10.6: Gendered Prison Experience
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Prisons are not fun. People do not want to be in prison (despite what some few and far between news stories might claim). The free meals, health care, and rooms are not luxurious; in fact, in most institutions human rights are violated with spoiled food, lack of yard time, deprivation of family visitations or phone calls, lack of safety or privacy, medical experimentation, deprivation of rehabilitative services, and outright abuse and sexual assault.
Sociologist Gresham Sykes (1958) noted that prison inmates suffer through a variety of serious hardships, which he referred to as the “pains of imprisonment.” 325 Pains of imprisonment include loss of freedom and independence, loss of important familial, personal, romantic, and/or sexual relationships, inability to access normal goods or services, and loss of personal security. Collectively, these hardships can lead inmates into depression and may make them more susceptible to what sociologist Erving Goffman called “mortification.”
One example of deprivation of protection within prison can be seen in the habitual occurrence of rape—including prison staff as well as inmates—within the confines of prison. Prison staff includes security staff, teachers and counselors, medical workers, contractors and even religious volunteers. Struckman-Johnson conducted the most comprehensive research to date on prisoner rape. 326 After surveying 1,800 inmates in Midwestern prisons, they found that one in five male prisoners have been coerced or pressured into sex, and one in ten has been raped. In one women's prison, more than a quarter of the inmates said they had been pressured into sex by guards.
Political activist, professor, academic, and author Angela Davis argues that while men constitute the vast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects of the state punishment system are missed if it is assumed that women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention. 327 Further, according to Davis, because women make up a relatively small proportion of the whole prison population, the inattention given to female prisoners is frequently justified. Due to the late twentieth-century reforms which relied on a “separate but equal” model, demands for more repressive conditions in order to render women’s facilities “equal” to men’s resulted in harsher punishments and disciplinary actions in women’s prisons than were previously implemented. Women of color in particular are subject to regimes of punishment that differ significantly from those experiences by white women, including assigned chores, manual labor, and frequent unnecessary strip searches. “Sexual abuse, especially among women of color, has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls.” 328
Conditions of improper touching by persons of authority, sanctioned sexual harassment, and unnecessary strip searches exist in numerous women’s prisons across the country. In addition, psychological coercion and/or threats of sexual assault by persons in authority create a constant, unending and intense pressure on many incarcerated women. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as formerly incarcerated, have documented these abuses. 329 As part of a 2004 civil rights case brought against the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) alleging a guard’s rape of a female inmate, two Chicago attorneys sent surveys about sexual assault and harassment to women incarcerated in Illinois. 330 Almost 15% of the survey’s respondents said that IDOC staff had forced sexual activities on them—that is, they were raped or sexually assaulted. Two noted that IDOC staff had sexually assaulted them more than ten times. About 23% of the respondents stated that IDOC staff had offered money, food or privileges in exchange for sexual favors, and almost 10% noted that staff had done this to them on more than three occasions. About one in seven reported that IDOC staff had threatened loss of privileges, physical attack, or placement in isolation if the woman refused sex with the staff.
The violent sexualization of prison life within women’s institutions exposes ideologies of sexuality—and the intersection of race and sexuality—which have had a profound effect on the representations of and treatment received by women of color both within and upon release from prison. 331 Men of color experience a perilous continuity in the way they are treated in prison, where they are more likely to experience harsher forms of punishment such as solitary confinement whereas women of color are more likely than white women to experience sexual abuse within prison. 332
The state itself is directly implicated in the routinization of sexual abuse in women’s prisons and other forms of physical and mental abuse such as solitary confinement in men’s prisons, both in permitting such conditions that render individuals (especially those of color) vulnerable to explicit abuse carried out by guards and other prison staff and by incorporating into routine policy such practices as the strip search and solitary confinement. Being victimized will likely result in further social-psychological damage for the inhabitants experiencing the institutionalized racism and sexism. This results in their adjustment to society upon release being even further hindered, with one likely consequence being a return to crime and recidivating back into the prison structure. 333 334 335
While nearly 5,000 transgender people are incarcerated in state prisons, it's estimated only 15 cases (people) in which these prisoners were housed according to their lived gender. 336 Based on the available records (many records remain sealed depending on states' privacy laws) obtained from 45 states, just 13 transgender women are housed with women and two transgender men are housed with men. Thirty-five percent of transgender people who had spent time in prison in the previous year reported being sexually assaulted by staff or other inmates, according to a 2015 report by the Department of Justice. 337 When asked about the experiences surrounding their victimization by other inmates, 72% said they experienced force or threat of force and 29% said they were physically injured.
325 Sykes, G.M. 1958.
The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
326 Struckman-Johnson, Cindy. 2006.
National Prison Rape Elimination
. University Press. South Dakota.
327 Davis, Angela Y. 2003.
Are Prisons Obsolete?
Page 77. New York: Seven Stories Press.
328 Ibid.
329 Human Rights Watch Report. 2001. “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons.” Retrieved October 2, 2008 (
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/
)
330 Mills, Alan, Margaret Byrne. 2004. Rape Crisis in Women's Prison. Chicago Press: Chicago.
331 Davis, Angela Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.
332 Poole, Eric and Robert Regoli. 1980. “Race, Institutional Rule Breaking, and Disciplinary Response.” Law and Society Review, 14:4, 931-946.
333 Bonta, J., P. Gendreau. 1990. “Reexaming the Cruel and Unusal Punishment of Prison Life.” Law and Human Behavior, 347-366.
334 Cohen, S., L. Taylor. 1972. Psychological Survival. Hammondsworth: Penguin
335 Day, Susie. 2001. “Cruel But Not Unusual: The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons.” Monthly Review. Retrieved April 29, 2006 (
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0701day.htm
)
336 Sosin, K. (2020). Trans, imprisoned — and trapped. NBC News.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-
out/transgender-women-are-nearly-always-incarcerated-men-s-putting-many-n1142436
337 Beck, A. (2015). PREA Data Collection Activities, 2015. U.S. Department of Justice.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/pdca15.pdf