Corrections officials, like most people, feel they need to be gentler with women than with men. So instead of enforcing order by roughing up the miscreants, they barrage the women with teensy, stupid rules, adding fuel to a blazing fire. “Possession of contraband” may mean stashing drugs, but it as easily refers to having a postage stamp in one’s room (prohibited at Bedford Hills), or candy, or a borrowed comb. “Trafficking” can refer equally to selling heroin, as Marti did, or sharing shampoo in the shower. The regulations can be so oppressively petty that they wind women up to levels of teeth-grating irritability. The effect is compounded by the fact that women tend to be less fearful of their guards.
“My hardest problem has been authority,” says Geita. “All the prison guards were young.”
Marti leaps in: “And they’re trying to tell a woman forty-five years old what to do?” She raises her brows.
Responds Geita: “You want to slap ’em. They write the rules in pencil so they can erase ’em and change ’em when they want to.”
“You give ’em respect, they’ll give you respect,” cautions Cat.
Women want to understand the meaning behind a rule and, in prison at least, are more likely to argue its merit. Research on gangs in Los Angeles reveals that girls, too, are less likely than boys to follow a rule just because it exists, and will do something on behalf of the gang only if they judge it to be worth their while. In prison, getting hit with a rule violation for something like sharing shampoo can escalate into an argument between inmate and guard until she gets lockdown for threatening an officer or ripping up her cell. “Negative feelings toward staff lead inmates to respond emotionally to some minor event, which serves to confirm the staff in its perceptions” of women as moody and quarrelsome, notes the author of the study on infraction rates in the two Texas prisons for women. Interestingly, however, the study found that the one difference between the two prisons studied was that the maximum-security facility had fewer problems than the facility with all different sorts of inmates mixed together.
The Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario, to which Karla Homolka was assigned in 1993, resembles an old stone dungeon. Until it shut down in the summer of 1996, the prison held 120 women, nearly 25 percent of whom were serving life sentences for violent crime, in extremely restive conditions. On April 22, 1994, six inmates attacked four guards in a preplanned escape attempt outside B Range, a high-security segregation area like CCWF’s Building 505. The guards, all of whom were female, were put in chokeholds, punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, stabbed with a hypodermic needle, and assaulted with scissors and a telephone ripped from the wall. When one guard went to another’s aid, inmate Joey Twins grabbed her around the throat and went for her keys: “Don’t push me, Boston,” Twins warned, “I’ve got a shiv and I’ll stick you.” A male guard arrived, tried to subdue her, and got kicked in the testicles. The guards finally regained control by using Mace. They returned the inmates to their cells but forgot to strip-search them for weapons.
P4W (as Prison for Women is called) rapidly lost control of the situation; the hostility between the guards and the prisoners grew so intense that B Range geared up to full revolt, with noise levels so loud that “cell bars were vibrating.” The inmates set fires, flung urine, and threatened guards’ lives. One woman tried to hang herself. Another slashed her body with scissors, getting bloodier and bloodier and demanding that the guards let her out of her cell.
On April 26, guards demanded that the warden bring in an “Institutional Emergency Response Team” from the nearby men’s prison. The demand was to result in a national scandal. The all-male IERT stormed in, strip-searched eight inmates, and placed them, half-naked, in full-body restraints, all of which they videotaped, as was standard procedure in the prison that the IERT members worked in. Because the inmates were women, however, the strip-search became front-page news. “I felt very degraded,” Brenda Morrison, who was serving five years for armed robbery and aggravated assault, told a federal commission of inquiry. “How can they walk in there, rip my clothes off and say it’s okay? I don’t know how any man could do that to a woman and say it was their job. As far as I know, it’s a crime.” Reporters covering the inquiry described Morrison as “dabbing at tears” while she gave her account. An expert who saw the IERT videotape described what they had done as “a little like shoving a gun down the mouth of a woman—I mean, it’s a very phallic act.”
