Women Prisoners in the Golden Gulag

Since 1984, California has built twenty-three major new prisons, although it took a hundred years to build the first nine. According to abolitionist Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, at the end of the golden age of American capitalism,  prisons were “partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis.” ¹ .  Prisons were not protecting the public from crime, which was actually decreasing, but rather were a place to put marginalized people, particularly poor people and people of color who weren’t useful to the state or business, a way to use surplus land, and a way to legitimize a faltering government that could not control popular resistance. Drug-related sentences led to the rise of mass incarceration nationwide, and in California, policies such as the 1979 Determinate Sentencing Law and the Three Strikes Law dramatically increased the length of time people spent behind bars and the number of Life Without Parole (LWOP) sentences. The population of incarcerated women skyrocketed from 4,432 in 1980, to 23,597 in 2000. ² .  By 1995, the state opened both the Northern California Facility for Women and the Valley State Prison for Women. ³ .

Graphic by Nicolas Lampert for the Justseeds/Critical Resistance portfolio “Voices from the Outside” in 2008., courtesy of Justseeds Artists Cooperative. 

The unprecedented growth and aging population of the prison system exacerbated the preexisting healthcare crisis behind bars. Larger populations of drug offenders and women faced distinct health challenges, including chronic illnesses, addiction, pregnancy, and cervical cancer. By the mid 1990s, the incredible inadequacies of prison healthcare systems were becoming more and more apparent. Care was inaccessible, and each medical visit required a five dollar copay, beyond reach for many incarcerated people making less than a dollar a day. Furthermore, California is one of only six states to allow guards to be hired as Medical Technical Assistants who have minimal nursing training. Their role is to deliver medical care, although more often they deny it. This practice is such a flagrant human rights violation that it was condemned by the United Nations in 1999. ⁴ . 

 In reaction to the growth of the prison system, the invisibility of women prisoners in prior prison movements, and the political principles of the intersectional feminist movement, a more radical critique of the gendered violence within the prison system and the inacessibility of healthcare began to emerge. 79% of women in federal and state prisons nationally are survivors of physical or sexual abuse, making the links between dehumanizing racism and sexism they face in society and behind bars even more obvious than they are for men. ⁵ .

 As Davis, argues "For women, the con­tinuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, since they also con­front forms of violence in prison that they have confronted in their homes and intimate relationships." ⁶ This often includes gendered violence and sexual harassment, even by medical staff. Emergent organizations such as Critical Resistance, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Survived and Punished, INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, embraced this new emphasis on violence against women and also queer and transgender communities. 

The definitive abolitionist organization Critical Resistance emerged in the period after the explosive growth of California’s prison system turned the state into what co-founder Ruth Wilson Gilmore called “the golden gulag.” Davis joined Gilmore as a founder and visionary of the movement. As the organization defines it, “prison Industrial Complex abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” ⁷ . Gilmore defines and situates the crises of racial capitalism, criminalization, and the prison industrial complex, while also envisioning potential resistance in the 2020 documentary Geographies of Racial Capitalism. On a local level, incarcerated women fought the prison industrial complex by forming another organization, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.