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Jesse Keating

Drs. Taylor & Clark

PHL 399A: Human Rights and Prisons

April 8, 2015

Race and Gender

When one is looking at the population of the incarceration system, women get lost in

shuffle. Just like men, women too have been drastically effected by mass incarceration over the

last 30 years. According to a 2015 ACLU fact sheet, Nationally, there are more than 8x as many

women incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails as there were in 1980. Looking

closer, black and hispanic women are overrepresented in the criminal justice system in

comparison to white women. (ACLU 2015) Focusing on the intersectionality of race and gender,

one can detail through a historical framework how the southern prison system of containment,

control, and exploitation in association with the criminalization of blackness and gendering of

punishment, has led to the ongoing sexual abuse of women prisoners by male guards.

Before slavery was abolished in the South, the penitentiary system was driven to carry

out the punishment of slaves . . to accomplish domination and to secure white supremacy.

(Guenther 45) Slave masters focused on the containment and control of the slaves body through

means of torture. Through practices of bondage, shackling and forced self-betrayal, slave masters

were able to effectively lead their slaves to their social death and exploit them. After the 13th

amendment was passed and slavery was abolished, the South evolved to a new means of

controlling blacks. Black codes were passed by law makers in the South to contain the mobility

of recently freed blacks, through the means of hyperincarceration. (Guenther 49) These codes

could best be described as a way to legally criminalize black people. Blacks southerners were
arrested for a myriad of things like, unemployment, breaking a labor contract, making a public

speech, vagrancy . . (Guenther 49)

Later on, southern states developed the convict lease system; in which black prisoners

were leased to railroad and plantations to work for during incarceration. Once again, black

southerners were forced into working under extreme conditions, with little to no pay, with no

regard for their lives. This constant physical punishment as Dylan Rodriguez puts it, subjects

are reminded that they will spend the remainder of their lives in a perpetual intimacy with

regulated bodily violence. (Guenther 51) With that, this points to the constant physical

vulnerability that black people and other people of color face to this day.

Putting this into context, one can see how the evolution of the southern penitentiary

system had transformed and defined the illegality and criminality of blackness and the perpetual

bodily harm that people of color face. When applying this to how women are treated in prison,

one can see how these factors thrive. The hyperincarceration of blacks through black codes has

defined the criminal by the ongoing illegality of blackness. Over time, this racial status of the

criminal has been placed upon other racial groups and lower income whites. (Guenther 48) For

women prisoners, this racial criminal relation to blackness is apparent in their punishment and

treatment by their guards. Angela Davis briefly discusses the gendered punishment of the

pregnant slave woman by her master and how it defines this intersectionality of sexuality and

criminality in terms of blackness. The slave women was dealt a penalty by her master for

coerced sexual relations, which defined the slave woman's reason of being a slave. Women

prisoners today go through similar perceptions of their deviance of gender norms as being

hypersexualized.
Now one can assert that the female inmate, no matter the race, is held to this blackness

that is seen as criminal. In relation to the criminal," guards take the place of the slave master

when leashing out punishment in motions of bodily abuse. The guard, when punishing the

inmates body, is asserting this developed relation between the institution and this criminal

blackness. The criminal is vulnerable, and is not weighed upon civic mindedness. So in this case,

the institution perceives the criminal as only able to relate to bodily punishment. In many cases,

these acts of bodily punishment are used to control and exploit the prisoners relation to her

physicality. She is subjected to dehumanizing internal searches, an obscene amount of pelvic

examinations and other forms of sexual abuse and rape because of the evolution of the southern

penitentiary system.

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