Book Review:
Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex
bq. Edited By: Julia Sudbury
bq. Published By Routledge, 2004,
bq. 352 pages
Reviewed by Antonia Baker
An impressive volume of twenty articles, Global Lockdown calls for a new approach to thinking about women in prison. Edited by abolitionist Julia Sudbury, it looks at the explosion of women’s imprisonment as a crisis of working class women of colour and indigenous women globally. Unlike much existing prison research, it locates the experiences of prisoners at the centre of analysis, and using a transnational feminist approach, encourages us to think beyond the limits of national borders in order to critique the role of race, citizenship, global capitalism and military occupation in the expansion of prison regimes.
Compelling and layered, this anthology moves outside the usual scope of US-centric writing on the prison industrial complex. Contributors analyze prisons in South Africa, Canada, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Australia, Italy, Jamaica, Britain, Colombia, Portugal, Palestine, the US and Pakistan. Many write from their prison cells.
Personal narratives and critical essays reveal the effects of imprisonment on women’s lives, while rejecting the notion that there’s a singular or universal experience of incarceration. Comparisons of prisons from different countries have been written before, but as Sudbury cautions us, many international studies stop short of questioning how borders are policed and the ways in which people’s mobility is restricted while capital flows unimpeded.
There are, however, common features in women’s prisons worldwide. One of the fastest growing prison populations, women are confined in overcrowded jails where human rights violations are rampant. Sudbury asks what has caused the unprecedented rise in the number of women being sent to prison. She discredits theorists who point to an increased pattern of women offending, arguing that crime rates are falling. Explanations that hinge on women’s past experiences of abuse are also problematic in that they obscure the larger political and economic forces driving mass imprisonment.
While much has been written on private investment and prison industries, prior to Global Lockdown there’s been little discussion on how prisons are transformed by free trade agreements and economic restructuring, including the interplay between the globalized war on drugs, the criminalization of migration and increased border control and security. Sudbury encourages activists to consider other spaces of confinement, such as immigration detention centres, noting, “Immigrant rights and prison activists rarely share the same platform”. Global Lockdown is an academic book, but also a tool for organizing, offering examples of successful cross-border campaigns.
Criminalizing Survival
The first part of the book maps the ways in which women’s survival strategies are criminalized. Asale Angel-Ajani explores the policing of immigrants, particularly African women, in Italy, which experienced a 50 per cent rise in its prison population over two years due to the immigrants, drug users and sex trade workers held in custody. The author points to policies such as the increased use of preventative detention under Italy’s “Operation Clean Hands”, immigration controls, and heightened penalties for drug use.
In Canada, Aboriginal women and youth disproportionately fill our prisons. First Nations ex-prisoner Lisa Neve and activist Kim Pate tell the story of Neve’s designation as a dangerous offender in 1994, a court decision that carries an indefinite sentence. Neve writes about her successful struggle to overturn this label, and the Court of Appeal judgment that ruled her crimes were connected to her efforts to survive, including her involvement in the sex trade. Her story shows how classification of women is dangerous, as it’s based on the impossible prediction of future behaviour, as well as gender and racial discrimination. Women who refuse to be “managed” by the corrections system receive the harshest treatment. Pate illustrates how the neo-liberal destruction of social safety nets collides with colonization and poverty on a systemic level.
Stormy Ogden, an ex-prisoner of indigenous Yokuts and Pomo ancestry, examines California’s prison industrial complex. She discusses the role of prison labour and its colonial roots. Native youth activists experience the devastation of foreign laws and are sent to prison for defending their native burial grounds and lands. The author, sentenced to five years for welfare fraud, describes the intersecting high rates of imprisonment and sexual violence of native women as genocidal. She concludes, “What was my crime? Being an America Indian woman.”
Women in the Global Prison
The second section begins with Kemba Smith writing from her prison cell, serving time for a non-violent drug offence. She gave birth to her son behind bars and shares her dreams of being at home with her family. Her article Modern Day Slavery reveals that 61 per cent of federal US prisoners are serving time for drugs. “Basically this war on drugs is the reason why the prison-industrial complex is a skyrocketing enterprise,” she writes. The Kemba Smith Justice Project has since successfully fought her conviction.
Palestinian political prisoners from three refugee camps in the Gaza Strip share their experiences of detention and sexual torture with Elham Bayour. Meanwhile, Linda Evans reports on women in Vieques resisting imperialist occupation, accused of “trespassing” on their own land. In the US, stigma and discrimination against prisoners has become public policy; in many states women with drug felonies can never receive welfare, apply for student loans or vote. An anti-imperialist former political prisoner, Evans draws insightful links between border militarization, exportation of the war on terror, globalization and the criminalization of immigrants, who are deported after serving their sentences. Other authors discussing the detention of “illegals,” include Sudbury, who writes of the cross-border imprisonment of Jamaican women in Britain, and Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Nurakawa, who offer an in-depth examination of immigration and crime control in the US.
One of the most interesting articles is Manuela Ivone Perieria da Cunha’s From Neighborhood to Prison, which looks at women and the war on drugs in Portugal. Da Cunha challenges the assumption that prison walls are impermeable, that prisoners are “A World Apart” from the rest of society. In Portugal, one of the European Union’s largest incarcerators, women imprisoned for participating in the drug trade are often locked down with other female family members because mass arrests target entire communities. This, in turn, causes the division between the imprisoned and the free to become blurred, and shifts the focus to the “interface between inside and outside.” Prison culture isn’t about convict code; its roots are in pre-prison networks of family and kin, and it is this mass incarceration, ironically, that helps prisoners maintain their identities, relationships, and will to resist. Like national borders, prison walls can be porous.
From Criminalization to Resistance
While the third section of the book is the shortest, it contains valuable examples of organizing efforts (though testimonies of women’s resistance weave throughout the book). Melissa Upreti looks at the policing of women’s sexuality in Nepal and traces how cross-border alliances and local activism led to the decriminalization of abortion in 2002. Beth Ritchie challenges us to expand our understanding of the prison system to include regulation of sexuality; her article features the voices of queer black youth in detention in the US. In South Africa, where domestic violence is not criminalized, the Justice for Women Campaign asks why the state responds to women experiencing violence by locking them up. The campaign, as Vetten and Bhana write, mobilizes for the early release of women, as well as legal reform.
Global Lockdown is successful because it contains writings by those who best understand the prison industrial complex: prisoners and their families. As ex-prisoner Debbie Kilroy insists in Sisters Inside: Speaking Out against Criminal Injustice, prisoners need to speak for themselves. Kilroy is rightly critical of those who assert that there are categories of prisoners “who do not belong” in prison – the underlying implication being that there are people who do belong behind bars. Activists need to hear this; to do otherwise is to condone the perpetuation of the prison system. Is the release of certain prisoners (non-violent, political or those deemed minimum-security) an abolitionist strategy? It can be, but only if anti-prison activists see decarceration and legal reform as a beginning and not a destination.
A phrase stays with me from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Pierce the Future for Hope: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape: “without glorification or shame.” Romanticizing the prison experience or stigmatizing it renders the pains of imprisonment invisible. What makes Global Lockdown unique among other books on the prison industrial complex is that many of its voices are those of women inside, orienting us to center the experiences of women of colour in our analysis and organizing.
Antonia Baker is a member of the Prisoners Jusice Action Committee (PJAC). PJAC can be reached via email at pjac_committee@yahoo.com