According to the Toronto Globe & Mail, an internal inquiry into the uprising “paint[ed] a picture of the prison as a place that has tended to view women as victims, and so has been ill prepared to deal with inmates who are manipulative and capable of serious violence.” Ultimately, all the guards involved took prolonged mental health leave. Two transferred out of the prison, and one quit the business. “Noting the inevitable problems posed by trying to house prisoners requiring different levels of security in one institution,” the Globe reported, “the report [also] recommends that violent inmates be housed in a facility separate from the general population.” Yet in 1996, P4W’s inmates were farmed out to smaller institutions. None of them were maximum-security. Canada’s federal department of corrections opened a new facility in Edmonton, Alberta, for all the prairie region’s female inmates, and designed it along minimum-security guidelines, responding to arguments made by Canada’s Elizabeth Frye Society that women are only in prison because of men’s abuse, and that if you treat them with respect, they’ll conduct themselves with dignity. No security fence was erected around the perimeter, and no locks were put on the “bedroom” doors. Within the first six months, 25 percent of the inmates escaped. One inmate was apparently hanged in her room by others who simply let themselves in.
Since the P4W uprising, according to Irving Kulik, deputy commissioner of Corrections Canada, federal prison policy has been to back away from the rigid rules for minor infractions so apt to fan inmate frustration. Women, the deputy said, are not charged if they’re caught with small amounts of drugs. Although this sounds compassionate and rational, letting women dope themselves so that they’ll remain passive in prison is not a new managerial strategy. “Mostly everybody that wasn’t a heroin addict [before] was on heroin in Chowchilla,” points out Marti. “That is the god honest truth. I had girls that were, like, ‘Do me, do me.’ Everyone’s strung out.” The same is true, apparently, at New York’s Bedford Hills. “I lost a friend to AIDS,” reflects Mohammad, “after she got addicted to drugs in here.” Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the one drug that agitates the addict—crack—is nowhere to be seen in prisons, whereas drugs that pacify, such as heroin and hashish, are abundant. Coincidence or no, the fact that so many women do time in the first place for drug-related crime is hardly assisted by their continuing substance abuse in the mix. “Why do you think the courts send me the girls?” Marti demands. “Because they know. They ain’t gonna learn nothing in there. You know what I’m saying? It’s a big old game.” In the absence of a rational corrections strategy for handling female inmates, doping them may be the only unofficial alternative. The use of prescription drugs like sedatives and tranquilizers is five times higher in female prisons than in male prisons. Drugs, according to British scholar Alexandra Mandarakka-Sheppard, are “for the purpose of social control and not for the genuine help of prisoners.”
When we focus our scant attention on female prisoners, fixating almost exclusively on wrongly imprisoned battered wives, we generate the impression that women just sit around looking pensive and fragile, awaiting rescue, like Rapunzel from her tower. It is not a blessing for female inmates to be viewed this way, because we don’t ask if they’re receiving parenting skills, vocational training, drug treatment, or adequate security. We don’t provide them with halfway houses upon their release, and we don’t care that they’re all thrown together into homogeneous compounds—the most violent and volatile in the mix with those who are sane and kind. We may hope to give “wrongly punished wives” a benevolent, cottage-style purgatory fro
m which they can escape as soon as they file an appeal, but for corrections departments across North America, that vague sentiment translates into a mandate for warehousing. Lieutenant Wong spelled out the approach of his institution: “Our obligation is to safely house inmates. Curing them, as adults, is nearly impossible. They have so few resources on the street that they have it better in here.”
Where this presents a particular problem is in the rise of violence by younger women, in terms not only of numbers but degree. “There’re a lot of younger girls now, coming in from the gangs,” says Marti. “Yesterday, I saw a girl that was in for a drive-by shooting. She shot a girl. She’s gonna do a long time. The gang girls think they’re tough, they think they’re bad. When you go into the prison, you can do your time easy, or you can do your time hard. And we did easy. Never wanted to beat anybody up. [These girls] make weapons with razor blades. They’re tough, man. They don’t want to go straight. They’re rebellious.”
