Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 23:304312

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Copyright

ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online
DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2011.596052

Anti-Black Racism, Gender,

and Abolitionist Politics
MECHTHILD NAGEL

The world over, when it comes to sentencing and incarceration, the focus
inevitably is on boys and men. We see in the United States, however, that
younger defendants, including girls, are targeted by the criminal justice system. Thanks to the enduring War on Drugsas of June 2011, in its fortieth
yearwomen, in particular black women, are the fastest growing population
in U.S. prisons. Less well known is that girls rates of imprisonment are also
outpacing boys. Here, again, we have to note how race intersects with gender.
Black girls receive the brunt of the policing attention.

uch of the criminalization aspects of youth starts with school suspensions, especially given the Zero Tolerance policies that have accelerated veritable repression across the U.S. school systems. According to a recent
study, black girls are suspended at four times the rate of white girls in middle schools. The racial threat hypothesis has also found renewed attention
vis-`a-vis school sanctions. A nationwide study of 294 public schools notes an
increase of punitive measures such as suspension and expulsion where there is
a proportionate increase of black students in relation to white students. Black
students tend not to receive more benign sanctions such as parentteacher
conferences or guidance counseling. This is echoed in the recent study, Education Interrupted, by the New York Civil Liberties Union:
Students with disabilities are four times more likely to be suspended
than students without disabilities.
Black students, who comprise 33 percent of the student body, served
53 percent of suspensions over the past 10 years. Black students with
disabilities represent more than 50 percent of suspended students with
disabilities.
Black students also served longer suspensions on average and were
more likely to be suspended for subjective misconduct, like profanity
and insubordination.
Black girls who talk back are singled out for repressive punishment, and
much evidence has surfaced that school suspensions are correlated to a higher

304

ANTI-BLACK RACISM, GENDER, AND ABOLITIONIST POLITICS

305

likelihood of school dropouts and spells of imprisonment. Suspension can

apparently never start too early. Kindergarten, too, has been under the zero
tolerance watch, as Baltimores Department of Education reports: 75 preK students in Maryland received an out-of-school suspension or were expelled during the school year. The punished incidents include: disrespect
(3), classroom disruption (12), refusal to obey school policies (7), and inciting/participating in disturbance (4). And lest six-year-olds forget who
they are (namely, prisoners-in-training), their Paterson, New Jersey teacher
will vent about them and identify herself as their warden on her Facebook
page.
Lesbians also find themselves at peril of facing sanctions in schools,
even at a higher rate than gays. Their consensual sexual practices more often
trigger punishments than equivalent opposite-sex behaviors. Furthermore,
[a]necdotal reports have suggested that nonheterosexual girls may be particularly
overrepresented in the juvenile-justice system. Scholars have suggested that the
overrepresentation of nonheterosexual girls may relate to the historical role of the
juvenile-justice system in policing girls sexuality, as well as a heightened juvenilejustice system and media opprobrium directed at girls with aggressive or masculine gender presentations.

Historically and ideologically speaking, girls and women have been sanctioned for status crimes (prostitution, running away) and within prisons for
talking back when such crimes have been of little significance for free
and incarcerated boys and men. The sexist ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood, invented around the 1820s, continues to hold persons perceived to be
girls or women to standards of passivity, domesticity, and Christian virtues
that are enforced in public patriarchal institutional settings (schools, courts,
prisons, workplaces, and so on).

n 1995, the noted criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind appealed to the feminist movement and feminist scholars [to] make the decarceration of women
a part of their political agendas. She laments the fact that women as victims
have gotten much more attention by feminist actors than incarcerated women,
such as women who were deemed deviant. What seems to me at stake here
is the importance of disrupting criminologist classifications of victims and
perpetrators in light of implicit bias, which trigger sanctions targeted at
criminalized behavior or classes of people. At the same time, I worry about
feminist advocacy that is purely victim-based, lobbying for enforcement
mechanisms to change attitudes about domestic violence and tying criminal
justice money to safe houses. These may inadvertently reinforce not only discourses of pathology but deliver those who need the most social/community
healing kinds of interventions to carceral regimes.

