Summer 98

WOMENSPACE: SUMMER 1998

Part 1: Lock-Em Ups: Warehousing Society's Failure | Part 2: Women of Kali: We Will Not Be Subdued | Part 3: Non-Profit Resources: Canada | Part 4: Take a Spin with Spinifex | Part 5: Pssst—Know Any Good Women-Related Web Sites? | Part 6: Finding Data on Women: A Guide to Major Sources at Statistics Canada | Part 7: FemiNet Asia | Part 8: A Virtual Conference : From Outraged Speech to Polite Listening | Part 9: Trying to Teach | Part 10: Women’s Art Online | Part 11: CD Rom: The Process behind the Creation of “Woman in the Centre” | Part 12: The Institute For Women’s Policy Research | Part 13: Internet Down the Road: What It Means For Everyone | Part 14: Reviews | Part 15: Madgrrls | Part 16: Anarchist Feminism |

Following the tragic death of Vancouver teenager Reena Virk, mainstream media seemed to report new instances of violence by teenage girls almost every day. But the reality, according to the Elizabeth Fry Society,
www.elizabethfry.ca
is that there are no solid figures on how many teenage girls are actually in the correctional system, because there are too few to count.

“The stereotype of girls becoming gun-toting gang robbers is simply not supported by statistics,” according to a report by E Fry national co-ordinator Kim Pate. “That does not mean that there are not specific and egregious examples of young women committing violent offences. It does mean, however, that every time one such incident occurs, journalists and talk show hosts beat the bushes for other examples to support extreme interpretations of the event.”

In fact, despite notorious examples such as Karla Homolka, extremely few women are imprisoned for violence--and most of those were battered spouses. In 1993, women made up only 2.2 percent of Canada’s federally sentenced population. Sixty percent of them were imprisoned for non-violent offences. That year, women were charged with about eleven percent of the violent crimes committed in Canada, but 62 percent of these charges were for low level assaults.

E Fry fact sheets show that women who end up in prison are overwhelmingly poor, illiterate or barely literate, physical and/or sexual abuse survivors, and often single parents. First Nations peoples are six times more likely to go to prison than non-aboriginal Canadians; First Nations women are only three percent of Canada’s population, but 17 percent of women in prison. Despite all these strikes against them, women have a very low recidivism rate, compared to men. Only about 20 percent of women prisoners who get out, return to prison--and half of them are brought back by administrative procedures or conditions of community release.

However, the picture is changing--not because women’s behaviour is changing much, but because there is a crying lack of alternative services for women especially. “Rather than adopt a ‘zero violence’ approach,” according to Kim Pate, “ ‘zero tolerance’ policies are resulting in ever increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth being jettisoned out of schools and communities, and usually through, rather than into, a thinning social safety net. Rather than nurturing our youth, we are increasingly scapegoating and disposing of them as though they are expendable human refuse.”

In this law-and-order emphasis, as in so many things, Canada seems to be following the example of the United States. In the US, more than five times as many women were incarcerated in 1994 (64,000) as in 1980 (12,000), according to The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, edited by Stephen R. Donziger (HarperCollins, 1996)
“Women have become the hidden victims of the state’s zeal for incarceration, as the number of California prisoners surged past the 100,000 mark in April of 1991,” states the Prison Activist site at
www.prisonactivist.org/women/women-in-prison.html

While the majority of women in conflict with the law remain poor (80 percent reported incomes of less than $2,000 in the year before their arrest, 92% had incomes less than $10,000), non-white (54 percent are women of colour) and semi-literate (58 percent had not finished high school), another factor has entered the picture. Women and young people--younger and younger all the time--are getting caught up in a general expansion of a new, increasingly privatized, prison industry.

For instance, California alone spends $3.6 billion a year just maintaining its prisons. That’s because, with the “three strikes and you’re out” law the state has officially abandoned the idea of rehabilitation, and now imprisons offenders strictly as punishment--according to the Organization for Sensible and Effective Prison Policy, at
www.amandla.org/osepp/

And it cites The Real War on Crime figures to show that “third strikes” are often minor offences: “Percent of second and third felony convictions in Los Angeles County, under ‘three strikes’ law, that were for murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, or carjacking, in 1994: 4"

“The number of people sent to jail is actually determined by policy decisions and political expediency,” claimed investigative reporter Phil Smith, in “Private Prisons: Profits of Crime,” which was published in Covert Action Quarterly in Fall 1993 and is available at
mediafilter.org/MFF/Prison.html
“In fact, from 1975 to 1985, the serious crime rate actually decreased by 1.42 percent while the number of state and federal prisoners nearly doubled.”

Perhaps the scariest aspect of the drive towards incarceration--besides the death penalty--is the growth of the private prison industry. “The punishment industry is the fastest-growing industry in the country,” according to the Prison Issues desk of the IGC
www.igc.apc.org/prisons
“The US spends more on locking people up than on higher education, or social services, or health care.”

Profit, rather than social policy, seems to be the key motivation. Prison construction, for instance, costs $54,000 per unit. “Between 1990 and 1995, 213 new federal and state prison facilities were constructed,” states PrisonActivist, “representing a 41 percent increase in prison capacity.” Imprisonment costs can reach $92,000 per prisoner, annually. That’s about nine times as much as 92 percent of women prisoners earned the last year before they were jailed.

One way to get around such a major investment is to subcontract out the job--to private prisons, a growing industry in the US and New Zealand, and mooted about as a possibility in Ontario. The legal technicalities have yet to be smoothed out--one Texas prisoner escaped and avoided jailbreak charges because the private prison had no legal standing--but what is really worrisome is the question of what costs the prisons are cutting. Guard training? Food?

Of course, even publicly run prisons can require prisoners to earn their keep. Some jail farms grow their own food. Canada’s new minimum-security women’s prisons, intended to replace P4W, will require prisoners to keep their own rooms clean.

At the other end of the spectrum are prisons where private businesses can install equipment and produce merchandise with the prison workforce--what some prisoners claim is essentially slave labour. “Unicor, the prison manufacturing industry of the [Bureau of Prisons]...operates 90 prison factories and is rapidly expanding...” wrote former prisoner Danny Mack in 1997. TV newsmagazine Sixty Minutes also viewed prison factories with some alarm: workers may earn $10 a day before garnishment for restitution, with no benefits, and no possibility of strikes. In fact, Mack cites historical instances of employers using prison workers to break free workers’ strikes. Employers no longer have to relocate to developing nations in order to find rock bottom wages, to drive down factory workers’ earnings.

All these issues are raised on websites devoted to prisons and some individual prisoners, easy to find with a simple web search for “prisons”--or jump off from one of the main sites given above. Few prisoners have direct access to the Internet. Most of the sites are run by friends, or by social change groups. Even if there should be some measure of exaggeration, the rapid rising incarceration is alarming. Critical Resistance will host a conference called “Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex,” Sept 25-27.
Email critresist@aol.com
or visit the Prison Activist website at
www.prisonactivist.org/

Email Penney Kome at Kome@shaw.wave.ca

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