Three local women spoke about “The Unique Story of Women in Prison.” The first speaker reported on her research, and the other two spoke about their personal experiences while imprisoned for protesting injustices.
Our first speaker was Paula Johnson, a professor of law at Syracuse University College of Law. She currently serves as co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, and she has written and spoken extensively on matters of race, gender and law. Her writings include the recently published book Inner Lives: Voices of African-American Women in Prison (NYU Press, 2003).
The recipient of numerous awards, Paula shared with us her research and her personal experiences with African-American women in prison. Paula began by saying that there has been insignificant attention to women in prison and to the impact that the experience of imprisonment has on their lives. She also asked how we got to this place of so many prisons. The United States presently incarcerates or has on parole over 7½ million people. In fact, the United States has surpassed all the other nations of the world in the percent of its populace that it incarcerates. While there are more men than women in U.S. prisons, the female population is growing more rapidly. She stated that over 100,000 women are imprisoned in state and local jails.
Paula asked us to consider who some of these women are and explained that many of them “mirror” us. It was their particular challenges that led many to prison, whether abuse done to them, substance abuse, or ensnarement in drug trafficking of their partners. None of them dreamed or aspired to be in prison. In addition, Paula told us that women often serve longer sentences than their male counterparts because men often receive better deals since they can provide more information such as naming others who are involved. Usually women are sentenced for nonviolent offenses, often simply doing things just to survive.
She then spoke of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was enacted into law last week, addressing the discrimination of women’s pay in the working environment. However, in the prison environment, many women suffer discrimination, and this disparity is greatest in the African-American population. This disparity is evident in the charges, treatment, punishments, worse assignments, and lack of educational opportunities for these women. To illustrate,
Paula told us the story to Joyce Ann Rounds who was accused of armed robbery that also involved a homicide. Joyce spent ten years in a Texas prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Many people reported seeing her at the time of the crime, far from the scene. However, no one bothered to investigate, and the state insisted she committed the crime and the jury convicted her. For another example, Paula read an excerpt from her book about another woman who was sentenced to 45 years for a simple unarmed robbery to feed her children at Christmas.
Paula ended by asking, “What are prisons for?” Prisons cannot just be focused on punishment but instead should concentrate on prevention. Many people need health care, mental health care, housing, child care, etc., and Paula suggested that if our society addressed these issues, many people would not be incarcerated. She ended by saying, “Everybody can’t do everything, but everybody can do something.” We can contribute money to help transport children to visit their mothers or to transport the women to their parole sites or other services mandated by the prison system. We can also donate books, as literacy is extremely important.
Our second speaker, Julienne Oldfield, is an active member of Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church and Peace Action. A committed Christian, Julienne is concerned with issues of peace and justice. She protested to close the School of the Americas in Georgia and, in November 2006, was arrested at the military base at Fort Benning, Georgia. Julienne was sentenced to 90 days in the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center and began her sentence on April 17, 2007. Julienne tried to reassure her husband, who was worried about her imprisonment, by hiding the fact she herself was scared. She was incarcerated with another companion from the Fort Benning protest, first on the special housing unit (SHU) reserved for outright offenders. There they, for ten days, had no contact with other inmates except for the nightly awakening of voices in the dark. There she spent her 70th birthday; Julienne read us a poem she wrote for that day. It ended with:
In the small of the night
The clank of keys, footsteps heavy
Blinding spotlight, focused, flashing
Anguished incessant calling
In 809 we two stand firm, one young, one old
Witnessing within these walls
Our story will in time be told
Three score years and ten
It’s 6 AM in the pen.
After two weeks they were moved down to the third floor, as “we were no longer considered a threat to the system.” This floor was light and clean with 52 units of cells, each occupied by two individuals. The women did all the work throughout the jail, which housed one more identical unit for women in addition to units for 1000 men. She was assigned to work in the kitchen for 12 cents/hour. She told us that afterwards it took three months for her fingernails to get back to normal because of the harsh sanitation fluid they had to use. She did link this to the fact that no one suffered the common cold while she was there.
