Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Created by:
Iresha Picot
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
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.
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
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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
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.