“Prison very much reflects the world,” says Mohammad. “As society becomes more chaotic and violent, so does prison. When I came in, you respected those inmates who were older. Now, [new inmates] tend to be drawn to one another, to run in groups. There was no older person in their life, so there’s disrespect. I hear it every day. There was no father, the mother was an alcoholic or a drug addict. They lacked the love. A lot of them are mothers themselves now, they’re twenty-year-olds leaving four children behind in foster care. They don’t know the first damn thing about parenting.” Increasingly disconnected from the network of kinship that supposedly endows women with an ethic of care and keeps their aggression suppressed, these young women are game to display physical violence. Neither prison officials nor the unstable female prison hierarchy are prepared for the effect that a young, violent inmate population will have. “We don’t have the role models we used to,” says Mohammad. “Aggressors look to me for advice and as a role model. But there are less and less of us. To know that [in the future] there won’t be any mentoring is scary.”
One can predict with some confidence that Mohammad will be left to grapple with that concern on her own in the future. Like battered men and lesbians, female inmates are outcasts on a barren island in our thinking about violence. Myths about female nature govern the way they are treated and guarded, to their own detriment. Should it matter? Is the problem so large? Male inmates, after all, fall victim to rape, assault, and murder, and we consider it the price that they pay for their crimes. But male inmates expect to pay that price, and have acquired the skills for survival. What do female inmates expect? Perhaps, if they knew, Mohammad’s future would be a little less scary.
LET THE GUN SMOKE
Holding Ourselves Accountable for Our Deeds
To Aileen Wuornos and all the women who have been vilified, pathologized and murdered for defending themselves by whatever means necessary.
Dedication by cultural critic LYNDA HART in FATAL WOMEN: LESBIAN SEXUALITY AND THE MARK OF AGGRESSION, 1994
We must choose with great caution the folk heroes we present to one another and the qualities they embody, for they shall surely return to haunt us.
ELLIOTT LEYTON, anthropologist, 1996
On a Saturday morning, bright and hot, eleven well-heeled Los Angeles women stand in a circle at the LAX Firing Range and shout: “Get the fuck away from me!” Then they bellow, “No!” And pick up volume. “No!” This eruption of hostility is a rehearsal. The women, in their twenties and thirties, have signed up for a daylong course called “Women’s Empowerment in the ‘90s.” The day begins with “what to shout at men who walk too close behind you on the sidewalk” and ends by pumping fifty rounds of live ammunition into paper silhouettes of men. Laid out on a table at the front of the class are stun guns, pepper sprays, reinforced steel door jams, and small black police batons, which you can hang from your key chain and swing at a face.
“Women, by definition, are targets,” says the petite, golden-haired instructor, whose bearing is low-key and self-assured. Her name is Paxton Quigley. She was “very antigun” until a friend of hers was raped in Beverly Hills, even though the friend called the police when she heard the intruder break in. Quigley went over at 2:00 A.M.and drove her to the hospital. “Do you think you could have stopped him if you’d had a gun?” she wanted to know. The friend wasn’t sure. Quigley did some research and wrote a book called Armed and Female. Her main point was that women needed to foster in themselves the psychological entitlement to use weapons so that they could feel more powerful, more defended, even if they never had to shoot. Shortly after, Quigley became a spokeswoman for Smith & Wesson.
Her students look grim, resolved. “I want to be mentally prepared for violence,” says a dark-haired actress in black, steel-toed boots. A housewife with two children offers that she just bought a.22 Ruger: “I went through that whole feeling of ‘Could I shoot somebody?’ And I decided that I could.” The classroom is festooned with posters of guns: a Beretta, two Smith & Wessons, and a snub-nosed revolver accompanied by the curious slogan, “A terrific Taurus afternoon.” It’s illegal to carry guns concealed in California, but there are holsters on the market all the same. “Now, I want you to know that I am not endorsing an illegal activity,” Quigley cautions, “but here’s a purse with a holster inside it. You just say to the guy, ‘I can waste this purse, and I can waste you.’ “Next, she brandishes a “bra holster,” which resembles a large white bandage. Removing her tailored jacket, she shows how to wear it, high up around the ribs, beneath a fluffy sweater, say.
