Policy brief on Prison Industrial complex
Randomtb
cellingblackbodiesJuliaSudbury.pdf
80 celling black bodies: black
women in the global prison
industrial complex
� � � � � �
Julia Sudbury
abstract
The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the population of women
prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison
construction. This article argues that this new pattern of women’s incarceration has
been forged by three overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental shift in the
role of the state that has occurred as a result of the neo-liberal globalization. The
second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of
what has been labeled a ‘prison industrial complex’ made up of a intricate web of
relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison
corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is
symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in
criminalized drugs. These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build
on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-
exploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex. The article
calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of
race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political
and economic realities. The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining
the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming
the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability. The article seeks to reveal
the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international
financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever
increasing numbers.
keywords
war on drugs; globalization; prison industrial complex.
feminist review 80 2005
(162–179) �c 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com
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introduction
My mother got twelve years. She’s in Foston Hall. They can give people those long sentences
just for knowing drugs are in the house. He sentenced her to 12 years for knowing. She
wasn’t even involved and he knew that. But he said she knew it was in the country and if it
had got through, she would have benefited from it, from any money. He said one only has to
read the papers every day to know the trouble it causes once it gets in the pubs and clubs,
what it does to people. There was a recorder in the cage and she was saying: ‘Why did you
do it?’ They convicted her on that
(Janet, HMP Holloway).
Janet 1
is an African Caribbean woman in her mid-twenties serving a seven year
sentence for importation of Class A drugs. She was six months pregnant when
she was arrested at Heathrow airport and brought to HMP Holloway, England’s
oldest and most notorious women’s prison. After having her son, she was
transferred to the Mother and Baby Unit where I interviewed her. In this
‘compassionate’ penal environment, designed to punish the mother but not her
innocent child, Janet and son are confined to a 60 by 80 cell with a bed, toilet
and closet from 8 PM to 8 AM. During the day, they have intermittent access
to a creche, playroom and roof garden where the baby can breathe fresh air under
wire mesh designed to prevent escape attempts. When her son reaches
nine months, Janet will be transferred to another unit where she can keep him
for a further nine months, at that stage, they will be separated while she
serves the remainder of her sentence. While Janet was sentenced to a ‘lenient’
seven years because of her guilty plea, her mother, who was not involved in the
drug trade, was sentenced to 12 years because of her failure to report her
daughter to the police.
Janet, her mother and her son represent three generations caught up in an ever
expanding network of penal repression and profit that increasingly defies national
borders. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic increases in women’s
incarceration accompanied by expansive prison building programs in Britain as well
as the rest of western Europe, North America and Australasia. At the same time,
there has been a shift in the nature of confinement as the private prison industry
has been embraced by New Labour and Conservatives alike, and the deprivation of
liberty has become an extremely profitable enterprise. This article will argue that
the explosion in women’s incarceration is the hidden face of neo-liberal or
‘corporate’ globalization and can not be understood without reference to three
overlapping phenomena. The first is the fundamental restructuring of national
economies and social welfare provision that has occurred as a result of the
globalization of capital. The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and
subsequent global expansion of what has been labelled a ‘prison industrial
complex’ made up of a intricate web of relations between state penal institutions,
politicians and profit-driven prison corporations. The third is the emergence of a
1 Between 1999 and 2001 I interviewed 50 women in prisons in England, Canada and the US. All names of women prisoners are psyeudonyms.
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 163
US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted
by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs. 2
These new regimes of
accumulation and discipline, I will argue, build on older systems of racist and
patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-exploitation of black women and
women of colour 3
within the global prison industrial complex.
the global boom in women’s imprisonment
Since the early 1990s, increases in the prison population in England and Wales have
sparked a boom in prison construction, leading commentators to comment on ‘the
largest prison building program since the middle of the 19th century’ (Morgan,
1999: 110). While women make up a small proportion of those incarcerated, their
rates of imprisonment have multiplied faster than men’s, causing feminist activists
to call for drastic measures to counter ‘the crisis in women’s prisons’. 4
Between
1985 and 1998, for example, the number of women in prison more than doubled,
from 1,532 to 3,260 (Prison Reform Trust, 2000). The prison service has responded
by contracting with private corporations to built and operate new prisons, and by
re-rolling men’s prisons for women. Recent government initiatives designed to slow
the increase in the use of incarceration, such as Home Detention Curfews, have
had little impact on the number of women sentenced to prison which continued to
grow during the year to April 2001 by 9%, compared to 2% for men.
The British pattern is mirrored elsewhere. In the US, where the prison and jail
population reached two million in the year 2000, women’s incarceration is also
spiraling upwards at a greater pace than that of men. While the number of men in
US prisons and jails doubled between 1985 and 1995, women’s imprisonment during
the same period tripled (Department of Justice, 1998). In 1970, there were 5,600
women in federal and state prisons, by 1996, there were 75,000 (Currie, 1998). In
Australia, a surging women’s prison population, accompanied by pressure from
activist organizations, forced the Parliament of New South Wales to commission a
Select Committee on the Increase in Prisoner Population (Bacon and Pillemer,
2000). The Select Committee was instructed to investigate a 20% increase in men’s
and 40% increase in women’s incarceration (Parliament of New South Wales, 2001).
