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Workbook

Created by:
Iresha Picot

Women in Prison: How it is With Us?


Assata Shakur (Excerpt)

Politicians are considered liars and crooks. The police are hated.
Yet, during cop and robber movies, some cheer loudly for the cops.
One woman pasted photographs of Farrah Fawcett Majors all over
her cell because she is a baad police bitch. Kojak and Barretta
get their share of admiration. A striking difference between women
and men prisoners at Rikers Island is the absence of revolutionary
rhetoric among the women. We have no study groups. We have no
revolutionary literature around. There are no groups of militants
attempting to get their heads together. The women at Rikers
seem vaguely aware of what a revolution is but generally regard it
as an impossible dream. Not at all practical.
While men in prison struggle to maintain their manhood there is no
comparable struggle by women to preserve their womanhood. One
frequently hears women say, Put a bunch of bitches together and
youve got nothing but trouble; and, Women dont stick together,
thats why we dont have nothing. Men prisoners constantly refer
to each other as brother. Women prisoners rarely refer to each
other as sister. Instead, bitch and whore are the common terms
of reference. Women, however, are much kinder to each other than
men, and any form of violence other than a fist fight is virtually
unknown. Rape, murder and stabbings at the womens prison are
non-existent.
For many, prison is not that much different from the street. It is, for
some, a place to rest and recuperate. For the prostitute prison is a
vacation from turning tricks in the rain and snow. A vacation from
brutal pimps. Prison for the addict is a place to get clean, get
medical work done and gain weight. Often, when the habit
becomes too expensive, the addict gets herself busted, (usually
subconsciously) so she can get back in shape, leave with a clean
system ready to start all over again. One woman claims that for a
month or two every year she either goes jail or to the crazy house
to get away from her husband. For many the cells are not much

different from the tenements, the shooting galleries and the welfare
hotels they live in on the street. Sick call is no different from the
clinic or the hospital emergency room. The fights are the same
except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The
poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the
same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the
system is the same. Rikers and is just another institution. In
childhood school was their prison, or youth houses or reform
schools or children shelters or foster homes or mental hospitals or
drug programs and they see all institutions as indifferent to their
needs, yet necessary to their survival.
The women at Rikers Island come there from places like Harlem,
Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, South Bronx and South Jamaica.
They come from places where dreams have been abandoned like
the buildings. Where there is no more sense of community. Where
neighborhoods are transient. Where isolated people run from one
fire trap to another. The cities have removed us from our strengths,
from our roots, from our traditions. They have taken away our
gardens and our sweet potato pies and given us McDonalds. They
have become our prisons, locking us into the futility and decay of
pissy hallways that lead nowhere. They have alienated us from
each other and made us fear each other. They have given us dope
and television as a culture. There are no politicians to trust. No
roads to follow. No popular progressive culture to relate to. There
are no new deals, no more promises of golden streets and no place
else to migrate. My sisters in the streets, like my sisters at Rikers
Island, see no way out. Where can I go?, said a woman on the
day she was going home. If theres nothing to believe in, she
said, I cant do anything except try to find cloud nine

Study Guide: Vocabulary Words

Abolition: is a political vision with the goal of eliminating


imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives
to punishment and imprisonment.
AT: Automatic Transfer; passed in 1992, the law permits minors to be
tried as adults.
Clemency: This process allows a prisoner or a prisoners representative
to file a petition with the governor, asking for mercy and documenting
how the sentence represents a grave injustice from which she should be
released.
Inmate: A term for prisoner, from the institutional perspective. A
resident of an institution that houses a number of occupants, especially a
person confined to that institution, such as a prison or a hospital.
Deriving from the word insane, the term implies mental dysfunctions.
Mandatory Minimum Sentencing: a court decision setting where
judicial discretion is limited by law. Typically, people convicted of
certain crimes must be punished with at least a minimum number of
years in prison.
Parole: The release of a prisoner whose term has not expired on
condition of sustained lawful behavior that is subject to regular
monitoring by an officer of the law for a set period of time. Parole
violations are a common cause of recidivism.
Political Prisoner: Anyone held in prison or otherwise detained, such as
under house arrest, because their ideas, affiliations, and or actions are
viewed as challenging or posing a real or potential threat to the
established state.
Prison Industrial Complex: Often referred to as the PIC, it refers to
industries that do business with correctional facilities, those that benefit
from prisoners free or low-cost labor, and related interest groups. As
described by Angela Davis, ...as the U.S. prison system expanded [in
the 1980s], so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of
goods and services, and use of prison labor. Because of the extent to

