Women’s prisons in countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand tend to disproportionately house Black and Indigenous women (Wikimedia Commons).

CW: sexual assault, violence

In a women’s prison in New Zealand, the treatment of two Māori prisoners may have violated the International Convention against Torture, according to one lawyer. Their stories, publicized in November in the process of a court case against Karma Cripps (one of the prisoners) for setting fire to prison property, have drawn attention to inhumane treatment within the facility. Guards gassed Cripps’ cell with pepper spray on multiple occasions with the knowledge that she has asthma, forced inmates to lie down on the ground in order to be given food, and demanded to see prisoners’ used hygiene products before they would provide replacements. The revelations point to the often-ignored challenges endured by women prisoners—and the way racism shapes incarcerated women’s experiences.

More than two-thirds of Auckland Women's Prison inmates are Māori, making them the most incarcerated group of Indigenous women in the world. But the incarceration of Indigenous women is not a problem limited to New Zealand. While 2020 has ignited discussions on racism around the world, women have often been ignored in these conversations. In prisons, Black and Indigenous women are often disproportionately represented, while their gender gives rise to unique challenges and underemphasized abuses.

The Long Shadow of History

These inequalities are deeply rooted in histories of slavery and colonialism. State-sanctioned sexual violence has long been used alongside police brutality and lynching to terrorize marginalized communities. In the United States, slave patrols regularly sexually assaulted enslaved women and girls, and law enforcement officers participated in the lynchings of Black women in the South. Enslaved women who tried to defend themselves against sexual violence could be executed.

Modern American policing has its roots in slave patrols (Wikimedia Commons).

During Reconstruction, militia-like groups replaced slave patrols to enforce Black Codes, which enforced strict rules on formerly enslaved people including limitations on job access, voting rights, and other freedoms. Though Black Codes were abolished with the ratification of the 14th amendment, Jim Crow segregation and its enforcement through new local police departments continued the history of racialized police violence in America.

Policies like the War on Drugs have further exacerbated police surveillance and targeting of marginalized communities. A lack of funding toward social problems that disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous communities contributes to mass incarceration—including mass incarceration of women of color. In the last three decades, the number of women in prison has increased by an astonishing 800 percent.

At the same time, prison sentences tend to aggravate the social problems that they are supposed to address. It is difficult for prisoners to find work after release with their status as a felon, which contributes to recidivism.

Mandatory minimums and “three strikes” laws enforce harsh sentencing, which can lead to a life sentence for a minor drug offense. Drug offenses have precipitated the increase in women’s incarceration over the past three decades in the United States, even though women’s drug use has not increased. The rate of incarceration for drug offenses for women exceeds the rate for men, according to a 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. Black women are overrepresented in these statistics.

Bridging the legacy of slave patrols, racial profiling impacts Black women in particular. Black women get stopped for traffic violations seventeen times more than white women and are arrested thirteen times more than all other races combined in San Francisco. Once they are charged, Black women are more likely to be convicted than white women or men for the same crime. While women of each race use drugs at about the same rate, women of color are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates.

Features of U.S. mass incarceration have influenced the incarceration of women abroad—the government of Victoria, Australia, for instance, looked to the U.S. model of privatization to allow the establishment of the first for-profit women’s prison in Melbourne in 1996.

Indigenous Incarceration

In countries founded as settler colonies, past and current injustices contribute to Indigenous women’s disproportionate incarceration.

A recent report by PwC Australia showed that the cost of imprisoning Indigenous people in Australia is $5.5 billion per year and set to reach $13.8 billion by 2040. Indigenous women are the fastest growing group of prisoners in Australia at about 34 percent of the total population in women’s prisons while comprising only two percent of Australia’s population as a whole.

In Canada, women, and especially Indigenous and Black women, are the fastest growing prison population. Black women are on average given harsher sentences than white women for the same crimes. Indigenous women make up about two percent of Canada's population but 38 percent of the women’s prison population.

Antoinette Braybrook, who leads Djirra, an organization in Melbourne working with Indigenous women who have faced family violence, has pointed to the impact of wealth inequality on incarceration in Indigenous communities. According to Baybrook, “most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women inside are in for non-violent offences related to homelessness and poverty.” In Victoria, unpaid fines, public drunkenness, and bail laws can land you in prison, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous women.

In the United States, a report on incarceration in Montana shows how probation and parole systems disproportionately land Indigenous people in prison. Most Indigenous people do not go to prison for a new crime but rather for parole violations such as failure to complete substance abuse treatment or failure to check in with supervision. These conditions are extremely difficult for Indigenous people in Montana to meet because of the high costs of check-ins, drug tests, and work release programs; limited access to treatment centers on reservations; and high travel expenses. As such, probation and parole have entangled many in a cycle of imprisonment.

With added childcare responsibilities, Indigenous women often have an even harder time meeting these requirements. The prevalence of domestic violence and sexual assault also affect women’s mental health, a major determinant of success in meeting probation and parole conditions. Indigenous people account for 6 percent of Montana’s population, but Indigenous women make up about a quarter of the state’s women’s prison population.

Unsafe Guards

Injustice doesn’t just contribute to the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Indigenous women—it also impacts the way they’re treated in prison. In Canada, for instance, where two-thirds of women in prisons have faced sexual abuse in their lives, prison procedures reignite trauma. Strip searches are still conducted regularly in Canada and other countries even though a UN resolution ordered their replacement with body scans.

The United States has the highest female prison population in the world (Wikipedia).

Women in prisons also face sexual violence from prison guards, who often use their power to coerce women into sex for access to basic needs, such as menstrual products and the right to see their children. In the United States, women of color, low-income women, and LGBTQ+ women are most vulnerable to sexual abuse in prisons. Seven corrections officers in one New Jersey prison were charged for sexual abuse in 2018, sparking a federal civil rights investigation by the Department of Justice.

Transgender women face additional challenges. Under the Trump administration, the Bureau of Prisons changed its policy to use “biological sex” when determining inmate housing instead of gender identity, putting transgender inmates at risk of abuse and sexual assault. One 2012 survey found that nine out of ten transgender women of color in prisons faced extortion by law enforcement agents.

In the United States, issues of reproductive injustice are also prevalent in women’s prisons. 38 states do not require that prisons distribute menstrual products. At the will of prison guards, women might have to perform coercive sexual favors, pay, or go without them. These products are often in short supply, and even when they’re provided, they are usually of poor quality. Lack of access to proper menstrual products leads some women to make their own, which can cause infections and other menstrual health issues.

Prisons also fall short in prenatal healthcare education and access to sonograms and pelvic exams, and they do not provide pregnant women the flexibility to adjust their dietary needs. Once incarcerated mothers give birth, they are separated from their newborns almost immediately. This separation can create emotional issues for the mother and child and hinder the woman’s right to breastfeed, which is tied to attachment, postpartum depression, and psychological benefits for both the mother and newborn. In Canada, at least 70 percent of incarcerated women are mothers, and their children are five times more likely to go to foster care than the children of men in prison.

Expanding the Conversation

Conversations around mass incarceration and the police system often ignore women. But atrocities like those seen in New Zealand point to the ways marginalized women are uniquely targeted by the penal system, particularly in settler-colonial states where the injustices of history weigh heavily on modern inequalities. If mass incarceration continues to be treated as a problem exclusive to men, it is unlikely that inhumane treatment in Auckland’s and other women’s prisons around the world will be addressed anytime soon.