In her book “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, Angela Davis speaks about many facets of the prison-industrial complex and why abolition is the best long-term solution. Within her pages, she talks about the gendered nature of punishment in prison - she challenges the idea that men’s experiences in prison are the default, and instead argues that while women’s punishment is gendered, so too is men’s, just in different ways.
Though Davis’s work is monumental and relatively recent, bringing this book into a conversation now, 15 years later, can bring up questions of different intersections that were not as well-known in 2003. She broke ground in talking about race and gender as it interacts with prison, but only focused on cisgender individuals - and to her credit, conversations about the transgender community were not at the forefront when this was published. Looking at this book now, though, may bring up questions about how the gendered structure of incarceration affects trans people who are incarcerated.
In Chapter 4, Davis talks about the morality of male criminality vs female criminality - male criminality is often seen as an infraction on a social contract that can be redeemed, while female criminality is usually perceived as divorcing and disrespecting the very nature of “womanhood”, and that can NOT be redeemed. Once a woman has become a criminal, she has fallen forever. In an attempt to combat this view, activists in the 1800s pushed for separate facilities for women, many of which instituted lessons on womanhood - during sentences, women were taught to cook, sew, clean, and remember what it was to “be a woman”. As Davis discusses, this had a very different effect on Black, indigenous, and other women of color who became incarcerated than it did white women. This setup, while not practiced explicitly anymore, created an extremely gendered dichotomy of imprisonment that still remains today. This dichotomy continues to instill transphobia in an already transphobic society that makes incarceration for trans people even more perilous.
While society generally institutes extremely gendered roles, and consequences for violating those roles, incarceration adds another layer in that there is no escape. You can’t express yourself freely in your free time in the privacy of your home, there are often no people around that are willing to affirm your identity, and there is nowhere to hide from potential violence. These conditions can certainly exist outside of prison walls as well, but prison tends to exacerbate and reinforce these conditions, with full permission and protection from the state. The gendered structure of prison contributes to violence faced by trans people behind bars by creating more confusion over how to treat incarcerated trans people, while condoning and encouraging transphobic views that are mirrored in larger society - including that sex is equivalent to gender, or that trans people are “asking for” violence by being themselves. This often leads to trans people being placed in gendered facilities based on genitalia rather than identity or expression, which contributes to violence faced in prison - including harassment, beatings, rape, and murder. The confusion created by gendered expectations on how to treat inmates can also cause guards, providers, and other officials within the prison to become angry at trans people for “confusing” or “tricking” them, leading to officials either encouraging violence from other inmates, purposefully placing trans people in situations where they are at high risk for violence, and participating in violence themselves. Because there are no formal laws on how to handle trans people in prison, there is often little to no legal recourse for these situations.
Davis’s work is crucial to the conversation of mass incarceration and prison abolition, and leaves a lot of room for discussion to build as cultural conversations shift. By providing a framework, she has paved the way for work going forward - while her book may not be all-inclusive, it lends itself to being open to forming further analyses.
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