Julienne told us that the other inmates’ first reaction to her was, “What’s she doing here?” By color, accent, age, by not taking medications, by being married to the same husband for forty-five years, receiving heaps of mail from supporters and knowing exactly where she stood in relation to the length of her stay, she realized she was different. However, she shared with her fellow inmates a belief in fair play and honesty, concern for each other, and a desire to be treated with respect. Julienne said her jail experience gave her access to an amazing group of women, mostly African-Americans, a few with whom she shared Bible study. They all endured the waiting and the fact that they had to do whatever was ordered by the officers known as “cops.” No vibes! No objections! Just do it! The alternative was being relegated to the isolation of the SHU, losing the right to have visitors or phone calls, except for a single call each week. The prison industrial complex is rooted in gaining profits, regardless of the fact that it breaks up family units, deprives so many children of their mothers, and keeps so many in limbo with their lives on hold. Julienne noted that throughout this country’s jails, the commissary turnover amounts to a billion dollars a year, as prisoners have to depend on the limited supplies available to them. However, she ended by saying she was grateful for this unique experience, a humbling, transforming one, thanks to the women she met during her three-month stay in the Federal Incarceration System. The support from fellow members of WTB, Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church, the Syracuse community, and members of the School of the Americas Watch was immeasurable.
Kathleen Rumpf, our final speaker, has been arrested more than 100 times. Her activism began in 1971 working with the Catholic Worker movement helping to serve homeless women and children in Baltimore and New York City. She has been sentenced to jails and prisons for protesting war and on behalf of the homeless. Ten years ago Kathleen served one year in prison for protesting torture at the School of the Americas. She also lived and worked with the Berrigans and spent two years in prison with Liz McAllister, Phil Berrigan’s wife, after being arrested at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, for a disarmament witness. She currently lives in Syracuse where she continues to work on behalf of prisoners in federal and state prisons with Jail Ministry and the CNY American Civil Liberties Union.
Kathleen told us she has been horrified and haunted by the treatment of prisoners in our jails and prisons. One example she shared was a procedure called the “Jesus Christ” where prisoners were hanged naked on the bars of the old jail in downtown Syracuse. Kathleen tried to get this procedure stopped and in 1993 built a cage in front of the jail where she lived for nine days. She stated that some who work in our jails and prisons are good and professional people who understand their mission, but they have no procedure for reporting cruelty or corruption because they would lose their jobs and cannot risk speaking out.
Kathleen lobbied in Washington, DC, for better conditions in our prisons. In ten months she saw fourteen women die in prison, many of whom did not belong there; while at Congress, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons testified under oath to Congress that three out of four women do not belong in prison. She repeated Paula’s remarks that very few women in federal prisons have information to offer to the authorities in return for a reduction in sentencing, and thus they serve longer sentences than men.
One case she shared with us involved a 78-year-old grandmother, Savannah Means, who was arrested in Birmingham, Georgia, for not testifying against her grandchildren. In all, sixteen grandmothers were incarcerated for this “crime” and received sentences of 8 to12 years. The Carswell Prison in Texas at Fort Worth is the only prison in the Federal Bureau of Prisons that houses women who are sick or have mental health issues. She saw many women die because
they were not treated for their illnesses and often went undiagnosed; many incarcerated women had untreated last-stage cancer at the time they arrived in Carswell. While these women didn’t get death sentences, this lack of medical care did, in a sense, impose a death sentence on many of them. Kathleen showed us some very disturbing pictures. One was of a woman with untreated sores on her leg. Upon her release from prison, she needed to be hospitalized and her
leg had to be amputated. In addition, pregnant women in federal prisons are in shackles when they deliver their babies; often the infant is taken from the mother to be adopted if her family cannot afford to travel to Texas to take the infant or if they are not in a position to adopt the child. In that case, the mother loses custody of her child and the baby is put up for adoption.
Kathleen herself experienced many of the hardships. When incarcerated in Columbus, Georgia, before she was transported to Texas, she lacked basic necessities. She got lice, had no access to hot water, and lacked a toothbrush for more than 30 days. Women in prison pay for their own shampoo, any toiletries, paper, envelopes, stamps, phone calls, though earning only 12 cents an hour. In our Syracuse jails, the profit can be $35,000 a month from prisoner phone calls. As to the increasing number of people being incarcerated, Kathleen said that the old downtown Syracuse jail housed 212 inmates; the new jail is now capable of housing more than 700.
Kathleen called our prisons the Prison Industrial Complex and said they are corrupt and inept and lack adequate oversight. Taxpayers are victimized as well; the Prison Industrial Complex costs taxpayers more than 60 billion dollars a year, and the prisoners when released from prison are left more marginalized, hurting and even dangerous because rehabilitation does not exist for the most part. Those released who lack family or community support are worse for the cruelty and warehousing. Finding work is nearly impossible for many, in part because of their mental health status and the stigma of being labeled a criminal. Our meeting ended when vice president Gay Montague asked us to join hands in a circle and imagine what “imprisons” each of us, preventing us from being our best. We were then asked to let it go.