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MECHTHILD NAGEL

The Florida-based advocacy group NCCD Center for Girls and Young
Women presents the following statistics that focuses on girls arrest and incarceration rates: First, girls are the fastest growing segment of the juvenile
justice population.
The national picture shows that crime rates are decreasing for both girls and boys, but
the rate of decrease has been slower for girls. Nationally, since 1997, incarceration
for boys has decreased 18% compared to only 8% for girls. However, in 14 states
the female juvenile rate of incarceration has increased more than 30% since 1997.
Nationally, girls make up 15% of the incarcerated youth population and as much as
34% in some states. States and local jurisdictions are in need of gender-responsive
interventions to reverse the escalating trends of girls entering into the system.

Second, the girls are young:

In 2007, there were 2.5 million arrests for females of all ages, 25% of which were
for girls under the age of 18. Of all youth incarcerations, 42% of girls are age 15
and younger, compared to 31% of boys age 15 and younger. Gender-responsive and
age-appropriate services are urgently needed.

The question remains whether the prison should adopt women/girl/transfriendly policies to ensure that the varied needs are accounted for.
What does gender-responsive service mean to an abolitionist? Its a contested and complex issue. It can be a platform for meaningful improvements
in womens prison and important services given to transgender prisoners. Or,
on the other hand, it can be a way of increasing penalties. Whereas a pregnant
mother might be released early from prison, a prison with excellent pre- and
postnatal arrangements might sway the parole board to retain the prisoner
to give birth in prison. Mara Dodge makes a historical point by noting that
nineteenth-century judges in Illinois were reluctant to send pregnant women to
prison, not due to humanitarian concerns, but due to costbenefit accounting:
pregnant women and the subsequent prison care (cr`eche) of babies would not
be cost-effective in a prison environment that was supposed to extract as much
menial labor from the convicts as it could. In fact, theres hardly a bleaker
picture given on gender disparities than from a chaplain in 1930: To be a
male convict in this prison would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict,
for a protracted period, would be worse than death. It is reiterated in Mary
Barrs personal account of surviving New Yorks prison, Rikers Island, the
largest jail in the world, housing over 20,000 remand and convicted women,
men, and children.

learly at stake is that the modern penitentiary was designed to fit the needs
(if any) of adult men. And some nineteenth-century women reformers
such as Elizabeth Fry may not have understood that. Fry was beholden to

ANTI-BLACK RACISM, GENDER, AND ABOLITIONIST POLITICS

307

the Cult of True Womanhood ideal and thus blamed the victim rather than
the male-oriented standard of housing prisoners. She heaped much blame
on the loud, unkempt women prisoners rather than on the material conditions
they survived in. Fry, however, would have been aghast at gender-neutral
accommodations that permit men to work in shower areas in womens prisons
because of equal opportunity provisions (contrary to UN conventions on the
treatment of prisoners). By the 1970s, gender-specific prisons, inspired by the
disciplinary regime of reformatories, vanished and co-educational prisons
appeared. So it is ironic that gender-specificity is demanded again. My worry
is that if one operates under a reform paradigm, one is always inclined to
make excuses for sending women (and men) to prison, and for long stretches
of time, because it will be a tolerable experience.
As Julia Sudbury argued, creating gender and trans-sensitive spaces in
prisons goes against the spirit of maroon abolitionism. She summarized
her focus group interviews with formerly incarcerated trans people who have
become activists for abolitionism in the following way:
This interaction between racism and trans-phobia in the prison is the basis for an antiracist, gender-queer, anti-prison agenda promoted by black transgender and gender
non-conforming activists. In contrast to calls to develop a normative transgender
prison order, or trans-sensitive prisons, the participants point to the systemic nature
of gender violence as part of the structures of imprisonment, and reject the possibility
of gender liberation under conditions of captivity. In so doing, they seek to transform
anti-prison politics by calling for the abolition of gender policing as part of a broader
abolitionist agenda.

Clearly, resistance to enforced gender behaviors, instead of advocating

for trans-sensitive prisons, is necessary. Following recommendations by Andrea Smith and others, gender-responsiveness in the abolitionist context can
mean to care for girls in non-punitive, open healing sites such as a Healing
Lodge for Native Americans and First Nations girls, where they can get holistic
treatment for trauma, for state-generated violence, and educational opportunities that are meaningful rather than coercive and test and grade-oriented.
Criminologist Medea Chesney-Lind calls for expert-driven options in prisons
that are gender-specific, trauma-informed treatments and would take into account the girls personal history of abuse and drug dependency. Many girls and
young women, however, have been intensely studied by (white) expert personnel to very little avail. Again, working with a community justice paradigm
that empowers the non-experts such as children as peer trainers guided by an
abolitionist framework may have more lasting results to bring about healing. I
avoid language of restorative justice or rehabilitation because those terms
suggest that there has been bucolic nonviolence in our cities and towns and
rural areas some mythic time ago, when, in fact, this country was founded on
slavery and genocidal practices that it has never been held accountable for.