In Canada, the increase in federally sentenced women prisoners, accompanied by
pressure from penal reform organizations, has led to the construction of five new
federal prisons for women (Hannah-Moffatt and Shaw, 2000). In Ontario, spiraling
numbers of prisoners have fueled the construction of three 1600-bed superjails
where a growing women’s population will be warehoused within US-style, austere
coed facilities.
Aggregate rates of increase in prison populations under-represent the impact of
the prison boom on black women, women of colour and indigenous women. In all
the countries mentioned above, oppressed racialized groups are disproportionately
represented. For example, in New South Wales, while all women’s imprisonment
2 The ‘threat’ of drugs can be seen to be socially constructed in so far as some drugs with addictive properties and damaging social consequences including violence and theft (tobacco, alcohol) are sold to the public legally under government license, and others (heroin, cannabis, cocaine) are criminalized. In addition, substances that are illegal in one context (alcohol during Prohibition), may be enjoyed legally in another. Others may be simultaneously legal and illegal (medical marijuana in California). Referring to ‘criminalized’ rather than ‘illegal’ drugs reminds us that ‘the criminal’, like ‘the crime’ she commits are products of penal regimes that shift over time.
3 Writing about gender and race transnationally generates problems of naming, since racial terms have different meanings depending on location. In this article, I use ‘black’ as the common term for women of African, Caribbean and Asian origins in Britain only; since ‘black’ in the US and Canada refers only to women of African descent, I use ‘women of colour’ to refer to women of African, Asian, Latin American and indigenous communities transnationally. I also use the term ‘women of the global south’ since this is now widely used by
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies164
increased by 40% in 5 years, aboriginal women’s incarceration increased by 70% in
only two years. In Canada, aboriginal people comprise 3% of the general
population and 12% of federal prisoners, a figure that increases to over 60% in
provinces like Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canadian Criminal Justice Association
2000). African Canadians are also disproportionately policed, prosecuted and
incarcerated (Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice
System 1994). In the US, Latinas and African American women make up 60% of the
prison population. And despite their small numbers in the population, Native
Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned (Rojas, 1998).
Finally, 12% of women prisoners in England and Wales are African Caribbean British
passport holders 5
compared to 1% of the general population (Elkins et al., 2001).
In addition, British prisons hold numerous women from West Africa, the Caribbean
and Latin America, either as immigration detainees, or serving sentences for drug
importation. The crisis of women’s prisons can therefore be read as a crisis for
black women and women of colour worldwide.
the emergence of the prison industrial complex
Activist-intellectuals in the US have traced the emergence of what has been
labelled the ‘prison industrial complex’ to the economic transformations of the
1970 s (Davis, 1998, Goldberg and Evans 1998). As advances in technology enabled
corporations to transport information and capital between distant geographic
locations in fractions of a second, new forms of globalized capital began to
appear. US-based corporations downsized their unionized Western workforces and
relocated manufacturing operations to locations in the global south where labour
was cheap and labour and environmental protections minimal. Multinational trade
agreements such as NAFTA and GATT and the establishment of Free Trade Zones
hastened the process, opening the doors to the unhindered super-exploitation of
predominantly young women of colour from Tijuana to Manila. The impact of
massive downsizing in the US on urban African American and Latino communities
was catastrophic. Redlining and racist violence had kept African Americans and
Latinos out of the 1950s suburbanization drive that had allowed many working
class white families to move out of the inner cities, restricting the former to urban
ghettos where they were warehoused with few opportunities for mobility (Oliver and
Shapiro, 1995). As job cuts hit these communities, they were devastated by
pandemic rates of unemployment, a declining tax base and resultant cuts in
social, welfare, educational and medical provision. The result: spiraling rates of
poverty, drug addiction, violence and social dislocation. These conditions were not
met passively. The Black Liberation Army, Black Panthers, Young Lords, Chicano
Power and American Indian movement were the organized voice of the resistance
that sprung from these oppressive conditions. However these movements
encountered brutal repression and criminalization. The FBI’s Counter Intelligence
activists to refer to women in what is often, and problematically called ‘the Third World’.
4 ‘The Crisis in Women’s Prisons’, Press Release, Leeds Metropolitan University, April 7, 1999 http// www.lmu.ac.uk/ news/press/archive/ apr99/prisons.htm.
5 British officials have changed the way in which they report ethnic origin in order to downplay the number of black women and men in prison. By excluding non British passport-holders, the Home Office Research Development Statistics unit has ‘reduced’ the proportion of African Caribbean women prisoners by 51% to 12% of prisoners, compared to 1% of the general population (Elkins et al., 2001). However this is revealed to be a sleight of hand if one considers the large number of black British residents who hold ‘commonwealth’ passports.
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 165
Program (COINTELPRO) identified the Black Panthers as THE number one threat to
the security of the US and targeted activists such as Assata Shakur, Pam Africa
and Angela Y. Davis for ‘neutralization’ via trumped up charges, massively
publicized manhunts and incarceration in maximum security institutions (Churchill,
1990). The scene had therefore been set for the mass criminalization of African
Americans, American Indians and Latinos. In the white imagination, black protest
was synonymous with lawlessness and violence. While overt Jim Crow racism had
waning public acceptance in this post-Civil Rights era of Martin Luther Kingesque
integrationist policies, criminalization provided a new camouflaged racist
language in which code words such as ‘criminal’, ‘drug dealer’ and ‘welfare
queen’ could be used to refer obliquely to the racialized ‘enemy within’ (Davis,
1998: 66). Criminalization therefore became the weapon of choice in dealing with
the social problems caused by the globalization of capital and the protest it
engendered.
