Professional Documents
Culture Documents
April 8, 2015
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
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
examinations and other forms of sexual abuse and rape because of the evolution of the southern
penitentiary system.