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Introduction

The mass incarceration of women

The ugly truth has been there for years.

In 2016, Oklahoma became the largest per-capita incarcerator on the planet.4 Even more alarming, as of 2019 the state has led the nation in putting women behind bars for more than 30 years, a disproportionate number of them women of color.5

Prisons are barren, frightening places that house the good, the bad, and the innocent together in one large bowl of prison soup, subjecting them to subhuman conditions while denying them basic constitutional rights.

That’s where we warehouse women who have hit rock bottom, women for whom we have no other place. The slightest infraction, with little or no evidence, can land a woman behind bars for decades, possibly the rest of her life, deprived of the oxygen of freedom.

The burden of the state’s high incarceration rate falls hardest on women of color. Black women are incarcerated at about twice the rate of their representation in the state’s adult population. The truth is that in too many states black women are denied the same justice afforded white women. Even black men don’t suffer the same consequences as their female counterparts.6

Unseen, confinement is where society’s unspent rage takes its toll on human lives. It reduces existence to a room that grows smaller with each degradation. A house of pain and trauma, its concrete walls and steel doors enclose people in jails and prisons, juvenile facilities, solitary, immigration detention, and civil commitment. Incarceration intersects punishment, dignity, and end of life. And fear of its horrors are the bludgeon of interrogations, plea bargaining, and retributive justice.

Dehumanization spreads through imprisonment like a virus, eroding human life by indifference to suffering and the perpetuation of violence. Indeed, confinement is where sustenance becomes punishment, neglect substitutes for care, and the mind is wasted and destroyed.

The correctional system hasn’t adapted to the large increase in incarcerated women.

Women are jailed simply because they can’t make bail for minor offenses or can’t attend a court appearance because they can’t find a babysitter, miss work, or lack transportation. Women wind up in the state’s prison system, where they are stripped of moral autonomy and denied the benefit of every doubt, the simple dignity of being believed, and the capacity for suffering.

Hence, prison is where myths and stereotypes hold sway, fed by social biases and prejudices, demolishing the notion that the punished can also be victims. Punishment, more so than conviction, denotes the character of inmates, often causing their prison guards to see abuse as justified and to discard the idea that inmates could be victims of mistreatment. So, in dark corridors where there is no moral restraint, no accountability, no limit to harm, retribution is doled out, often by overbearing, underpaid guards with cold-hearted ways of giving and getting what they want.

Women can be shackled during childbirth. They can be placed in solitary confinement. They can have their complaints of contractions, bleeding, and labor ignored and deliver babies in jail cells or prison cells. They can be denied their right to access abortion. They can be denied access to quality prenatal care.

The consequences for children born to an incarcerated mother—or of having an incarcerated parent—are profound later in life, especially when we consider the deep racial disparities in incarceration rates. Thus, the cycle of incarceration continues as generations of low-income minorities are whiplashed into the prison system with little means of defending themselves.

Jails are facilities for coercing women into plea bargains, for providing business for bail bondsmen, and for punishing women who haven’t had a trial and are presumed innocent.

Many arrests result in felony charges, which remain on the offender’s record permanently and result in lost job opportunities, low-income wages, and often unaffordable childcare costs for women struggling to regain a foothold in society. Living conditions worsen and basic needs go unmet. Children suffer.

Nowhere is this problem starker than in Oklahoma, where eighty-five per cent of incarcerated women are mothers.7 8

Nearly forty per cent of women in prison have been physically or sexually abused,9 a fact underscored in Oklahoma where the prevalence of rape and physical violence toward women by an intimate partner is greater than any other state.10

In Oklahoma, a state notorious for locking up more women per capita than anywhere else on Earth, Mabel Bassett, the state’s sole medium-maximum security prison, has its own special notoriety.

The 1,200+ inmate facility topped the list for sexual violence in female institutions in the country.11 In 2014, a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found that over 15 percent of the inmates surveyed at Mabel Bassett reported some form of sexual abuse or rape from a prison guard or another inmate, double the national average.12

Women claimed that surveillance cameras in parts of the facility “were either not properly installed in that area or were kept in [an] ongoing state of disrepair,” and that prison guards took advantage of this security lapse.13

In July 2013, eleven women serving time in Oklahoma prisons filed a federal lawsuit claiming they were sexually assaulted by three guards at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. According to federal court documents, the wardens created “a corruptive den for sexual depravity” where the guards were authorized to prey upon and commit acts of excessive force against inmates whenever and wherever they chose without meaningful consequences. Oklahoma state prison officials refused to testify at the hearing.14 15

“We send people to prison and we punish them for what they’ve done,” said Pottawatomie/Lincoln County District Attorney Richard Smothermon, who prosecuted the case against Mabel Bassett. “But that should not include being victimized, raped, abused by other people behind bars or prison guards.” 16

Women are the fastest-growing correctional population in the country. And beyond the headlines, beyond the statistics, beyond the prevalent notion that these women are where they belong, the result isn’t pretty.

You don’t know what it’s like until you creep up to the edge of the swamp and peer into its fetid core.

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