Joel Dyer argues that three components make up the ‘perpetual prisoner machine’
that transforms criminalized populations in the US into fodder for the prison
system and has caused the prison population in the US to increase tenfold in
twenty years (Dyer, 2000). The first is the consolidation of large media corporations
that rely on violent and crime-oriented content to grab ratings and that have
created a dramatic rise in the fear of crime in the US population at large. The second
is the increasing use of polling and market research by politicians to align their
platforms with ‘popular’ views about policy areas, leading to ‘tough on crime’
rhetoric on both sides of the electoral spectrum. This rhetoric is translated into
policies such as mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing and three strikes that
cause more people to serve prison sentences, for longer terms and leads to spiraling
prison populations. The third is the intervention of private prison corporations such
as Wackenhut Corporation and Corrections Corporation of America which provide a
way for governments to expand their prison estate without having to spend the initial
capital cost of prison construction. The mutually profitable relationship between
private corporations and public criminal justice systems enables politicians to mask
the enormous cost of their tough-on-crime policies by sidestepping the usual process
of asking the electorate to vote for ‘prison bonds’ to raise funds to build publicly
operated prisons. Instead, they can simply reallocate revenue funds from welfare,
health or education into contracts with privately run for-profit prisons. Since the
1980s, the private sector has allowed prison building to continue, even where public
coffers have been exhausted by the prison construction boom. It has been rewarded
with cheap land, tax breaks and discounts in sewage and utilities charges, making
prison companies a major beneficiary of corporate welfare. These three components
constitute the ‘political and economic chain reaction’ that we have come to know as
the prison industrial complex: a symbiotic and profitable relationship between
politicians, corporations, the media and state correctional institutions that
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies166
generates the racialized use of incarceration as a response to social problems rooted
in the globalization of capital.
the PIC goes global
Although the prison industrial complex emerged in the US, the past 15 years have
witnessed its transformation into a global phenomenon. Multinational prison
corporations have fueled this expansion through an aggressive strategy of pursuing
foreign markets through sophisticated marketing techniques. Targeting British
politicians has proven particularly fruitful. During the 1980s, Labour and
Conservative politicians were invited to the US for tours of flagship private
prisons where the new steel and glass buildings and latest technological advances
in surveillance appeared to offer a striking advance over Britain’s decaying penal
estate. The glossy rhetoric of the ‘new corrections’ where prisoners were called
‘residents’, prison guards ‘supervisors’ and cells ‘rooms’ was favourably compared
to the brutal and dehumanizing prison culture in Britain which had long proved
resistant to reform. Prior to this time, both sides of the House of Commons were
opposed to prison privatization. Politicians tended to view the denial of freedom
as too serious an undertaking to be entrusted to private interests and subjected to
the vagaries of the profit motive. But these carefully orchestrated visits led to a
sea-change. As Sir Edward Gardner, Chair of the all-party penal affairs group
commented after a visit to the US in 1986: ‘We thought it was stunning. These
places didn’t feel like prisons and didn’t smell like prisons. There was nothing we
could find to criticize’ (Young, 1987: 3).
In 1987, a Home Affairs Select Committee visited four adult and juvenile jails run
by the Corrections Corporation of America and the Radio Corporation of America.
The Select Committee subsequently recommended that corporations should be
invited to bid for contracts to build and manage custodial institutions, initially as
an experiment. A key to the recommendation was that privatization would
dramatically accelerate the prison building program, which was hindered by lack of
public funds (Speller, 1996: 5). Gradually, key British politicians and
administrators were won over to the possibilities for cost cutting, modernization
and prison expansion offered by the corporate agenda. Privatization was presented
as a panacea to the problems facing the prison service: overcrowding, old
buildings, high annual costs, resistance to reform and a rigid prison guard culture
reinforced by the powerful Prison Officers Association. Between 1991 and 1994 the
mutually profitable relationship between conservative politicians and the prison
industry culminated in a series of Acts which allowed for corporations to design,
construct, manage and finance new prisons and to bid to operate existing prisons
FN [5]. By 1997, when New Labour came to power, Britain had become a profitable
location for multinational prison corporations, producing revenues of over d95
million for the five leading private incarcerators, Premier Prison Services (a joint
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 167
venture of Wackenhut and Sodexho), Wackenhut (UK) Ltd., UK Detention Services
(a joint venture of Corrections Corporation of America and Sodexho), Securicor and
Group 4 (Prison Privatisation Report International, 1998a; Sudbury 2000). Although
Labour had condemned the Conservative privatization program, pre-election
promises to return prisons to the public sector were short lived (Prison
Privatisation Report International, 1996). Within a year of election, Home
Secretary Jack Straw announced that privately run prisons would only return to the
public sector if the latter could outbid their private competitors, and that new
prisons would be built under the Private Finance Initiative (Prison Privatisation
Report International, 1998b).
