Journal Issue 3.1
Spring 2011
Edited by Agatha Beins, Deanna Utroske, Julie Ann Salthouse, Jillian Hernandez, and
Karen Alexander
Editorial Assistant: Mimi Zander

Carol Jacobsen, activist, scholar, and social documentary artist,
in conversation with Films for the Feminist Classroom

continued

Introduction and Interview by Deanna Utroske

Utroske: In what ways does physical and sexual abuse (such as domestic violence and violence against sex workers) contribute to the incarceration of women? And tell us how sexual abuse is exacerbated by incarceration.

Jacobsen: Women abuse is an epidemic that is produced by governments worldwide. It is a leading cause of death among women, as well as the primary contributing factor in their lawbreaking. Most women are serving time for nonviolent, poverty-induced crimes. Many are criminalized only because they are women. Women working in prostitution, girls who are under duress from a male codefendant who commits a crime, domestic violence survivors, and poor women who write bad checks to support kids whose fathers are not held accountable by the law are some examples of gender-based crimes. Among women serving life or long sentences for murder in Michigan, approximately one-third acted in self-defense against an abusive male. And about 30 percent did not commit the crime at all but were with a male who killed someone, usually to their horror. Once they enter prison, women are vulnerable to the arbitrary violence of the institution. No individual abuser acts alone: laws, courts, jails, prisons, and other institutions normalize gender-based violence. In the 1990s, the U.S. Justice Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations all investigated Michigan’s women’s prisons and found the system to be one of the worst in the nation with regard to sexual assault, retaliation, medical neglect, and other human rights abuses against women. Last year, approximately four hundred courageous women prisoners and their lawyers won $100 million in a landmark class action lawsuit against the state of Michigan (Neal, et al. v. State of Michigan, et al.) for the rapes, assaults, and sexual abuses they had suffered for the past seventeen years. Because of the women’s lawsuits and grievances and other acts of resistance, they had also suffered unspeakable retaliation and cruelties over the years, which continue today. Women are harassed, locked down, and given petty tickets to delay their paroles; they can no longer wear street clothes (which might “tempt” male guards); the library space was taken away (only a small law library, required by law, remains, with endless restrictions for its use); and the media ban effectively cuts off the women from direct contact with reporters. In a closed system like prison, abusive keepers take advantage of the women with impunity.

Utroske: Can you speak concretely about how women in prison are denied opportunities for communication?

Jacobsen: All recording devices, including cameras and audio recorders, are banned. Reporters are routinely denied entry and therefore have a difficult time getting access to interview women inside. Scholars are also routinely denied permission to conduct research studies in prison, especially with women. Prisoners must wait in lines for the few available phones to make collect phone calls, or call on their purchased phone cards, and are allowed to call only persons on an approved, limited list. Visitors are also limited. A prisoner may receive visits only from a certain number of nuclear family members and friends, who must also be cleared by the state. A visitor may be on only one prisoner’s list. It is only attorneys and their assistants who can meet with more than one prisoner in the state. (There are occasional exceptions for those who have more than one incarcerated family member.) Each time I visit a prisoner (as a legal assistant), I take a student or volunteer with me because I want to get as many citizens inside to see for themselves who’s in prison and why and also to see what the conditions are.

Utroske: Talk about how the silencing of prison life and sexual violence lets incarcerated women be overlooked and about ways that your work (in the classroom, in film, as an activist) can facilitate conversations about these hushed issues (or cultural taboos).

Jacobsen: As a closed system that most people do not see and cannot enter, the prisons in our midst are virtually invisible. Women prisoners, in particular, are forgotten because they comprise only about 7 percent of the total prison population and are seen as an insignificant population by policy makers, despite the fact that women’s incarceration rate has increased dramatically over the past thirty years due to the war on crime and drugs, which has ensnared too many poor women instead of kingpins of drugs and violence. The silencing and misrepresentation by the corporate media compounds the problem. Films in which women prisoners speak for themselves about the injustice of their trials and the conditions of their incarceration open opportunities to present a different picture of women’s “crimes.” The audience can hear how women’s acts of survival turn them into criminals; how issues of abuse and other facts of the cases are absent from trials, how most women did not testify for themselves or were convinced to take pleas to avoid life sentences (when they should not have gone to prison at all), how gendered, racist, and inhumane prisons are, etcetera. The audience can almost feel the pressure-cooker conditions that women are forced to live in when these issues are openly discussed. They can hear about women’s acts of resistance and ways of supporting each other. While men often turn their anger toward each other and assault other men in prison, women prisoners often form family structures to help each other, but also frequently turn their anger inward and become suicidal. There has been a rash of suicide attempts and at least four actual suicides in the women’s prison in Michigan in the past year due to the contemptuous attitudes of the prison administration and brutality of the staff and because of the crowded, unsanitary conditions. The women’s lawsuits, i.e., Nunn, et al. v. Michigan Department of Corrections, et al., Civ. No. 96-CV-71416-DT; and the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit in support of the women: United States of America v. State of Michigan, et al., Civ. No. 97-CV-71514-DT, brought a few changes: male guards are no longer assigned to housing units, toilets, or showers; this makes it more difficult, though not impossible, for them to assault the women. But some guards have found other ways (threatening misconduct tickets, brutality, name calling, refusing medical help, and other degrading and malevolent behavior) to harass the women over the lawsuits. And the Department of Corrections retaliates by taking away more “privileges,” such as requiring women to wear uniforms that must be uncomfortably tucked in at the waist, putting limits on commissary items, refusing entrance to volunteer programs by American Friends Service Committee or domestic violence centers, etcetera.

One woman in the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project who was paroled recently after twenty years in prison was hospitalized within hours because she collapsed from several neglected medical conditions. She said the doctors and nurses in the emergency room were lined up at her bedside grilling her about prison life and were astonished to find how neglected the prisoners’ medical and dental needs are, how little and non-nutritious the food is, how difficult it is to take care of basic needs, because items like soap have to be paid for despite the fact that most prisoners come from poor backgrounds and jobs are few in prison. Bringing former prisoners to lecture in classes is an eye-opening experience for students. When I brought a friend in to speak in a university class on LGBT issues, students heard firsthand about her experience as an out lesbian in prison. She had been classified as a “predator” by the Michigan Department of Corrections and confined to segregation for her first year in prison. She was also targeted by some of the guards for harassment and issued false tickets that resulted in her serving a longer prison sentence. The current harassment of young lesbians and young mentally ill women in Michigan’s prison is under investigation by the Justice Department.