A part of the Collection
The Highway to Abolition
Content material warning: This text describes home and sexual abuse, in addition to violence dedicated by jail guards.
1000’s of the ladies and trans and gender nonconforming people who find themselves doing time in U.S. prisons have been doubly victimized — damage first by different individuals, after which victimized by the legal authorized system.
Taylor Partlow, a 30-year-old lady who’s now incarcerated in New York, was sentenced to eight years after killing the person who abused her.
Ashley Barnett, a 34-year-old lady, served eight years in federal jail for inadvertently introducing a younger lady to the boys who would ultimately site visitors her, after years of getting been sexually exploited herself.
Ky Peterson, a 32-year-old trans man who shot the person who raped him as he walked residence, is now free, however was imprisoned for 9 years for defending himself from the assault.
Their tales all underscore a actuality that Survived and Punished — a nationwide coalition working to assist and free incarcerated survivors of violence, decriminalize the actions that survivors take to guard themselves, and abolish gender violence and the carceral state — famous in its 2022 report: “Home and sexual violence are sometimes rejected as professional justifications for self-defense, both by the legislation’s design or by way of its interpretation and software in courts.”
Partlow, Barnett and Peterson are thought of by the system to be “imperfect” victims of gender-based violence: They fail to adapt to the slim confines of “true” or “harmless” victimhood — a class reserved for victims who’re white, heterosexual, cisgender, passive and compliant with legislation enforcement.
Victims are solely deemed “good” if they don’t use medicine or have psychological well being points. To be “good” they can’t be jealous, indignant or sturdy, and so they can by no means battle again. They’re anticipated to report back to legislation enforcement and take part in prosecution.
The failure to satisfy these requirements makes it troublesome (if not unimaginable) for police, prosecutors and courts to see imperfect victims as victims in any respect. Imperfect victims are usually arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for crimes instantly linked to their very own victimization.
Day by day, the U.S. punishes victims of gender-based violence in prisons throughout the nation. Let’s be sincere about what that appears like and what mainstream society hopes to perform by locking them up.
Legislation college students are taught that there are 4 justifications for legal punishment: incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution. Incapacitation is locking somebody away in order that they can not trigger additional hurt. Deterrence is the concept punishment will each forestall a person from offending once more and ship a message to others in society about what’s going to occur to them ought to they have interaction in the identical conduct. Rehabilitation is supposed to handle no matter shortcoming led to somebody’s legal exercise within the first occasion. And retribution is punishment proportionate to the offense dedicated — in biblical parlance, a watch for a watch.
Most of those rationales make little sense, particularly when utilized to criminalized survivors. Individuals who break the legislation in response to or on account of the violence towards them are usually not usually harmful and don’t have to be rehabilitated or remoted from the remainder of society to stop additional hurt; they want safety from the individuals who have abused them. Few students imagine that legal punishment deters. Which leaves retribution. It could be that society helps the concept criminalized survivors must be punished for his or her actions. However the punishment meted out in prisons in america is much from “proportionate.”
In Texas, for instance, incarcerated girls dwell in what are primarily rundown pizza ovens. Over two-thirds of Texas prisons are usually not air conditioned. As the skin temperatures climb, the individuals inside endure temperatures as excessive as 149 degrees Farenheit; they’re primarily being cooked. Opening the small window to permit cooler air inside can imply inviting cats, skunks, rodents, snakes, frogs, birds, raccoons, possums and bugs into the parking space-sized brick cell.
To color a fuller image of the horrific circumstances and violence endured by many ladies incarcerated in Texas, we share beneath some observations and tales drawn from coauthor Kwaneta Harris’s personal lived expertise of incarceration in Texas.
In the course of the summer time months, some incarcerated girls cease taking drugs for coronary heart, seizure and psychiatric circumstances as a result of the unwanted effects of these drugs embody warmth intolerance. Incessantly, the water and electrical energy don’t work. There are no smoke detectors in many prisons. Fires are usually not unusual. Desperation to flee the warmth results in many suicide makes an attempt — the aim is to be housed within the air-conditioned psychiatric middle. Typically, these makes an attempt turn out to be “unintended” suicides.
Sexual and bodily abuse of incarcerated girls in Texas is shockingly widespread. We are able to solely inform their tales utilizing pseudonyms, for worry of retaliation. “Y” was held above a correctional officer’s head, legs flailing within the millisecond earlier than he bounced her off the nook of her cell. Her crime? Rolling her eyes at him.
A correctional officer pulled “M” over the again of a bench by her hair, yanking a few of her plaits out.
Perceived emasculation is dealt with with overwhelming drive: Damaged arms, jaws, chipped tooth and dislocated shoulders are proof of poisonous masculinity.
Correctional officers beat individuals up, then write them up. One Texas lieutenant was nicknamed “Sir Slam A Lot” by the incarcerated girls, who watched him beat his spouse up within the jail car parking zone. It confirmed what the ladies already knew — what they do to girls behind bars, they do to girls behind doorways.
The irony is that girls who had been abused are despatched to a spot the place they’re abused within the identify of “correction.”
“B” was triggered by a guard’s cologne; it was the identical as her abuser’s. She moist herself then crumbled to the bottom, rocking. In response, the guards sprayed her bedding with it.
Witnessing such merciless brutality leaves incarcerated girls feeling remoted and powerless. Consuming issues and self-harm satiate the dearth of management for some. However the jail chooses to punish as an alternative of deal with. This state-sanctioned violence reinforces what criminalized survivors had been advised by their companions: You don’t matter.
Criminalized survivors commerce one abusive atmosphere for an additional. The carceral system isn’t the primary hurt that they expertise, however it’s for a lot of by far the worst, revictimizing and retraumatizing incarcerated individuals. Prosecutors argue for and judges sentence victims to jail within the hopes that they are going to be rehabilitated and return as contributing members of society. However incarceration doesn’t rehabilitate; it merely heaps further trauma on individuals who have already endured a lifetime’s price of trauma.
That is what the state is doing to criminalized survivors on behalf of its residents. If voters are prepared to let this proceed, we must be sincere concerning the hurt that we allow in our names.
There’s, after all, another choice — we will battle to stop survivors of violence from being incarcerated and to assist those that already are. Teams like Survived and Punished and MUAVI in Chicago have been supporting incarcerated survivors for years, publicizing the tales of criminalized survivors, operating campaigns to petition for his or her acquittal and clemency, and offering monetary sources when they’re launched.
Equally, particular person survivor protection campaigns have raised consciousness of the tales of criminalized survivors like Marissa Alexander, Bresha Meadows, Nikki Addimando, Maddesyn George and Wendy Howard. In state legislatures, efforts to abolish necessary minimal sentences and enact legal guidelines that permit judges to rethink draconian sentences have featured the tales of criminalized survivors.
And we will do that work with a watch towards the last word aim of abolishing incarceration altogether. As long as police, prosecutors and judges have the discretion to criminalize survivors, they are going to discover causes to take action. The one strategy to assure that “imperfect victims” are now not punished is to dismantle the system that punishes them.