While Wackenhut Corporation, Corrections Corporation of America and others have
reaped enormous profits in the US since the 1980s, their profits have recently been
compromised. A radical popular prison movement, and a series of high profile legal
cases have pushed the US prison industry into a period of crisis as shares go into
freefall. 6
Critical Resistance, the Prison Moratorium Project and the Black Radical
Congress’ ‘Education not Incarceration’ campaign have mobilized popular support
and media coverage in questioning the logic of ever increasing incarceration. At
the same time, private prisons corporations have proven vulnerable to the ‘Jena’
effect, whereby a case of malpractice turns the tide of popular and political
sentiment and corporations are left with legal costs and empty facilities due to
cancelled contracts. 7
Potentially damaging incidents of prisoner abuse, sexual
assault, violence and protests are generated by the very conditions that make
prisons profitable: low paid non-unionized staff, low staffing ratios and sparse
provision of activities for prisoners (Yeoman, 2000). Although corporations engage
in a process of damage limitation, whereby they seek to suppress public knowledge
about such incidents, close scrutiny by prison activists has severely limited their
ability to do so. As domestic profits come under threat, foreign operations play a
key role in maintaining corporate viability. New prisons in Marchington, Olney and
Peterborough therefore play an important role in maintaining the viability of the
multinational prison industry as it seeks new markets in South Africa and further
afield (Martin, 2001). Women and men serving time in British prisons thus fuel
stock market profits from London to New York, reinforcing the logic of
incarceration with the logic of capitalist accumulation.
the war on drugs wages war on women
With the entering of the New Year, I want to give you the gift of vision, to see this system of
Modern Day Slavery for what it is. The government gets paid $25,000 a year by you
(taxpayers) to house me (us). The more of us that they incarcerate, the more money they
get from you to build more prisons. The building of more prisons create more jobs. The
federal prison system is comprised of 61% drug offenders, so basically this war on drugs is
6 Between 1998 and 2000, Corrections Corporation of America (aka Prison Realty) shares fell from $40 to $2, Wackenhut shares fell from $30 to $9 (Martin, 2001).
7 In September 2000, the State of Louisiana agreed in federal court to cease contracting with privately run juvenile facilities after an investigation found boys in Wackenhut’s Jena facility had been abused with pepper spray and tear gas and denied basic needs from underwear to food (Martin, 2001).
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies168
the reason why the Prison Industrial Complex is a skyrocketing enterprise (Kemba Smith,
1999).
In 2000 two African American women were among the prisoners granted clemency
by outgoing President Clinton. Dorothy Gaines and Kemba Smith’s cases had been
highlighted by organizations including Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the
Kemba Smith Justice Project and the Million Woman March as evidence of the
egregious injustices occurring as a result of the ‘war on drugs’ and the particular
impact on women. Kemba Smith’s case in particular attained national attention
and was widely reported in the mainstream press. 8
Kemba was a student at
Hampton College, a traditionally black college in Virginia. She became involved
with a young man, Khalif Hall, who, unknown to her, was a key figure in a large
drug operation. Kemba stayed with Hall despite abuse and threats to kill her
because she was afraid for her family and herself and because she had become
pregnant. Shortly before the drug ring was apprehended, Hall was shot and killed.
Kemba pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, but hoped Hall’s
abusive behaviour would be taken into account. Instead, she was held responsible
for the full 255 kg involved in the offense, although she personally was not found
to have handled the drugs, and was sentenced to 24.5 years in prison. Kemba, like
Janet and her mother (above) have been targeted by a transnational war on drugs
that emerged in the mid 1980s in the United States and has since been aggressively
exported around the globe. While the shadowy figure of the drug dealer or
trafficker tends to be envisioned in the popular media as male, increasingly women
are the low level ‘footsoldiers’ within the transnational drug trade who are most
vulnerable to arrest and punishment.
The current war on drugs was announced by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and
formalized in the 1986 Anti Drug Abuse Act. The Act made a critical break with the
concept of drug users as a medical population in need of treatment, and instead
targeted them as a criminal population. It also utilized the erroneous assumption
that users would be deterred from their habit and dealers and traffickers
incapacitated by punitive and extensive use of penal sanctions. By removing those
involved in the criminalized drug trade from the streets for long periods of time, it
was assumed, syndicates would be severely damaged in their ability to get drugs to
the streets. 9
Since ‘liberal’ judges could not be trusted to hand down sufficient
sentences to deter and incapacitate those involved in the drug trade, the Act
removed discretion and imposed mandatory minimum sentences. Thus treatment
programmes and community service were effectively barred in cases involving
drugs, and sentences length related not to the role of the defendant in the
offense, but to the weight and purity of drugs involved. In the US, African American
women and Latinas are disproportionately affected by mandatory minimums.
Since the only way a lesser sentence can be given is in cases where the
defendant provides ‘substantial assistance’ in the prosecution of another person,
women, who tend to be in subordinate positions within drug syndicates and thus
8 Kemba Smith’s case is a composite of factors which make her both representative of and different from the majority of women incarcerated as a result of the war on drugs. As an African American woman, young mother and victim of domestic violence, she is typical enough to become a symbol of the anti-war on drugs campaign. As a middle class, articulate student, she is clearly untypical, yet her class status strengthens the message to ‘middle America’, that this could happen to ‘your daughter’.
9 This has not been the case, instead, criminalization and targeting by law enforcement artificially inflate the price of drugs, so that manufacturing, trafficking and selling them become immensely profitable and increasingly associated with violence. This
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 169
have little access to information are usually unable to make such an agreement.
