Bummer
Friday, January 1st, 2010I posted this at the new and improved STR, and it’s continuing to gnaw at me. It’s about the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, founded by Malika Saada Saar, random emphases mine:
The story of a prisoner’s death in Arizona over the summer popped up in the national media for a single news cycle and disappeared without provoking much outrage. Marcia Powell died after being left in an outdoor holding cell in triple-digit heat for more than four hours. She had a history of mental problems and was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution—a crime for which we can assume none of her clients were prosecuted.
Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and sexual violence is often at the root of the events that put them behind bars.
According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), as many as 88 percent of female inmates have experienced sexual or physical abuse before coming to prison. And by and large the mothers behind bars are not gang-bangers, murderers, or drug kingpins. They are first-time, nonviolent offenders, arrested for untreated addiction. With the drug wars and the passage of mandatory minimum sentences, the incarceration of mothers has skyrocketed.
It is fashionable to get worked up about the shackling of pregnant mothers giving birth in prison, or to advocate reform of “the system” ad nauseum. These are topics to get worked up about, but the proposed solutions are usually little better than bandaids. If people focused on ending the prosecution of victimless crimes–prostitution, drug use–a lot of nonviolent women (and men) would be free to deal only with our screwed-up society, not our screwed-up society plus the horrors of prison. But it’s far more fashionable to dither about what Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or whoever means for women in our “national moment” or whatever. You know, Bible Spice and something about rape kits, while actual women are actually raped inside and outside of prison.
Posted in Feminism, Prison Tagged: feminismwhatisitgoodfor, rant















