To Maria and Rosario
Maria Suarez and Rosario Muñoz, two Latina
survivors of abuse, both recently won release on
parole but were immediately placed in federal
detention because they are not U.S. citizens and
have a prison record. They each mounted a strong
campaign against deportation, but despite the
efforts of their families, advocates and U.S.
Congresswomen, the Department of Homeland
Security has deported both of them to Mexico.
Each will appeal this decision in the future.
For their ability to articulate and transform
their experience of abuse, for their unceasing
fight to win release, and for their courage to
stand up to the Homeland Security office and
assert their human right to stay in this country
with their families, we dedicate this issue to
Maria and Rosario. Bring them back home!
Category: Issue 27 – Spring 2004
Debi Zuver, Central California Women’s Facility
II had just gone through so much? A man, my
abuser, threatened to kill me and I had defended
myself. I was semi-conscious when the cops
pulled me out of the closet I was in and the next
thing I knew was that I was being slammed on the
floor and then stuck on a gurney. All this
happened so fast I couldn’t comprehend what was
going on.
Once I got to jail, I was stripped by two women
officers and then was left naked on the floor of
the cell while a man from “mental health”
services kept looking in to see if I had tried to
kill myself. Every 15 minutes they would come by
to ask various weird questions which were meant
to establish my mental ability.
Finally I was taken to the shower to clean up
because I wouldn’t bathe for four days since the
shower was in stalls placed in the center of a
unisex mental health module. It was very
degrading – I no longer had any privacy
whatsoever! Then I was placed in an observation
cell which was all windows with the light on all
the time. I felt like a bug under a microscope.
Because the tank was in the mental health module,
there was constant yelling and screaming and the
noise kept echoing making it even louder than it
already was. And the cops would stand outside
the women’s cells, women who already had mental
health problems, and whisper horrible things to
them, trying to make them think that these things
were the voices in their heads.
When I was finally brought out to go to court, I
was in waist chains with both hands cuffed at my
waist. This was the beginning of my understanding
how the domestic violence I had experienced would
be continued again and again by the prison system.
by Cassie Pierson, Staff Attorney, Legal Services for Prisoners with
Children
A brief search of the legislative web site,
www.leginfo.ca. gov, turned up several bills
addressing various issues of interest to
prisoners, their families, friends, and
advocates. This column focuses on four bills
that CCWP supports in addition to SB 1385, which
is discussed elsewhere in this newsletter.
AB 1866 (Leno) and SB 1164 (Romero) address the
issue of access to prisoners by the media. Both
of these bills have language in them which will
allow a journalist to receive “confidential”
correspondence from prisoners, to conduct
prearranged interviews with specified prisoners
as well as randomly selected prisoners, and to
bring pens, papers, audio and video recording
devices with them to the interview. Similar
“media access” bills have previously passed the
legislature but were vetoed by governors Wilson
and Davis.
SB 1287 (Kuehl) requires that prior to accepting
a plea of guilty or nolo contendere to any
offense punishable as a crime, the court must
state the following on the record: “If you are a
custodial parent, you are hereby advised that
conviction of the offense for which you have been
charged may have consequences for your parental
rights.” The defendant can then request
additional time to consider the appropriateness
of a plea. After January 1, 2005, if the court
fails to advise the defendant as required, and
the defendant can show that the conviction may
lead to termination of his or her parental
rights, the court shall vacate the judgment and
allow the defendant to withdraw the pleas of
guilty or nolo contendere, and enter a plea of
not guilty. If there is no record that a person
was given the advisement by the court, it will be
presumed that no advisement was given.
AB 1946 (Steinberg) addresses the issue of
compassionate release. This bill provides that a
prisoner who has a terminal illness and is given
a prognosis of less than 12 months to live and
who is not a threat to public safety, is eligible
for early release. In addition, there is
language in the bill that requires the warden or
the warden’s representative to keep the prisoner
and the prisoner’s family informed about the
prisoner’s medical condition and about
compassionate release proceedings. If the
prisoner is granted a compassionate release, she
is to be released within 48 hours of the court’s
order with her state identification, medical
records, medications, and property in her
possession.
AB 1796 (Leno) would permit those convicted of
drug felonies to qualify for food stamps.
Specifically, the bill provides that California
will opt out of the lifetime federal ban from
food stamps for persons who were convicted of a
drug felony. While California declined to
include an opt-out provision in 1997 when it
implemented welfare reform, there are several
states, including Maine, Oregon, New York, and
Ohio that opted out completely. Bills similar to
AB 1796 were introduced in the past and were
passed by the Assembly and Senate only to be
vetoed by Gov. Davis.
These are only a few of the many bills that are
being developed in the Assembly and Senate. In
the past few months there has been an increased
awareness of the corruption present within the
CDC and CYA that may lead to more positive
legislation in the future. Many newspaper
articles have appeared and legislators in
Sacramento have held hearings about the state of
corrections in California. CCWP encourages you
to keep informed about what is happening in the
legislature and to call or write your
representatives and tell them you support the
above bills!
Isolation, intimidation, humiliation, coercion,
blame, emotional abuse sound familiar? These
are some of the common methods used by abusers to
maintain control over the women they batter. Many
of these same techniques are used by prison staff
on a regular basis to maintain control of the
women they “guard”. When a woman is told that if
she behaves herself she can get more hygiene
products or a better job, when she has to endure
a cross-gender pat search, when she suffers a
barrage of degrading words on a daily basis, when
she is denied medical care because an MTA doesn’t
like her or when she is repeatedly put in the SHU
because she is not cooperative and docile ?she is
experiencing the same types of abuse that
survivors of domestic violence report. Studies
show that the majority of women prisoners have
experienced ongoing abuse before coming to
prison, so they are particularly vulnerable to
manipulation by such techniques which have
victimized them before.