The crack-cocaine disparity also feeds the disproportionate impact on women of
colour. The mandatory minimum sentence for crack cocaine is 100 times harsher
for crack than for powder cocaine. Since crack is cheaper, and has flooded poor
inner city neighbourhoods, African Americans and Latinos receive disproportionate
sentences when compared with white powder cocaine users and dealers (Waters,
1998).
While the war on drugs has had a dramatic impact on US communities of colour, it
has reached far beyond US borders. 10
From the mid-1980s, the war on drugs
increasingly played a key role in US foreign policy decisions as Reagan and Bush
administrations pushed a US drug agenda on the global community. Initial efforts
focused on the G-7 countries as the Reagan administration used US economic clout
to push for international compliance with US drug policy. In 1988 the Toronto
Summit endorsed a US proposed taskforce which in turn led to the 1988 United
Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances (Friman, 1996). The Convention contained a number of controversial
conditions that ran counter to the policies of other member states. By requiring
states to criminalize drug cultivation, possession and purchase for personal use,
maximize the use of criminal sanctions and deterrence and limit early release and
parole in drug related cases, the Vienna Convention represented the transnational
spread of the US punitive ‘law and order’ agenda (Jorg-Albrecht, 2001). By signing
the Convention, member states signed onto the logic of incarceration, pledging to
use criminal justice sanctions in place of medical or social solutions and turning
decisively away from legalization. 11
By the mid-1990s, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Taiwan, South and Central America, the Caribbean and African countries
including Nigeria and South Africa were fully fledged partners in the US driven
transnational war on drugs.
The Americanization of drug policy is evident in the British approach to
criminalized drug use, trafficking and retail. While the ‘British System’ of
prescribing heroin or methadone to addicts, dating to the 1920s, indicates a
medical approach to drug use, it exists uneasily alongside recent developments
that draw on the US model of criminalization and incarceration. UN Conventions
are not the only way in which US drug policy is exported abroad. Indeed, British
politicians on both sides of the house have ‘gratefully accepted and sometimes
sought’ the ‘benevolence, advice, influence and leadership’ of the US on drug
matters (Bean, 2001: 90). US-British synergy on drug policy comes about as a
result of exchanges of research findings, fact-finding missions to the US by
politicians and administrators, international conferences and visits by ‘specialists’
to Britain. An infamous case involves Drug Enforcement Agent Robert Stutman’s
1988 visit to Britain. Addressing the Assistant Chief Police Officers Conference,
Stutman ‘scared the hell’ out the participants with his apocalyptic visions of the
crack epidemic in the US and its inevitable migration to Europe as the US market
mutually profitable relationship between law enforcement and the drug trade has been labeled the ‘international drug complex’ (Van Der Veen, 2000).
10 In Latin America, the war on drugs has been a military war. Since 1989, Colombia has seen deployment of US military personnel, financial assistance for policing, provision of attack helicopters and weaponry to assist in the fight against ‘narcoterrorists’. This fight has been closely associated with counter insurgency measures against left wing guerillas such as the FARC and ELN and has thus fuelled a bitter civil war. US counter-drug measures have also included spraying of crops with herbicides including Agent Green which indigenous groups claim has destroyed the rainforest and polluted the water table. For the impact of the war on drugs on Colombian women, see Sudbury (2001).
11 Although Dutch coffee shops selling cannabis and the British practice of prescribing to heroin addicts have gone largely unaffected by the 1988 Convention, they are in opposition to and theoretically threatened by its provisions.
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies170
became saturated. Stutman’s account was based on an unpublished report and
anecdotal evidence. Nevertheless, a 1989 Home Affairs Committee Report echoed
Stutman’s unsubstantiated argument that there is ‘no such person as a fully
recovered crack addict’ and that crack, by its very nature, called for a penal,
rather than a medical response (Bean, 2001). Stutman’s presentation had
immediate and racialized effects. From the late 1980s, the press ran reports of
crack infiltrating British cities. Crack became a foreign threat, an enemy brought
into Britain by Yardies, with African Caribbean communities as the Trojan Horse
enabling the foreign infiltration. As a result, resources were pumped into law
enforcement activities such as Operation Dalehouse and the Crack Intelligence
Coordinating Unit specifically to increase the surveillance and policing of black
communities. Coinciding with the entrenchment of ‘Fortress Europe, the crack
threat was also a justification for a heightened suspicion of black British women
and men entering Britain after vacations abroad, as well as Caribbean nationals
entering to visit family and friends. With such targeted policing and customs
attention, the numbers of African Caribbean women and men apprehended for
possession, sales and importation of both class A and lesser drugs increased
dramatically. In some instances, retail of crack was largely inspired by police
operations and protection of informants, as is the case in a northern city where a
senior police officer admitted that undercover police buyers stimulated demand
that disappeared once the police operation was over (Joyce, 1998: 179). While the
belief that Britain was on the verge of a US-style ‘crack epidemic’ was found by
the mid 1990 s to be a ‘media inspired panic’ (Joyce, 1998: 181), the pattern of
targeted surveillance has continued unabated. As public funds are poured into the
high-tech policing of black suspects, a self-fulfilling cycle is generated whereby
increased arrests in the black community reinforce the public fear of African
Caribbean drug dealers and traffickers, legitimate the continuation of racially
discrepant policing practices and generate additional resources for the police. 12
The impact on black women has been devastating. While in 1980, 4.4% of women
serving time in prisons in England and Wales were incarcerated on drug related
offenses, by 2001 that figure had risen to 39% (HMSO; 1982, Elkins et al., 2001).