308

MECHTHILD NAGEL

How do we dismantle white supremacy? In the prison of slavery,

as Angela Y. Davis has put it, black people experience natal alienation and
social death, and, according to Noelle Chaddock Paley, they increasingly face
pre-natal alienation due to the horrendous conditions of jails and prisons,
inimical to the well-being of pregnant women. The specter of the Thirteenth
Amendment still looms large in its twisted logic of setting enslaved people
free, at the same time deeming them people with abstract rights but devoid of
those once entering the prison milieu. What gives? To date, the United States
is the only country in the world that sanctions indentured servitude and slavery
through the exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment. Abolitionists of
prisons have capitalized on this fact, and we ought to be vigilant until the last
vestiges of slavery or the new Jim Crow have been dismantled. If we simply
focus on reforms, as the NAACPs 2011 report on prisons and the educationto-prison pipeline does, it will, at best, ameliorate dangerous conditions in
jails, prisons, detention centers, camps, secret sites run in collusion with the
CIA worldwide, and so on, but do little to contribute to decarceration. To the
NAACPs credit, they may have taken their cue from Michelle Alexanders
clarion call that black civil rights organizations begin to develop a focused
vision to roll back the attack on the black community.
Women of color have been particularly active in coalitional work with
the trans community in critiquing the rapidly increasing rate of criminalization
of girls and women of color, as well as trans people of color in the United
States. Organizations such as Justice Now, the National Network for Women
in Prisons, and Incite! Women of Color against Violence have been in the
forefront of advocacy. The group Incite! joined the anti-prison group Critical
Resistance in a manifesto that underscores the penal abolition emphasis on
working to end state violence and interpersonal conflicts. They critique liberal
feminist collusions with the state and show the state actors contempt for the
rule of law vis-`a-vis people of color and trans people and/or two-spirit people.
What tends not to get theorized by these groups is a focus on disability
activism, as youth who have disabilities also get stigmatized and targeted for
social control, and even labeled as terrorist.
From the following, we can see the perils of policy changes in the state
of New York, which has the nations oldest continuously run prison, located
at Auburn. The Coalition for Women Prisoners, the Correctional Association
of NY, successfully lobbied with former prisoners and other organizations to
repeal the excesses of AFSA 1997 (Adoption and Safe Families Act). The new
act, The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) Expanded Discretion Bill,
became law in June 2010. It gives parents in prison more chances to reunite
with their children before termination procedures are started. The AFSA law
is a haunting reminder of the endurance of slavery and its devastating effect
on families, especially black and Latino families who are facing the brunt of
the incarceration frenzy. The 2010 ASFA reform bill suggests that discretion

ANTI-BLACK RACISM, GENDER, AND ABOLITIONIST POLITICS

309

can be used in parental termination cases. In Cortland, New York, however,

the Public Defenders Office plans to sue state actors who block parents
rights by coercing foster families to adopt while providing cash incentives,
which gives the Department of Social Services much needed cash for each
placement. What remains of discretion in an era of incentives that trump
parentchild unification? It is important to be suspicious of so-called reform
laws and understand their unintended consequences, which might derail the
decarceration process.

