil Liberties Union:
Students with disabilities are four times more likely to be suspended
than students without disabilities.
Black students, who comprise 33 percent of the student body, served
53 percent of suspensions over the past 10 years. Black students with
disabilities represent more than 50 percent of suspended students with
disabilities.
Black students also served longer suspensions on average and were
more likely to be suspended for subjective misconduct, like profanity
and insubordination.
Black girls who talk back are singled out for repressive punishment, and
much evidence has surfaced that school suspensions are correlated to a higher
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Historically and ideologically speaking, girls and women have been sanctioned for status crimes (prostitution, running away) and within prisons for
talking back when such crimes have been of little significance for free
and incarcerated boys and men. The sexist ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood, invented around the 1820s, continues to hold persons perceived to be
girls or women to standards of passivity, domesticity, and Christian virtues
that are enforced in public patriarchal institutional settings (schools, courts,
prisons, workplaces, and so on).
n 1995, the noted criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind appealed to the feminist movement and feminist scholars [to] make the decarceration of women
a part of their political agendas. She laments the fact that women as victims
have gotten much more attention by feminist actors than incarcerated women,
such as women who were deemed deviant. What seems to me at stake here
is the importance of disrupting criminologist classifications of victims and
perpetrators in light of implicit bias, which trigger sanctions targeted at
criminalized behavior or classes of people. At the same time, I worry about
feminist advocacy that is purely victim-based, lobbying for enforcement
mechanisms to change attitudes about domestic violence and tying criminal
justice money to safe houses. These may inadvertently reinforce not only discourses of pathology but deliver those who need the most social/community
healing kinds of interventions to carceral regimes.
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MECHTHILD NAGEL
The Florida-based advocacy group NCCD Center for Girls and Young
Women presents the following statistics that focuses on girls arrest and incarceration rates: First, girls are the fastest growing segment of the juvenile
justice population.
The national picture shows that crime rates are decreasing for both girls and boys, but
the rate of decrease has been slower for girls. Nationally, since 1997, incarceration
for boys has decreased 18% compared to only 8% for girls. However, in 14 states
the female juvenile rate of incarceration has increased more than 30% since 1997.
Nationally, girls make up 15% of the incarcerated youth population and as much as
34% in some states. States and local jurisdictions are in need of gender-responsive
interventions to reverse the escalating trends of girls entering into the system.
The question remains whether the prison should adopt women/girl/transfriendly policies to ensure that the varied needs are accounted for.
What does gender-responsive service mean to an abolitionist? Its a contested and complex issue. It can be a platform for meaningful improvements
in womens prison and important services given to transgender prisoners. Or,
on the other hand, it can be a way of increasing penalties. Whereas a pregnant
mother might be released early from prison, a prison with excellent pre- and
postnatal arrangements might sway the parole board to retain the prisoner
to give birth in prison. Mara Dodge makes a historical point by noting that
nineteenth-century judges in Illinois were reluctant to send pregnant women to
prison, not due to humanitarian concerns, but due to costbenefit accounting:
pregnant women and the subsequent prison care (cr`eche) of babies would not
be cost-effective in a prison environment that was supposed to extract as much
menial labor from the convicts as it could. In fact, theres hardly a bleaker
picture given on gender disparities than from a chaplain in 1930: To be a
male convict in this prison would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict,
for a protracted period, would be worse than death. It is reiterated in Mary
Barrs personal account of surviving New Yorks prison, Rikers Island, the
largest jail in the world, housing over 20,000 remand and convicted women,
men, and children.
learly at stake is that the modern penitentiary was designed to fit the needs
(if any) of adult men. And some nineteenth-century women reformers
such as Elizabeth Fry may not have understood that. Fry was beholden to
307
the Cult of True Womanhood ideal and thus blamed the victim rather than
the male-oriented standard of housing prisoners. She heaped much blame
on the loud, unkempt women prisoners rather than on the material conditions
they survived in. Fry, however, would have been aghast at gender-neutral
accommodations that permit men to work in shower areas in womens prisons
because of equal opportunity provisions (contrary to UN conventions on the
treatment of prisoners). By the 1970s, gender-specific prisons, inspired by the
disciplinary regime of reformatories, vanished and co-educational prisons
appeared. So it is ironic that gender-specificity is demanded again. My worry
is that if one operates under a reform paradigm, one is always inclined to
make excuses for sending women (and men) to prison, and for long stretches
of time, because it will be a tolerable experience.