Between April 2000 and April 2001 alone, the number of women sentenced to prison
as a result of the war on drugs grew by 20% (Elkins et al., 2001).
As the risk of apprehension at Heathrow, Toronto or New York increases, drug
syndicates find it increasingly profitable to use black women and women of colour
as low level ‘mules’ to carry drugs through customs. Women are seldom involved in
the planning and organization of drug trafficking, nor are they party to the large
profits involved (Harper and Murphy, 1999). Male dealers may believe that women
will be less likely to come under suspicion of carrying drugs and more likely to
receive lenient sentencing if they are apprehended. However, black women are not
the recipients of such chivalrous behaviour, since they do not fall under the
benevolent patriarchal protection of the white men who judge them. Nicole, a 29-
12 In Winter 2000, the Metropolitan Police received d800,000 to carry out Operation Crackdown, targeting low level dealers of crack and class A drugs on council estates in boroughs with large black populations. The Operation led to surveillance of 700 private properties, over 80 raids and 1,000 arrests (‘1,000 arrested in London Class A drugs offensive’, Press release, Metropolitan Police 01/03/2001). An evaluation of the Operation found it
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 171
year-old Black British woman incarcerated with her daughter at HMP Holloway
explained:
The judge when he sentenced me said he’s going to use me as an example. Because he
knows I’ve been set up, but he has to give a message the world: ‘Don’t bring drugs’. He used
me as an example because he knew I was pregnant. I was set up by a friend of mine, if you
can call him that. And they knew that. But still he said that’s why they’re using women to
bring drugs to the country because they think that the system is not going to be as hard on
women as on male prisoners. He said that’s not the case.
The women I interviewed became involved in the transnational drug trade through
three paths: economic need; threats and coercion; and deception. Faced with
poverty and often without a second income to support the family, many women
make the choice to risk carrying drugs, sometimes believing it will be a one-off.
Interviewees often had specific financial goals, such as an emergency medical bill,
or school fees for a son or daughter. Marta, a Jamaican mother of four serving a
five year sentence at HMP Winchester explained:
They do it mainly for the kids, to support the kids. You have a mother who has four or five
kids, two is very sickly, every time she visit the hospital or the doctor, you have to pay to
register, you have to pay for medicine, your have to pay for an X-ray. Everything costs
money. So anything comes up they’re going to jump at it, the easiest way to make money.
Marta is typical of women who import out of economic necessity. Knowing little
about the punitive criminal justice system that awaited her in Britain, she took a
calculated risk based on the limited options available for her to ensure the survival
of herself and her children:
I was self employed doing a bit of selling. I was married but my husband wasn’t supportive
after sending the kids to school and the money kept going down. I never knew nothing much
about drugs, the only form of drugs I know is ganja, we call it weed. That’s the only hard
drugs I’ve known of in my life until I come here. And I was just asked by somebody to carry
some baggage for $100,000 Jamaican dollars and I just jump at it, thought it could really
help out. They said there is no risk involved, they make it look so easy, just carry the drugs
and collect your money and that’s it and come back. They didn’t show me the possibility
that I could get caught, just do it.
While Marta was not told explicitly that she was importing drugs, the fee involved
made it evident to her that the package was illegal. In contrast, Maureen, a
middle class North Londoner of Jamaican ancestry and mother of six was unaware
of the contents of her luggage. While on a visit to her father in Jamaica, she was
approached by an acquaintance who asked her to carry coconuts, rum and cans of
coconut cream to England. She was apprehended at customs and cocaine was
found in the cans:
I’m so embarrassed. I haven’t told no-one. I keep going over in my head, what have I done
wrong? What happened? Was I set up? Was I being duped? I don’t know what happened to
had ‘little discernible impact’ on London’s crack trade which quickly adapted to meet continuing demand (Russell et al., 2001).
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies172
me. I told them the truth and they didn’t believe me. I know so many people who lie to them
and they get off, they get a few years. Its not fair. And then again the jury was all white
and it was a verdict of 10 to 2.
Maureen’s case, she believes, was exacerbated by a customs officer who mistook
her for another detainee and stated that she was carrying d9,500, rather than the
few hundred pounds she actually had with her. In the face of racialized stereotypes
of African Caribbean drug traffickers, Maureen’s class status is erased. she is
processed through the criminal justice system as ‘just another’ courier, found
guilty by a predominantly white jury and given a mandatory minimum sentence.
While it may be tempting to draw a bold line between guilt and innocence in these
two cases, the reality of women’s involvement in importation is far more blurred. In
many instances, importing was part of a complex emotional relationship between a
male dealer or trafficker, often himself a minor player in the drug trade, and a
lover/partner/‘mule’. Diane, a biracial Canadian 25 year old, is serving the
second-half of a five year sentence for importation at the Elizabeth Fry halfway
house in Toronto. As a young woman, Diane left home and moved into a women’s
shelter because of her abusive relationship with her father. While she was there,
she entered into a relationship with a Grenadan man who was subsequently
arrested for drug dealing. While he was incarcerated, Diane visited him regularly
and he discussed marriage with her. Shortly after his release, she gave up her job
and started importing drugs for him, not knowing at the time that his previous
courier had been arrested and incarcerated. She was not paid in cash for the trips
she made, but occasionally, he would buy her expensive gifts such as jewelry and a
computer:
He looked at it this way, he was paying the rent, he was paying for the food, he was paying
the bills, if I needed anything I’d ask him for it. If I needed a new pair of shoes. But it was
hard for me to ask him for anything because I don’t like asking anybody for anything. I
never got any money.