which prison building and operation began to attract vast amounts of


capital - from the construction industry to food and health care provision
- in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex,
we began to refer to a prison industrial complex. (Are Prisons
Obsolete?, Open Media, 2003, p. 12).
Shackling: The process in which women in prison are cuffed to a
hospital bed to deliver their babies.
Solitary Confinement: a form of torture in prison, in which a prisoner is
isolated from any human contact, though often with the exception of
members of prison staff.

Source: http://womenandprison.org

Name__________
Date___________
Worksheet
Automatic
Transfer

Political Prisoner

Clemency

Prison Industrial
Complex

Inmate

Shackling

Parole

Abolition

Solitary
Confinement
MandatoryMinimum

1.Marilyn Buck was incarcerated for over twenty-five years due to her
involvement with politically conscious organizations that threaten the
status quo and the western world. Marilyn is considered a
_____________.
2. INCITE! Critical Resistant is an organization that put out a
statement in 2001 to ________________ the prison industrial complex.
2. In 2000, after serving six years for going on the run with her
boyfriend, who was a wanted drug dealer, Kemba Smith was granted a
___________ by President Bill Clinton.
3. Sarah Kruzan was given an ________ to an adult prison, when at the
age of 16, she was sentenced to life in prison for killing her pimp, who
subsequently raped her at the age of 13.
4. There are currently eight hundred ____________in Philadelphia
Prisons.
5. On October 1, 2003, Shaneen Allen, a single mother, bought a gun
across state lines from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. She faces a
_________ of three years in prison.
5. Laura White horn, a member of such radical groups as the May 19th
Communist Party and John Brown Anti-Klan movement, was
___________ in 1999, after serving fourteen years.

6. The increasing growth of and reliance on the _____________ in the


United States and the use of a strengthened drug policy to
disproportionately affect women of color are examples of a system that
utilizes violence and punishment as a means of social control.\
7. In New York State, approximately 4,000 women are incarcerated in
any given year. Of those, around 40 will be pregnant and 30 will give
birth while incarcerated while been ____________.

Autobiographi
Marilyn Buck
Post-war 1947
born on the white
side of the tracks
Texas segregation
civil rights preacher's child
fled Texas with honor's diploma
for UC Berkeley and free
speech
though I did not know then
that's why I left
Vietnam war 1965
what war
are you fighting for
make love not war
college books tossed into a
trunk in some room
I've never seen since
fires of internationalism called
me
a girl
to enlist
in the anti-war
war against Amerikka
my own women's liberation on
the line
war in Amerikka
war against the warmakers
white-skinned haters
capitalist consumers of
human lives
following the tradition
Nat Turner John Brown
Wobblies subversives
resistance in the belly of the
beast

clandestine war 1973


captured by the killers
spirit killers nationkillers
a political prisoner
enemy of the state
terrorist and traitor
white woman dangerous
to white Amerika
condemned to years
and years of absence
a lifetime
warmakers
wait for its prisoners to die
or go crazy
or simply wither away into
insignificance
I rest, a grain of sand
significant on the beach head
that meets the sea
to face the storm
I wage resistance
to stay alive
I learn to search out freedom in
the breath
my cells send out dendrites
to absorb the world and its
offerings
I offer back
poems
and occasional grains of sand
mixed into clay and fired
into sturdiness

World Search Puzzle


Female Political Prisoners
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ASSATA SHAKUR
DEBBIE AFRICA
GLADYS SCOTT
JAMIE SCOTT
JANET AFRICA
JANINE AFRICA
KATHY BOUDIN
LAURA WHITEHORN
MARILYN BUCK
NEHANDA ABIODUN

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Whats in a Name?