As Julia Sudbury argued, creating gender and trans-sensitive spaces in
prisons goes against the spirit of maroon abolitionism. She summarized
her focus group interviews with formerly incarcerated trans people who have
become activists for abolitionism in the following way:
This interaction between racism and trans-phobia in the prison is the basis for an antiracist, gender-queer, anti-prison agenda promoted by black transgender and gender
non-conforming activists. In contrast to calls to develop a normative transgender
prison order, or trans-sensitive prisons, the participants point to the systemic nature
of gender violence as part of the structures of imprisonment, and reject the possibility
of gender liberation under conditions of captivity. In so doing, they seek to transform
anti-prison politics by calling for the abolition of gender policing as part of a broader
abolitionist agenda.
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MECHTHILD NAGEL
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MECHTHILD NAGEL
311
in the United States the human drama has been played out on the backs of
black, marooned bodies. It is time to claim a transformative justice system for
black life to be considered human life the world over, especially in the United
States.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
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San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
ACLU. 2010. Can the Racial Justice Act Change the Practice of Picking All-White
Juries in North Carolina? Available at <http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/
can-racial-justice-act-change-practice-picking-all-white-juries-north-caroli> (last accessed February 20, 2011).
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color
Blindness. New York: The New Press.
Barr, Mary. 2007. Some Facts and Anecdotes of Women Arrested and Imprisoned in the
United States, in Mechthild Nagel and Seth Asumah (eds.), Prisons and Punishment:
Reconsidering Global Penality. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Correctional Association of New York. 2010. The Adoption and Safe Families Act
(ASFA) Expanded Discretion Bill Becomes Law. June 16. Available at <http://www.
correctionalassociation.org/news/ASFA becomes law June10.htm> (last accessed February 9, 2011).
Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1995. Rethinking Womens Imprisonment: A Critical Examination of
Trends in Female Incarceration, in Barbara Raffel Price & Natalie J. Sokoloff (eds.), The
Criminal Justice System and Women: Offenders, Victims, and Workers. New York: McGrawHill.
Dodge, Mara L. 2002. Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind: A Study of Women, Crime,
and Prisons, 18352000. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Elijah, J. Soffiyah. 2007. Political Prisoners in the U.S.: New Perspectives in the New Millennium, in Mechthild Nagel & Seth Asumah (eds.), Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering
Global Penality. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Himmelstein, Kathryn E.W. and Hannah Bruckner. 2010. Criminal-Justice and School Sanctions Against Nonheterosexual Youth: A National Longitudinal Study. Pediatrics December: 4957.
James, Joy (ed.). 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.
Johnson, Paula C. 2004. Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York:
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Kenny, Megan. 2011. Suspended from Kindergarten? Whats Wrong with This Picture?
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Losen, Daniel J. and Russell J. Skiba. 2010. Suspended Education: Urban Middle
Schools in Crisis. The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civilos. September 13.
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2FsMSiIfzGxhkH%2BX0o> (last accessed April 15, 2011).
Nagel, Mechthild. 2008. Prisons as Diasporic Sites: Liberatory Voices from the Diaspora of
Confinement. Journal of Social Advocacy and Systems Change 1: 131.
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NCCD Center for Girls and Young Women. 2010. A Call for Gender Equity for Girls in the
Juvenile Justice System. Available at <http://www.justiceforallgirls.org/call.html> (last
accessed May 29, 2011).
New York Civil Liberties Union. 2011. Education Interrupted: The Growing Use of Suspensions in New York Citys Public Schools. Available at <www.nyclu.org/files/publications/
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Nocella, Anthony. 2011. A Disability Perspective on the Terrorization of Dissent. Unpublished Dissertation. Syracuse University.
Paley, Noelle Chaddock. 2010. Comments on Girls in Prison panel at Reimagining Girlhood
conference, SUNY Cortland. October 24.
Payne, Allison A. and Kelly Welch. 2010. Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline.
Social Problems 75(1): 2548.
Peterson, Latoya. 2011. On Teachers Calling Kid Future Criminals and the School-to-Prison
Pipeline. April 8. Last accessed 4/23/11: Available at <http://www.suspensionstories.com/
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Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books.
Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Boston, MA:
South End Press.
Sudbury, Julia. 2010. Marooned Abolitionists. Black Gender Activists in the Anti-Prison
Movement in the U.S. and Canada. Meridians 9(1): 129.
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Mechthild Nagel is a Professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, College at Cortland,
Director of the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies (CGIS), and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the
Institute for African Development at Cornell University. She also teaches about peace and social justice
in her annual spring course, Prisons and Punishment, and she has taught in area mens state prisons for
a number of years. Dr. Nagel is editor-in-chief of the online journal Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational
Womens and Gender Studies (wagadu.org). E-mail: Mecke.Nagel@cortland.edu
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