New article up feministing.com, “For the first time in the history of Canada, more than a quarter of inmates in prisons are Indigenous people. This means that less than 5% of the Canadian population makes up of over 25% of the prison population. For Indigenous women, the numbers are even higher, accounting for more than 36% of women in prison. The most recent statistics suggest that Indigenous women only account for 4% of the total Canadian female population. The number of Aboriginal women who were locked behind bars in federal institutions grew a staggering 97 % between 2002 and 2012.” #indigenouswomen #nativewomen #aboriginalwomen #firstnations #canada #turtleisland
So when white men aren’t stealing us and trafficking us out, or leaving us for dead in ditches, we’re being thrown in prison or being forced to starve out on the reserve. Ok, I get it.
Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as ‘Angola Prison’, to this day compels prisoners to plant and pick cotton by hand, for as little as 4 cents an hour. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.
Long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun while armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch.
It is the largest maximum security prison in America, bigger than Manhattan, sprawling over 18,000 acres of farmland dotted with barbed-wire enclosures, gun towers and concrete dormitories.
A History of Slavery
The land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations -it is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil – bought up in the decades following the Civil War. From when it was converted from plantations, prisoners have worked the land in much the same way as slaves did, under conditions so brutal, prisoners resorting to cutting their own Achilles’s tendons in protest in the 50′s.
After the plantation was converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and their descendants kept their general roles, becoming prison officials and guards. This white overseer community, is located on the farm’s grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labour, Angola’s inmates do free work for these residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners labouring as they golf.
Harsh Conditions
Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days. However, since extra work can be mandated as a punishment for “bad behaviour", it’s common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports have been filed, with guards often writing out reports well in advance, fabricating incident citations, then filling in prisoners’ names, sometimes at random.
“Guards talked to prisoners like slaves,” says former prisoner Robert King who spent 29 years at Angola, until he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence. “Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine.”
4 Cents per Hour for Backbreaking Work
Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labour are still almost non-existent compared with the federal minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour, with agricultural labourers falling on the lowest end of the pay scale.
On top of that, prisoner’s keep only half the money they make. The other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use to “set themselves up” after they’re released. However, due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, 97% of Angola prisoners will never be released and so most will never get the other half.
A Common Occurrence
Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labour. Because of harsh mandatory minimum sentences, in Louisiana, writing bad checks can earn you up to 10 years in jail, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole, a trio of drug convictions will get someone a life sentence, all of which time prisoners can be forced to work in conditions that mirror those supposedly outlawed 150 years ago.
Despite this system of modern slavery, Angola’s labour system does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which prohibits forced labour, contains a caveat. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
Prisoners can be forced to work for the government against their will, and this is true in every state
As long as this system stands they will never let anyone go. What is abolished in the yesteryear will be renewed in the next under a new name.
what the FUUUUUUUCK
They do this at Cummins Unit here in Arkansas too
For 4¢ an hour? I just ran the numbers: If you worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a six year prison sentence (something like 22000 hours), you would walk out the door with….
$898.56
That’s bullshit. Prison work programs are fucking sick.
The ‘War On Drugs’ is a failure. The prison industrial complex and for-profit prisons have poisoned our society. Our courts and mandatory sentencing laws are focused on creating inmates, not solving or treating the problems of addiction.
The report calls this the “sexual abuse to prison pipeline,” and it
works like this: A girl may be sexually abused at a young age, leading
to unaddressed trauma or mental illness and spurring a reactive behavior
that can land her in juvenile detention. Once inside, her trauma
symptoms are triggered or she’s subject to new forms of abuse, leading
her to eventually be released not only untreated for prior trauma but
suffering even more. She then resorts to the trauma-coping behaviors
that landed her in jail in the first place, or she’s simply returned to
the original unsafe environment, whether it’s foster care or living with
an abusive relative. Once she acts out again in reaction, she’s
arrested again, and the cycle starts anew.
Worse, girls are being punished simply for being victims of sexual abuse. The Times reports
that some states allow girls as young as 13 to be arrested for
prostitution; they’re then funneled into the system and treated like
criminals, instead of what they really are: victims of abuse and sex
trafficking.
According to an investigation conducted by Dana Liebelson, there are currently 6,000 children throughout the Land of the Free currently being held in prison facilities for adults.
In her alarming report, Liebelson outlines the details of several cases of horrific abuse of children within the US Prison System. She was even able to obtain video of a young girl being held down in what looked more like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie than America’s rehabilitation process.
The girl in the video below is a minor; her name is Jamie. Because her mom was addicted to crack, Jamie lived with a close family friend. In 2011, Jamie and that friend got into an argument. Police were called, and Jamie was arrested for attempting to break back into the house she lived in with a brick.
On a video a half dozen militarized prison guards rushed Jamie’s cell, dragged her out into a hallway where chemical agents were still lingering from another ‘cell extraction.’ The chemicals immediately hindered Jamie’s breathing.
As she began coughing, officers shoved a spit guard over her face, this hindered her breathing even further. You can read more and watch the original video here.
‘And don’t you love the fact that all we see these days on these bastards is masks. They wouldn’t want to know that these assholes are living next to you. their children going to your’s schools. Doing business with you. Going to your churches, as Good Christians do. Try to find there names and you’ll be stopped by their unions and the politicians that kowtow to them’. Many of you think that all these stories are so far removed from your reality that you will never take part in such a case. I sincerely hope so. Unfortunately, practice shows that cops often make monstrous mistakes, quite often suspects and accused are those who have never been even close to the crime. We gotta understand that the law enforcement system is everywhere in America, and any citizen can become a victim of it.