Diane and her partner were married before she was finally arrested and
incarcerated at Grand Valley State, Kitchener. During the first few days of her
sentence, she met the first courier and also learned that her husband had already
moved in with another girlfriend. Nevertheless, she refused to trade information
for a shorter sentence out of loyalty and respect for his paternal role:
I had been told don’t implicate him because he’s still on parole, so he’d do more time than
I would, because he’d go back to jail to finish the remainder of his sentence, plus a new
charge. So I figure I can’t do that to him because I’d be taking the kids away from their
father. And altogether I was with him for 7 1/2 years.
Diane’s case illustrates the complex web of emotion, economics and abuse that
often draw women into criminalized activities. In her study of battered African
American women, Beth Richie argues that ‘gender entrapment’ best describes the
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 173
way in which black women are incarcerated due to their involvement with a
coercive and violent male (Richie, 1996). While Diane was not subjected to
physical violence, her partner’s controlling behaviour in relation to the money
which she generated through importation, the deception with regard to his other
girlfriends, and his apparently cynical use of marriage as a means of controlling
her labour form a web of abuse and exploitation. By controlling the labour of his
‘stable of mules’ through promises of love and commitment, Diane’s partner
generates wealth for himself without either taking the personal risk of importation,
or paying the going rate of several thousand dollars per trip. This web of economic/
emotional exploitation was a factor in the stories of many of the women I
interviewed. As Marta explained:
Men do it [import], but they tend to prey on the women more. Because they know that the
woman in Jamaica, they care for their family, especially their kids. They would do anything
to make sure their kids is looked after. So they mainly prey on the woman, especially single
woman. You have men do it, but the number isn’t as large as the woman.
Women’s subordinate role in heterosexual relationships and their role as the
primary and often sole carers of children combine to devalue their labour in the
drug trade. The low value of women’s labour in the drug trade is demonstrated by
the women I interviewed who reported being ‘set up’ as decoys so that their arrest
would distract customs officials from a larger shipment coming through. Paid
anywhere from zero to a few thousand pounds for carrying a shipment worth
upwards of d100,000, women form a cheap and replaceable army of labourers. As
one is incarcerated, another, like Diane, quickly fills her place.
the global feminization and racialization of
poverty
While transnational drug policies play an important role in channelling women of
colour into prisons from Cape Town to Toronto, women are not without agency and
do, of course, make choices within the options available to them. As the global
economy has been transformed however, these options have become increasingly
limited. In the global south, this economic transformation has driven a shift in the
role of the state. Firstly, governments have been formed to scale down their role as
providers of a social-welfare fabric as international financial institutions have
driven neo-liberal economic reform. In Jamaica, policies introduced since the mid
1980s by the Jamaican Labour Party working closely with the US, IMF and World
Bank, have led to cutbacks in public sector employment, the scaling back of local
government services, health and education, increases in the cost of public utilities
as state owned companies are sold to the private sector and a dramatic decline in
real wages. Such cuts hit women particularly hard as they carry the burden of
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies174
caring for children and sick or elderly relatives (Harrison, 1991). Marta’s
experience exemplifies the increasing economic pressures facing women:
Things in Jamaica is very expensive. Its hard for a single woman with kids, especially
anywhere over three kids, to get by without a good support or a steady job. It doesn’t mean
that I didn’t have an income. I did have an income, but having four kids and an ex-husband
who doesn’t really care much. I had to keep paying school fees and the money kept going
down. I did need some kind of support. That’s why I did what I did. We don’t get child
support in Jamaica, three quarters of the things that this country offers for mothers here we
don’t have it. This country gives you a house, they give you benefits, we get nothing in
Jamaica. We have to pay for hospital, not even education is free. Primary school used to be
free under one government hand, but under another government it has been taken away.
You’re talking about high school, you’re talking about fifteen up to twenty thousand dollars
a term, for one kid to go to high school. Its difficult in Jamaica.
Secondly, while the state has cut back its role in social welfare, it has stepped up
its role in subsidizing foreign and domestic capital. Free Trade Zones established in
Kingston, Montego Bay and elsewhere offer foreign garment, electronic and
communications companies equipped factory space, tax exemptions, a cheap
female workforce and, for the busy Executive, weekends of sun, sea and sand. 13
Foreign-owned agribusiness and mining companies have also been encouraged,
displacing traditional subsistence farming and causing migration from rural areas
to the cities, which now account for 50% of the Jamaican population. As the
economy has shifted, women working in the informal economy as farmers and
‘higglers’ find themselves unable to keep up with the rising costs of survival. While
younger women may find employment in the tourist industry as maids, entertainers
or prostitutes, or within the Free Trade Zones assembling clothes or computers for
Western markets, working class women in their thirties and older have fewer
options. Even where these women do find employment, low wages, driven down by
multinational corporations in search of ever greater profit margins and kept low by
governments unwilling to set a living minimum wage for fear of losing foreign
investment, mean that they can not earn a sufficient income to support their
families. The failure of the legal economy to provide adequate means for women’s
survival is the key incentive for those who chose to enter the drug trade as
couriers.
