“Do you know what really happens to the lives we lock away?” A provocative flyer advertising the Balch Auditorium panel discussion from Crossroads residents, a half-way house for women recently released from prison, asks student-passerby’s hurridly walking through Seal Court.
At the talk, the small group of diverse women (young and older, white and black) seated at the well-lit stage, each took turns speaking on a particular topic in relation to their incarceration experiences and the injustices they have suffered at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system. The place is filled almost completely with a sea of student faces. I had the pleasure of having known one of the women up on the stage intimately from my senior year of college. She had been gracious enough to share with me her words of wisdom for my senior thesis entitled “The Gulag Speaks Back: What Formerly Incarcerated African-American Women Can Teach Us About Living Between the Politics of the Corporate-Prison-Industrial Complex and The War On Drugs.” I was happy to see my old friend doing well, confident in her ability to raise awareness about issues important to her and many others. My connection to her, and another woman from Crossroads not on the panel but most certainly sitting in the front rows, have made me a better woman today. No kidding. I am sincerely grateful to both of these women and the four others that contributed so much to my life, through the undergraduate thesis interviewing process and beyond. They taught me about how to understand the cruelty of horrible violence and the great depths of unconditional love.
I am especially grateful in this space online to the women from the panel of the talk. In the lives of these self-empowered women, such as the women of Crossroads panelists, we can all learn about how in the lived reality of formerly incarcerated women, activism and Feminism are not independent practices of one another, as they shouldn’t be within academia. Far too long have the Feminists of the ivory tower excluded the voices of women of color, women formerly incarcerated, working class and poor. It is finally time that we, as academic Feminists, began to ask the marginalized Feminists how to proceed with a cohesive Feminist movement. Competancy is a non-issue.
I stood in awe of the panelists accomplishments despite all the terrible hardships in their lives. Here are some stats on the panelists of the talk:
*134 years of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous Attendance
*1 GED
*5 AA degrees
*1 Bachlor of Science Degree
*Substance Abuse Program-Peer Counselor
*Faith Based Program-2 Years
*Christian Twelve Step Facilitator
*Books on Tape for the Blind
*Carpenter, Electrician, Masonry…
*College Reading and Language Arts Tutor
*Computer Programming
*Graphic Arts Vocational Certificate
And Many, Many others…
These accomplishments say something about the women’s individual courage, and the strength of the Crossroads formula to help the recently released prisoners, especially “lifer’s” get back on their feet again. Although I am an aetheist and many of the women are Christian, this has never been a divisive issue that kept us from our discussions. Getting involved means listening, not just talking and acting. This is one lesson I learned from the current Crossroads program director.
Furthermore, the words of these women were bitter like acid when describing pregancy in prison, for example. The experience described of living the instant separation of mother from infant, not to mention, the shackling of the mother’s feet directly pre and post labor is heartbreaking. If you don’t know how to start practicing Feminism, I would like to encourage readers to start by listening to what women in prison/formerly released have to say.
I would like to conclude with a few outrageous statistics about women in prison:
*The number of owmen in prison has increased at nearly double the rate of men
since 1985: 404% vs. 209%.
*More than half of women incarcerated under state jurisdiction report that they had experienced either sexual or physical abuse before their admission to prison.
*Only 4 in 10 women are able to find employment in the regular labor market within one year of release.
*States are authorized to initiate termination of parental rights when a child has been living under foster care for 15 of the last 22 months.
*1 in 3 mothers has never spoken with her children by phone while incarcerated.
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