“Now, I never use the word ‘kill’ in this class,” Quigley says. “I say stop. You want to be able to stop your attacker. So you go for the center of mass.” She hits her chest with her fist. “If the police ask you what you did, say you shot to stop.” After the women have learned how to load and aim their.38s with sweaty palms, the talk turns to how women are much better shooters than men. “We don’t get into pecker contests,” says a soft-voiced blonde who used to be married to a Texan. “We’re more controlled.” As soon as they file into the range, outfitted with metal earmuffs and goggles, all the men hanging around at the firing range that afternoon line up at the window and grin.
On the range, twelve booths face down a hundred-foot alley of steel and cement. Each one has a paper target hanging down from a ceiling track, so that it can be moved as close or as far as you want. Quigley stands behind the line with a megaphone, barking out carefully paced commands. One-handed shooting is the hardest exercise. Some can’t pull the trigger without bracing. “Squeeze!” Quigley commands, but instead of a line of sharp bangs, there’s a series of puffs and grunts. Then there is a point-and-shoot, in which they must fire off five rounds as fast as they can, as they would in a dark house or alley, with an assailant fast approaching. With every bullet spent, the gun’s power ebbs.
“Okay,” comes the command. “Now I want you to shoot to the head.”
“Yeah!” yells the actress, and you imagine her paper target has turned into an ex-boyfriend’s smirk.
“Wow,” notes Quigley, “we have a real stopper here.”
For just under four seconds, the range is a deafening chaos of gunfire. “Okay,” Quigley says, “let’s see the damage.” The target silhouettes waft forward with a mechanical whirr. There are bullet holes clear through each head. “Hot!” Quigley laughs. Behind the glass partition, not a few manly grins fall away.
In 1975, a criminologist named Freda Adler shook up her field by publishing a book called Sisters in Crime, in which she proposed, with undeniable excitement, that female aggression and criminality were going to catch up with men’s. As the opportunities opened up by feminism led women to assert themselves, they would adopt more traditionally masculine methods of self-empowerment. Adler envisioned the change primarily in economic terms, as one in which women went for the gold, just as men did, legitimately or illegally, depending upon what avenues were open to them. If their only means were deviant, due to poverty or lack of skill, then their se
lf-assertion would take place within the context of crime. The traditionally higher involvement of African-American women in criminal enterprise would be balanced as white women joined them. White-collar women might engage in embezzlement or insider trading; unemployed women would settle for extortion, trafficking, or robbery. But it would happen. As support for her argument, Adler pointed to the rising crime rates of young women, and to the outbreak of women’s prison riots, among other 1970s trends.
Her proposal came to be known as the liberation hypothesis.
Over the next two decades, a great deal of energy went into disproving Adler, partly because the notion that women’s crime could be linked to women’s liberation was too politically dangerous. The liberation hypothesis would be—and was—gleefully appropriated as a weapon by conservatives to discredit the feminist agenda. For instance, an Alberta Report column on the rising crime rates recently gloated: “Women only have themselves to blame.” It is a perspective that harks back to the nineteenth-century view of women as inherently corrupt: Unbridle them from confinement, and they’ll give their baser desires free reign, unfettered by masculine reason, and fall lower into depravity than any man could. It is a repugnant view, and most feminist scholars reflexively shy away from any perception of women that plays this way into misogynist hands.
Adler’s hypothesis also became unpopular because of overall trends in her culture: The exuberant antiestablishment energy of the 1960s and 1970s, which was what she tapped into in envisioning female aggression, gave way to the culture of victimhood. By the 1980s, it was no longer a badge of honor to make a fist and wave it; it was more prestigious to weep in a therapist’s office. Therefore, women couldn’t want to do something so antisocial and frankly offensive as crime. Women were not to be held as men’s equals in villainy, they were to be shown as men’s victims.
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