The feminization of poverty in the global south is mirrored by conditions among
black people and communities of colour in the West. As Naomi Klein argues, the
flight of manufacturing jobs from the West to the global south has led to the
Macdonaldization of jobs in North America and Europe, with part time, casual, low
wage jobs the norm in the new service and ‘homeworker’ economies (Klein, 2001).
At the same time, successive governments, whether espousing compassionate
conservativism or the ‘third way’, have pursued market-led economic reforms
which have dramatically reduced public services, introduced widespread
13 www.vegamedia. com/Jamaica.
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 175
privatization and raised the cost of living. The result is the disenfranchisement of
working class and black communities and black women in particular as the state
sheds its social welfare responsibilities. In Britain, as in the US and Canada, this
has entailed a dramatic reform of welfare, and the targeting of single mothers in
particular as a drain on the public purse. It is this impoverishment that acts as the
motor to women’s involvement within the retail end of the drug trade and their
subsequent targeting by the criminal justice systems of these countries. Working
class women, and in particular women of colour therefore bear the brunt of both
the punitive and economic regimes of neo-liberal globalization. The devaluation of
their labor within the criminalized economy of the international drug trade is
closely interrelated to their superexploitation within the formal sectors of the
global economy (the Free Trade Zones and minimum wage tourism and service
sectors). Both are made possible by the radical feminization and racialization of
poverty that is an essential part, rather than an unfortunate offshoot, of the
corporate maximization of profits in the global arena.
conclusion: towards resistance
As the new millennium ushers in an era of unchecked capital accumulation and
massive and widening divides between information-rich elites and disenfranchised
majorities, feminists and anti-racists need to respond by infusing our praxis with
the new politics. The new social movements of the 21st century are more likely to
be found shutting down Niketown in San Francisco or battling the WTO in Seattle
than at a take back the night rally or consultative meeting on institutional racism.
While women of the global south and disenfranchised communities of the north
have been active in vibrant anti-globalization protests, feminist scholars have
been slower to identify corporate globalization as central to their concerns.
Gradually, a body of knowledge is being developed that can serve as a valuable
resource for feminist and anti-racist organizers as well as anti-globalization
activists. Research into sex tourism, the trafficking of women, women as workers in
the free trade zones and homeworkers in the garment industry and women in the
global food chain have all demonstrated the centrality of black women and women
of colour to the new global regimes of accumulation (Phizacklea, 1990; Kempadoo,
1999; Ching Yoon Louie, 2001; Shiva, 2001). Less attention has been paid to the
repressive penal regimes that underpin these processes. The ‘prison-like’
conditions under which women labour in the free trade zones, with restricted
access to restrooms, forced overtime and punitive sanctions for union activities
and pregnancy, have generated considerable outrage among researchers and
activists alike (Klein, 2001). The confinement of increasing numbers of women in
the prisons and jails of the global north, where they are subject to separation,
sometimes permanent, from children, sexual abuse, medical neglect and forced
labour has, however, been muted.
feminist review 80 2005 celling black bodies176
Perhaps the explanation for this muted response lies in a failure to connect
women’s incarceration to the social, economic and environmental concerns
generated by the new global economy. The prison has traditionally served the
purpose of separating those who have ‘offended’ from the social body politic.
Prisoners are therefore seen as ‘criminals’ whose behaviour is qualitatively
different from that of ‘normal’ people and must therefore be analysed using
different tools, hence the existence of criminology as a distinct discipline.
Yet if the complex web that has led to the massive increases in women’s (and
men’s) imprisonment documented in this article is to be understood and
challenged, prisons must be liberated from the criminologists and criminal
justice professionals, and brought under the scrutiny of anti-globalization,
feminist and anti-racist scholars and activists. Prisons serve a vital role in
suppressing dissent and invisibilizing disenfranchised populations. They therefore
maintain the viability of corporate globalization and mask its devastating effects
on global majority communities. Prisons also play a direct role in capital
accumulation since their operation generates profit for corporations engaged in
building, equipping and operating them as well as those employing prisoners as
cheap labour. Increasingly, black women and women of colour are the raw material
that fuel the prison industrial complex: as scapegoats of tough-on-crime rhetoric;
targets of drug busting operations that generate millions for police, customs and
military budgets; or workers sewing and assembling electronics in prison
workshops. There is a need for a new anti-racist feminism that will explore how
the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with
contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. It must be
transnational in scope and womanist in its integrated analysis of gender-race-
class and in locating black women and women of colour at the centre. As the
gendered and racialized bodies that turn prison cells into profit margins, women of
colour play a vital role in the global prison industrial complex. As activists, inside
and outside of the prison walls, we are a critical part of the forces that are
challenging its parasitic existence. The challenge for scholars and activists alike is
to make visible the women hidden behind prison walls and to dismantle the
profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international
financial institutions, media and politicians that are celling black women in ever
increasing numbers.
author biography Julia Sudbury is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, Oakland, USA
and author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics
of Transformation (Routledge, 1998). She was formerly director of Sia, a national
development agency for the black voluntary sector based in London and
coordinator of Osaba Women’s Center in Coventry.
Julia Sudbury feminist review 80 2005 177
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