t is urgently needed, if we want to start believing in the children and

assisting them in fulfilling their dreams of a better future. If not, we could
be stuck in a vicious cycle, where the upstate New York (white) child wishes
to be a prison guard of black and brown people, and the black male sixyear-old child who told a colleague that he defers his wish by first going
to prison to put that behind me, so that I then can go to college when I
am grown up. This child has already internalized the logic of targeted mass
incarceration, namely that prison is both a certain destination and home for
so many of his black male relatives, and he might as well join them in a
rite of passage to manhood. Welcome home, brother is indeed a common
greeting for the nervous, first arrival who walks through the prison gate in
upstate, rural prisons, and he will not be surprised to see so many familiar
faces from his neighborhood in downstate New York. Nevertheless, the person
marked as felon is stigmatized by his community, as Michelle Alexander
movingly describes. I would add that black women have to endure an even
greater burden of shame, especially when dealing with loss of parental rights,
since they are the cultural bearers and pillar of the community.
What is to be done? William Julius Wilson points out that given the
devolution of factory jobs and the shift toward suburban service jobs, black
women now have a greater chance of attaining employment than black men,
since low-skilled black males are perceived as dangerous or threatening
and thus not suitable to be in front-line customer service roles. Wilsons
agenda includes job creation, urban renewal benefiting black people, better
public education, and strengthening unions. This is all well and good, but
it is a myopic proposal, especially in light of his own research that black
people, and black men in particular, are considered a threat in and outside
urban white supremacist America. I would add they are not only considered
a threat by the retail establishment, but by the militarized police patrolling
their neighborhoods and keeping them from entering white neighborhoods.
When young men are accustomed to assume the position when they walk
their streets and are frisked by police, and this continues to be the case
while a bi-racial man resides in the White House, there is little hope that
things shift dramatically even if there is a concerted economic and educational
revitalization plan in place in multiracial or black cities.

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MECHTHILD NAGEL

It is time for a reconsideration of an amnesty proposal first raised by

the Black Panther Partys Ten Point Program before the recent advent of
mass incarceration of black people. The program comprehensively tackled
the police, military, jobs, education, land, and housing. Today, reforms tend
to utilize a piecemeal approach. Amnesty and reparations are fighting
words of the past, which demand legal redress. The more genteel phrases
used by lawmakers have been couching these demands with terms such as
racial threat hypothesis, racial impact study, or as cross-race identification to highlight the school-to-prison pipeline or life-on the-installment plan
(considering the high rate of recidivism). Politicians have started to look at the
racial discrepancy in sentencing and in witnesses often faulty identification
of suspects in a line-up. North Carolinas Racial Justice Act of 1998, for
example, prohibits exclusion of death-qualified African-American jurors. As
of 2010, the updated law also requires that courts reverse death penalties for
litigants who enter a life sentence for any death row defendant who proves
that race was a factor in the imposition of the death sentence. They would be
resentenced for life imprisonment.
What underlies all these reform-minded legal discussions is a concern
about fundamental anti-black sentiment. Will it be enough to undo the new
Jim Crowa racial caste system? Mumia Abu-Jamal notes, in his book on
jailhouse lawyering, that these street lawyers who acquire unconventional
legal skills while imprisoned are at risk of more harassment, brutalization, and
facing contempt from the prison staff than black prisoners, political prisoners,
and others. Putting his remarks in context of Jim Crow or, as I prefer, the
enduring legacy of slavery sanctioned by the Thirteenth Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution, it makes sense that jailhouse lawyers pose a great threat to
the establishment. They are the new conductors on the underground railroad
who champion the freedom cry with equal amounts of courage and with
greater idealism given the retaliation and the unlikely returns of freedom from
oppression faced on the outside. There is no up North to go to these days;
rather, many have wryly noted the racist up South phenomenon, North of
the Mason-Dixon line. As Assata Shakur notes in her autobiography, I dont
have the faintest idea of how it feels to be free. It is heartening to see a
burgeoning of resistances transpiring from the penitentiaries of the South, as
exemplified in the recent Georgia prisoners strike, to those of the West coast,
which are preparing a hunger strike about solitary confinement conditions in
July 2011, to New York state, where prisoners have joined over a hundred
activist groups with the New York State Prisoners Justice Network and are
guiding the networks main rallying points for change. Their key demand:
parole reform.
While legal concepts are couched in neutral terms of race, putatively
addressing concerns of all racial identity groups, when it comes to police
line-ups, witness errors, death penalty sentencing, and impetuous teachers,