Yet despite the prisons’ efforts to keep women
submissive and self-hating, many women transform
their experience of personal and institutional
violence and make the leap from victims into
conscious fighters for their rights.
Incarcerated survivors who come together and
share their experiences and their pain in groups
like Convicted Women Against Abuse at CIW, have
gained personal insight and the strength to fight
unjust sentences and win their long overdue
release. Other women have exposed the ways in
which Parole Board hearings are often nothing
more then sadistic reenactments of the original
offense primarily designed to inflame a woman’s
guilt. And every day when women help each other
write letters, file a 602 or just sit and listen
to another’s problems, they are helping to break
the cycle which breeds personal and institutional
violence.
Over the past couple of decades, the public has
become more familiar with the reality of domestic
violence, but too often people see the government
and law enforcement as the answer to this
pervasive problem. But can a government/state
which is based on violence, which wages continual
war against other nations, and here at home
imposes the violence of poverty, miseducation and
policy brutality on communities of color — can
this government be expected to genuinely oppose
domestic violence?
Women of color have led the way in insisting that
to achieve real change the women’s anti-violence
movement needs to understand the intersections of
domestic, state and community violence, and the
ways in which these different levels feed each
other. To us in CCWP, this means supporting
concrete strategies like the extension of the
habeas bill, SB 1385, which would offer more
survivors of domestic abuse the ability to go
back into court and win release (see page 5). At
the same time, it means we need to develop a long
term, holistic vision for eradicating the roots
of abuse and violence – in the prisons, in the
streets of our communities, and across the world.
* * *
The Surgeon General has reported for at least 10
years that battering is the single largest cause
of injury to U.S. women.
Each day between 5 and 11 women are killed by a
male intimate partner, between 1800 and 4000 per
year.
A 1995 study of women in the California prison
system found that 71% of incarcerated women had
experienced ongoing physical abuse prior to the
age of 18 and that 62% experienced ongoing
physical abuse after 18 years of age.
As of 1994 there were approximately 600 women in
California prisons and approximately 4000 women
in prisons nationwide convicted of killing an
abusive partner.
[Most of these facts were compiled by the
National Clearinghouse in Defense of Battered
Women, Philadelphia, Pa.]
Statistics on verbal, psychological, and
emotional abuse are not collected, or when they
are mentioned, it’s only to point out how few of
those kinds of abuses are ever reported.
Aislamiento, intimidacion, humillación, culpa,
coacción, abuso amocional suena familiar? Estos
son algunos de los metodos mas communes usados
por los abusadores para mantener el control sobre
la mujer matratada. Muchas de las mismas tecnica
son usadas por el personal de las prisiones de
una manera regular para mantener control de las
mujeres que ellos “cuidan”. Cuando una mujer le
dicen de comportarse bien y asi poder obtener mas
productos de hygiene o un mejor trabajo, cuando
una mujer tiene que soportar la vejación de la
revisión física, cuando ellas sufren el
degradante acoso de preguntas, cuando a ellas se
le niega el cuidado medico porque un MTA no les
gusta ellas o cuando ella es puesta repetidamente
en SHU porque ella no es cooperativa ni docil.
Ella esta experimentando el mismo tipo de abuso
que las sobrevivientes de violencia doméstica
reportan. Estudios muestran que la mayoria de
mujeres en prisión, son particularmente
vulnerables a la manipulación con tales tecnicas
que las habian abusado a ellas anteriormente.
A pesar de los esfuerzos de las prisiones para
mantener a las mujeres sumisas y con un
auto-odio, muchas mujeres transforman su
experiencia de violencia personal e institucional
y hace n el cambio de victimas a luchadoras
concientes de sus derechos humanos. Las
sobrevivientes de encarcelamiento que se llegan a
juntar y comparten sus experiencias y su dolor en
grupos como Mujeres Convictas Contra el Abuso en
CIW, han Ganado fortaleza y comprendimiento
personal para luchar por las injustas sentencias
y ganar su plazo vencido para su salida. Otras
mujeres han expuesto las diferentes formas en las
cuales las juntas de las audiencias de libertad
condicional son muchas veces nada más sadicos
dise_ados para inflamar la culpa de las mujeres.
Cada día cuando las mujeres se ayudan mutuamente
para escribir cartas, llenar la forma 602, o
solamente sentarse y escuchar los problemas de
las otras, ellas estan ayudando a romper el ciclo
el cual fomenta la violencia personal e
insititucional.
Durante las dos decadas pasadas, el publico a
llegado a conocer mas la realidad de la violencia
domestica, pero muy frecuentemente la gente ve al
gobierno y al reforzamiento de la ley como la
respuesta a este persisitente problema. Pero
puede el Estado/gobierno, el cual esta basado en
violencia, el cual continuanmente emprende
guerras contra otras naciones, y aqui en casa
impone la violencia de la pobreza, falta de
educación y brutalidad policial sobre comunidades
de color – puede esperarse de este gobierno la
genuina oposición a la violencia doméstica.
Mujeres de color han lidereado la via de
insistencia para lograr verdaderos cambios en el
Movimiento de Mujeres contra la Violencia, se
necesita entender la intersección entre violecia
de Estado, de comunidad y doméstica y los
diferentes niveles una alimenta a la otra. Para
nosotra en CCWP, esto significa apoyo concreto en
estrategias como la extension de la iniciativa
del habeas, SB 1385, el cual ofrecería a las
sobrevivientes de violencia domestica la
posibilidad de regresar a la corte y ganar su
libertad (ver la barra al costado). Al mismo
tiempo, esto significa que necesitamos
desarrollar una vision holistica de largo plazo
para erradicar de raiz el abuso y la violencia en
las prisiones, en las calles de nuestras
comunidades, y en todo el mundo.