Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis elaborates on the theme of prison’s simultaneous visibility and invisibility through examples of women’s prison literature that exposes life behind prison walls. Davis cites Assata Shakur’s memoirs to illustrate the “dangerous intersections of racism, male domination, and state strategies of political repression” (61). Shakur’s memoirs reveal the gender-based and racially biased nature of her incarceration, as she was forcefully searched internally, kept under 24-hour surveillance, and placed in an all-male prison without “adequate medical attention” (62). As Shakur was also a prominent activist for Black Liberation, Davis believes that her incarceration was a way to weaken the Civil Rights movement. Davis cites Elizabeth Gurly Flynn’s The Alderson Story as a strong representation of the gendered structure of women’s prisons, which focused their programs on domesticity. Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg’s writings developed the idea of the prison industrial complex, and countless other stories highlight what women experience while incarcerated. Despite all this expository literature, women’s prisons are still invisible in conversations about prison reform. Because women are a small percentage of total prison populations, their issues do not receive priority. Davis asserts that women are the largest growing prison demographic and that their issues reveal “the centrality of gender to an understanding of state punishment” (65).

The author again infuses her argument with firsthand experience, using Shakur’s discussion of the strip search. Shakur asserts that “every woman who has ever been on the rock, or in the old house of detention” (63) has been experienced the internal cavity search. The process is meant to be consensual, but Shakur confirms that prisons “lock you in the hole and they don't let you out until you consent to be searched internally” (63). Davis confirms this claim, using her own prison experience as evidence. She was in the Women’s House of Detention for about a year on charges of conspiracy in a courtroom hostage situation. While in prison, Davis experienced the strip search and internal cavity search as a routine process of incarceration. By “personally affirm[ing] the veracity of [Shakur’s] claims” (63), Davis leaves little room for debate about whether such practices happen. As personal disconnect is a significant barrier to activism—which Davis noted in Chapter 1—the story scales the issue down to the individual level, personalizing it.

Davis focuses much of this chapter on the sexual abuse that women endure in prison as “an institutionalized component of punishment” (77). Citing a 1996 Human Rights Watch report, Davis reveals that most officers who assault female prisoners “continue to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely be held accountable, administratively or criminally” (78). The report lists some of the common abuses, like rape, coercion for sex under threats of violence or reduced privileges, and coercion for sex with promises of privileges. Officers also “used their near total authority” (78) to conduct extraneous pat-and-frisks, room searches, and strip searches. As these procedures are technically legal forms of surveillance, Davis sees that “the state itself is directly implicated in this routinization of sexual abuse” (81). Davis connects this to the theme of the prison’s outdated and repressive structure, as the routine assault of women behind bars would be a crime in any other setting.

Female criminals’ distinctive treatment results, Davis argues, from women being seen as different from male criminals. The public imagination often brands women criminals as having mental health conditions, permanently fallen, and hypersexual. Davis notes that women’s facilities, by design, address and punish these specific unwanted traits. Women criminals aren’t simply understood as lawbreakers—as men are—but are “seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of womanhood” (70). Davis observes that women were more likely to be imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals when they disobeyed social mores—and that “psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts” (66) so that prisons can control unwanted behaviors. In addition, Davis notes that “sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners” (68), falsely equating their victimization to desire. This manufactured image of female criminals, Davis argues, is responsible for the normalization of women’s repression behind bars.

Davis follows the development of women’s-only prisons, which were physically structured differently than men’s because of gender-based punishment. Women’s earliest correctional facilities “infused domesticity into prison life” (70), believing that by teaching women how to cook, clean, and sew, prisons could “reintegrate criminalized women into the domestic life of wife and mother” (70) and “ingrain ‘appropriate’ gender roles” (71) into their lives. Despite this goal, Davis notes that most women who left prison with this training—especially Black women and other women of color—became domestic servants for the affluent. The training-based punishment accounted for women receiving longer sentences “not to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of their offense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, it was argued, required time” (72). Davis believes that this structure still influences women’s prisons and proves that the system is outdated, as it upholds patriarchal ideals to keep women submissive and obedient.

The author develops the theme of prison reform’s ineffectiveness, revealing how programs of “liberal—that is, formalistic” (75) feminism only made prisons more repressive for women by operating on a faulty “separate but equal” (74) model. Her main example of uncritical feminist reforms is from Tekla Miller’s The Warden Wore Pink. A former prison warden, Miller lists several “inequalities” between men’s and women’s prisons. Among her suggested changes are more weapons in women’s prisons and “that guards should be instructed to shoot at women [escapees] just as they were instructed to shoot at men” (75). Davis considers Miller’s desire to make women’s prisons more dangerous and repressive a “bizarre” understanding of equality. She finds similar perspectives from male prisoners, like those who petitioned the Alabama government in 1996 to introduce women’s chain gangs because they felt that “male chain gains discriminated against men by virtue of their gender” (76). Davis believes that rather than question why men’s prisons “function as the punishment norm” (76)—and rather than fight for better education, labor, and health programs for male and female prisoners—some “activists” demand equally repressive treatment for women.