Vigil for #KaliefBrowder, a young man who took his own life after years of reliving the trauma of spending three years in an adult prison beginning at the age of 16, for the crime of stealing a backpack in which he never was convicted. His wrongful imprisonment is another example of the flawed justice system that has stolen the lives of so many innocent people.
A few questions to answer:
-are there groups that do this already?
-if so, how can we contact them and,
-once contacted, how can we help?
-will prisons allow donations of sanitary equipment?
-if so, is there a specific prison we should target?
-if this is not allowed, we should consider switching focus to homeless shelters, as I suspect they have similar needs.
-cost??
-can we contact the major distributors to see if they’re willing to donate at-cost?
-if so, is there a catch?
-if not, how do we get the funds?
Anyone else interested in pulling off a crazy idea? XD
Everyone laughed when Piper Chapman emerged from the shower during the first season of Orange Is the New Black with bootleg shoes made of maxi pads – and inmates do sometimes waste precious resources like sanitary products with off-label uses. At York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut, where I spent more than six years, I used the tampons as scouring pads – certainly not as sponges, because prison tampons are essentially waterproof– when I needed to clean a stubborn mess in my cell.
That should not lead anyone to think that sanitary products are easy to come by in jail. At York, each cell, which houses two female inmates, receives five pads per week to split. I’m not sure what they expect us to do with the fifth but this comes out to 10 total for each woman, allowing for only one change a day in an average five-day monthly cycle. The lack of sanitary supplies is so bad in women’s prisons that I have seen pads fly right out of an inmate’s pants: prison maxi pads don’t have wings and they have only average adhesive so, when a woman wears the same pad for several days because she can’t find a fresh one, that pad often fails to stick to her underwear and the pad falls out. It’s disgusting but it’s true.
The only reason I dodged having a maxi pad slither off my leg is that I layered and quilted together about six at a time so I could wear a homemade diaper that was too big to slide down my pants. I had enough supplies to do so because I bought my pads from the commissary. However, approximately 80% of inmates are indigent and cannot afford to pay the $2.63 the maxi pads cost per package of 24, as most earn 75 cents a day and need to buy other necessities like toothpaste ($1.50, or two days’ pay) and deodorant ($1.93, almost three days’ pay). Sometimes I couldn’t get the pads because the commissary ran out: they kept them in short supply as it appeared I was the only one buying them.
Connecticut is not alone in being cheap with its supplies for women. Inmates in Michigan filed suit last December alleging that pads and tampons are so scarce that their civil rights have been violated. One woman bled through her uniform and was required to dress herself in her soiled jumpsuit after stripping for a search.
The reasons for keeping supplies for women in prison limited are not purely financial. Even though keeping inmates clean would seem to be in the prison’s self-interest, prisons control their wards by keeping sanitation just out of reach. Stains on clothes seep into self-esteem and serve as an indelible reminder of one’s powerlessness in prison. Asking for something you need crystallizes the power differential between inmates and guards; the officer can either meet your need or he can refuse you, and there’s little you can do to influence his choice.
When the York Correctional Institution became coed during my sentence – merging the old Gates Correctional Institution and the women’s prison – a lieutenant who spent his career at York and was unaccustomed to working with male inmates told a group of inmates that the men would rather defecate in their pants than ask him for toilet paper and get jerked around for it.
To ask a macho guard for a tampon is humiliating. But it’s more than that: it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that, ultimately, the prison controls your cleanliness, your health and your feelings of self-esteem. The request is even more difficult to make when a guard complains that his tax dollars shouldn’t have to pay for your supplies. You want to explain to him that he wouldn’t have a paycheck to shed those taxes in the first place if prison staff weren’t needed to do things like feeding inmates and handing out sanitary supplies – but you say nothing because you want that maxi pad.
The guards’ reluctance to hand out the supplies is understandable because of inmates’ off-label uses for the products. Women use the pads and tampons for a number of things besides their monthly needs: to clean their cells, to make earplugs by ripping out the stuffing, to create makeshift gel pads to insert under their blisters in uncomfortable work boots or to muffle the bang that sounds when a shaky double bed hits a cement wall whenever either of its sleepers move. The staff watches us waste a precious commodity. What they fail to acknowledge is that these alternative uses fill other unfulfilled needs for a woman to maintain her physical and mental health. If we had adequate cleaning supplies, proper noise control, band-aids for our blisters or stable beds, we would happily put the pads in our pants.
There are ways to restore dignity to America’s inmates. For example, we could remove the entire sanitary supply problem if American prisons bought the newly-released Thinx for female inmates, which are super absorbent, stain-free underwear designed by a woman’s start-up. Thinx are expensive – $200 for seven pair – but they still might be cost effective when you factor in the cost of buying disposable pads and the time and energy devoted to the pad power struggle in women’s prisons. But I doubt that corrections systems in the United States will give up the forced scarcity of menstrual products in prison.
Though many argue that prisoners cannot be pampered in jail, having access to sanitary pads is not a luxury – it is a basic human right. Just like no-one should have to beg to use the toilet, or be given toilet paper, women too must be able to retain their dignity during their menstrual cycle. Using periods to punish women simply has no place in any American prison.
Humiliating incarcerated women by withholding sanitary supplies is nothingnew. Its infuriating to consider the lengths states will go to in order to keep men comfortable, like forcing California to pay for a murderer to have a sex change operation . Invasive expensive plastic surgery is medically necessary because a man ‘needs’ it, but tampons aren’t because women need them.
Is there any way we can provide these items to women in need?
Maybe we can work with Diva or Luna to see if they’ll donate cups to a good cause? It’s probably cheaper than Thinx, and it only has to be emptied infrequently, and it could probably be cleaned in a shower?
Celtyradfem 