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311

in the United States the human drama has been played out on the backs of
black, marooned bodies. It is time to claim a transformative justice system for
black life to be considered human life the world over, especially in the United
States.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2009. Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A.
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
ACLU. 2010. Can the Racial Justice Act Change the Practice of Picking All-White
Juries in North Carolina? Available at <http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/
can-racial-justice-act-change-practice-picking-all-white-juries-north-caroli> (last accessed February 20, 2011).
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color
Blindness. New York: The New Press.
Barr, Mary. 2007. Some Facts and Anecdotes of Women Arrested and Imprisoned in the
United States, in Mechthild Nagel and Seth Asumah (eds.), Prisons and Punishment:
Reconsidering Global Penality. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Correctional Association of New York. 2010. The Adoption and Safe Families Act
(ASFA) Expanded Discretion Bill Becomes Law. June 16. Available at <http://www.
correctionalassociation.org/news/ASFA becomes law June10.htm> (last accessed February 9, 2011).
Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1995. Rethinking Womens Imprisonment: A Critical Examination of
Trends in Female Incarceration, in Barbara Raffel Price & Natalie J. Sokoloff (eds.), The
Criminal Justice System and Women: Offenders, Victims, and Workers. New York: McGrawHill.
Dodge, Mara L. 2002. Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind: A Study of Women, Crime,
and Prisons, 18352000. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Elijah, J. Soffiyah. 2007. Political Prisoners in the U.S.: New Perspectives in the New Millennium, in Mechthild Nagel & Seth Asumah (eds.), Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering
Global Penality. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Himmelstein, Kathryn E.W. and Hannah Bruckner. 2010. Criminal-Justice and School Sanctions Against Nonheterosexual Youth: A National Longitudinal Study. Pediatrics December: 4957.
James, Joy (ed.). 1998. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.
Johnson, Paula C. 2004. Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York:
NYU Press.
Kenny, Megan. 2011. Suspended from Kindergarten? Whats Wrong with This Picture?
February 14. Available at <http://www.suspensionstories.com/2011/02/14/suspendedfrom-kindergarten/> (last accessed April 23, 2011).
Losen, Daniel J. and Russell J. Skiba. 2010. Suspended Education: Urban Middle
Schools in Crisis. The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civilos. September 13.
Available at <http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/school-discipline/
suspended-education-urban-middle-schools-in-crisis> (last accessed May 29, 2011).
NAACP. 2011. Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate. Available at <http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=8eRlSOjgNTpLu7V%
2FsMSiIfzGxhkH%2BX0o> (last accessed April 15, 2011).
Nagel, Mechthild. 2008. Prisons as Diasporic Sites: Liberatory Voices from the Diaspora of
Confinement. Journal of Social Advocacy and Systems Change 1: 131.

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NCCD Center for Girls and Young Women. 2010. A Call for Gender Equity for Girls in the
Juvenile Justice System. Available at <http://www.justiceforallgirls.org/call.html> (last
accessed May 29, 2011).
New York Civil Liberties Union. 2011. Education Interrupted: The Growing Use of Suspensions in New York Citys Public Schools. Available at <www.nyclu.org/files/publications/
Suspension Report FINAL noSpreads.pdf> (last accessed March 4, 2011).
Nocella, Anthony. 2011. A Disability Perspective on the Terrorization of Dissent. Unpublished Dissertation. Syracuse University.
Paley, Noelle Chaddock. 2010. Comments on Girls in Prison panel at Reimagining Girlhood
conference, SUNY Cortland. October 24.
Payne, Allison A. and Kelly Welch. 2010. Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline.
Social Problems 75(1): 2548.
Peterson, Latoya. 2011. On Teachers Calling Kid Future Criminals and the School-to-Prison
Pipeline. April 8. Last accessed 4/23/11: Available at <http://www.suspensionstories.com/
2011/04/08/reposting-on-teachers-calling-kid-future-criminals-and-the-school-to-prisonpipeline/> (last accessed April 23, 2011).
Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books.
Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Boston, MA:
South End Press.
Sudbury, Julia. 2010. Marooned Abolitionists. Black Gender Activists in the Anti-Prison
Movement in the U.S. and Canada. Meridians 9(1): 129.
Wilson, William Julius. 2011. Being Poor, Black, and American: The Impact of Political,
Economic, and Cultural Forces. American Educator 35(1): 1023, 46.

Mechthild Nagel is a Professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, College at Cortland,
Director of the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies (CGIS), and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the
Institute for African Development at Cornell University. She also teaches about peace and social justice
in her annual spring course, Prisons and Punishment, and she has taught in area mens state prisons for
a number of years. Dr. Nagel is editor-in-chief of the online journal Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational
Womens and Gender Studies (wagadu.org). E-mail: Mecke.Nagel@cortland.edu

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