Prisoner
*A person
deprived of
their liberty and
rights.
*Men or
women who
have been
captured by the
enemy in times
of war or
people who
have been
sentenced by a
judge to serve a
term of
imprisonment
for a particular
period of time
in a prison.

Prisoner/Inmate

Human
Imprisoned
Subject to abuse and
torture
Denied basic human
rights

Inmate
*Confined to a
housing or residence
i.e. a hospital.
*An object, not
typically referred to an
a human but rather as
an object

Exercising our Write!


This conference forced me to face a reality. I was there because I had spent some
time in prison writing and thinking. Thinking and writing. Trying to put on
paper some cogent ideas that might enable others to understand why I did some of
the things that I had done and the process that had brought me/us to the point we
were at. I had also come to the conclusion that if we didn't write the truth of what
we had done and believed, someone else would write their version of the truth.
If we can't write/draw a blueprint of what we are doing while we are doing it, or
before we do it, then we must at least write our history and point out the truth of
what we did, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Safiya Bukhari, Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary


(September 21, 2002),

Writing exercise: Writing can take on great meaning for people


who have been incarcerated or have loved ones behind bars. It
helps people affected by prison stay connected to life on the other
side of the wall. Reflect on Bukharis words of writing being an act
of revealing truths, and imagine that you were writing to a Woman
in prison. What would you want to say to her? What questions
would you ask?
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________

A Not So Coloring Page

Protecting Our Children: Ensuring the Rights of Incarcerated


Mamas

Iresha Picot
Melinda is currently serving a thirty-six month sentence in state
prison. She leaves behind two small children with her elderly aunt,
whom after eight months in the aunts care, can no longer care for
the children. They are placed into foster care and Melinda loses
contact of them. Upon her release from prison, Melinda has
learned that she has lost all parental rights of her children under
the 1997 Bill Clinton initiative Adoption and Safe Families Act
(ASFA). While the ASFA was to ensure that children be moved
out of foster care into adoption, this act has made it far more likely,
that incarcerated mothers of children in foster care will lose their
children permanently. The state can terminate parental rights in
certain circumstances, with a shorter timeline for parents to
complete services and regain custody or face termination. If a
child is in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months of a parents
incarceration, the state can move to terminate the parents rights
except under certain circumstances (i.e. kinship). In addition, for
women who are incarcerated for longer than two years (women in
state prison serve an average of 36 months), this law can almost
guarantee the loss of custody of their children. In most cases,
after parental rights are terminated, they cannot be regained.
According to the 2008* Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1.7 million
children under age 18, had a parent in state or federal prison. The
number of children with a father in prison increased from 881,500
in 1991 to more than 1.5 million in 2007, a 77 percent
increase. During that time, the number of children with a mother
in prison increased by 131 percent, from 63,900 to 147,400. Over
half of the parents incarcerated stated that they were the
caregivers of their children.

Prison Abolitionists today have attributed the dehumanization and


economic profits of Black and Brown bodies in the Prison
Industrial Complex to that of Slavery. The thief of children from
their incarcerated parents is with no exception. During slavery,
children were ripped away from their mothers and sold into slavery
without ever seeing their children again. This Adoption and Safe
Families Act is no different. Moreover, with Black Women being
the fastest growing group in prison, and being sentenced to prison
six times more likely than white women, we can almost be sure as
to whom this affects the most.
Forty-eight states besides Hawaii and Vermont have implemented
ASFA. Last year, New York passed The Adoption and Safe
Families Act (ASFA) Expanded Discretion Bill. The new law allows
for foster care agencies and courts to take into account the special
circumstances of parents in prison or residential treatment when
determining a child's fate. I think all states should push this law to
amend this act and demand the government for reunification of
incarcerated parents with their children.
Call your senators to sponsor this bill and take it all the way to the
Governor! I propose that people help to amend this bill in their
own states!

Iresha Picot, M.Ed, BSL, is a Virginia Sista, currently


living in Philadelphia. A Therapist, Doula and Activist in

several prison abolitionist organizations, Iresha created


this workbook as a part of a service learning program
for Books through Bars. You can reach Iresha at
Iresha.Picot@gmail.com

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