An Interview with Victoria Law
By Ellen Papazian
The Feminist Review
Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.
Here Law shares her thoughts on making her book an activist tool, the
culture’s blind spot about the prison industry, social justice
movements’ responsibility to incarcerated women’s issues, and how
motherhood radically altered her own work and informed her upcoming
anthology, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind.
Who did you write Resistance Behind Bars for?
I
originally wrote the book, or the college paper that was the start of
it, with no audience in mind. I had spent a semester researching
post-Attica prisoner organizing and resistance in college. At the end of
the semester, I looked back at what I had and realized that every
instance, except for one, was about male prisoners. So the first paper
was written to explore what women were doing and why their actions
weren’t as well-documented, or remembered, as their male counterparts.
When
I first had the idea to turn my paper into a book, I had a few
audiences in mind: people who were already interested in prison and
prisoner issues; those interested in women’s issues; people who aren’t
particularly interested in prisons or prisoners’ issues, but are
interested in tales of resistance, and incarcerated women themselves. In
corresponding with over a dozen women incarcerated around the country, I
also wanted to make sure that the book was accessible to them. None of
the women I’d reached out to had any idea of organizing being done in
other prisons or of the previous organizing, resistance, and riots that
had happened in women’s prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. I kept in mind
that I wanted my book—and the information in it—to be accessible to
someone with an eighth-grade education. The book doesn’t work as a
potential organizing tool if those most affected by these issues aren’t
able to read and comprehend it.
What’s the response to Resistance Behind Bars been like—and how has it affected you personally and your work as an activist?
I think that because Resistance Behind Bars
is a book specifically about incarcerated women—and even more
specifically about their acts of resistance—it’s attracted attention and
interest from people who normally think of prison issues as male issues
and are excited and intrigued by incarcerated women’s resistance. Such
an enthusiastic response means that I’ve been kept busy planning and
doing events, not only the typical bookstore readings, but also
workshops at various social justice conferences and at schools.
My
daughter, who was a newborn when I first started researching
incarcerated women’s resistance, is now eight years old and knows a lot
about prisons, prison and gender, and abolition, probably more than most
other eight-year-olds (except, perhaps, for any children whose parents
are Critical Resistance
organizers). She’s asked me very pointed questions about both realities
inside prisons and ideas about abolition, which means that I had to
clearly articulate my arguments, thoughts, and ideas.
What was the writing process like for this book?
When
I first started researching, I did two things: I set aside all
preconceived notions of what prisoner organizing might look like and
started reading specifically about women in prison. I found a lot of
material covered issues like motherhood and pregnancy. Issues of
parenting—and, of course, pregnancy—do not come up in documentation
about male prisoner organizing, and so people who are looking at
instances of prisoner resistance aren’t going to necessarily look at how
they organize around and challenge the realities of parents in prison.
Battering and past abuse is another issue that comes up in a lot of the
studies around incarcerated women, but again, that’s not an issue that
we see impacting men going to prison and thus isn’t looked at as a
“prison issue.”
I also scoured the news—and alternative media,
mostly prison-related zines—for mentions of actions by incarcerated
women. Once I found that someone had done something—filed a lawsuit,
complained to the press, launched a hunger strike, etc.—I used the
websites of either that state prison system or the Federal Bureau of
Prisons to find the woman’s contact information and sent her a letter
explaining who I was and what I was researching. I asked if she would be
willing to share her stories and experiences with me.
Not
wanting to take without giving back, I offered what I could: I offered
to look up lawsuits for them and send them copies of court decisions; I
offered to look up other resources for them; I offered to send them
books via the Books Through Bars
program that I helped start here in NYC; I sent stamps so that they
could not only respond to me, but also write letters to other groups or
people; in some cases, I offered to call their children if they were
unable to get through themselves.
What were some of the most surprising realities about women in prison that you discovered in researching your book?
I
remember receiving a letter from the Clear Creek County Jail in
Colorado about the re-institution of the chain gang for the women held
there. That wasn’t the huge surprise; the surprise was that the woman
who wrote me was actually happy to be on the chain gang! She had
recently given her newborn son up for adoption, and so I can’t help but
wonder if keeping occupied, even if it’s on a chain gang, helps her
process losing him. She’s not the only one: women at Clear Creek want to
be on the chain gang. It’s tiring, backbreaking work in the hot sun,
but it’s also the first chance they’ve been given to get out of their
cells, be outdoors, and accrue “good time,” or time off their sentences.
Keep in mind that the jail’s male inmates have had the chain gang for a
while. They also have other chances to earn “good time.”
What
are the most common misconceptions and assumptions circulating right
now about women in prison that keep people from understanding what’s
really going on inside prisons for women?
In May, I was
invited to speak at a New York City high school about women and prison.
Having done so many of these talks to people who are interested in
prison issues and have some framework about the issue, I forget what the
majority of people think or don’t know. I came in ready to talk about
historical contexts and what is going on now and started with the
question: “What do you think about when you think about prison? Who goes
to prison and why?”
One girl raised her hand and said, “Criminals. People who do bad things.”
“Drug dealers.”
“Men.”
I
realized that most of the students had no framework about incarceration
other than what they had been fed by the mass media, so I had to
mentally throw out my outline and start from scratch. I talked about
poverty and racial profiling, the history of the prison as a means of
social control, how Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon equated the
civil rights movements and liberation movements with street crime and
started their war(s) on crime to lock up poor people of color before
they could mobilize to demand their rights. None of the students had
ever heard of the Rockefeller Drug Laws or mandatory minimum sentencing.
I hadn’t either when I was their age, and I grew up in New York City
too!
I also talked about some of the conditions inside—the lack
of health care treatment, the fact that staff members often encouraged
prisoner-on-prisoner violence, because it’s easier for them if the
prisoners aren’t uniting and fighting for basic human rights, lack of
educational programs inside the prison. At the end of the hour, when we
talked about what they, as high school students, could do about this
issue, one boy raised his hand and suggested that we should lobby for
medical treatment for people inside prison. “If I broke my leg in
prison—or anywhere—I would want people to help me get it treated.”
Later
one of the coordinators of that high school’s community day told me,
“Students in your session were really struck by the experiences you
shared with them, and there has been a lot of conversation in among
students about issues concerning prison.” Some of the students were
talking about forming a student club to do work around some of these
issues, like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
You
write in the book that calls for reform have failed to adequately
address the factors leading to women’s incarceration. How so?
Prisons
fail to address the societal conditions that lead to incarceration,
such as poverty and the increasing feminization of poverty, misogyny,
violence, racism, and the issues that accompany women to prison. How
does locking someone in a cage address any of these factors?
You
have to remember that people have gone to prison face numerous obstacles
in successfully reintegrating into the community when they are released
from prison. Oftentimes, they are not only released with the same lack
of resources and opportunities than they had before being arrested and
incarcerated, but now have a criminal record which prevents them from
getting certain jobs, qualifying for certain housing, or social safety
nets. The 1996 welfare “reform” banned people with drug felonies for
life. Similar legislation banned them from receiving governmental
financial aid for college, etc.
We also need to keep in mind that
prison issues affect all sorts of issues on the outside, shifting money
and resources away from other public entities, such as education,
housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports that
are needed.
Did motherhood change your own activism?
Before
motherhood, I was super-involved in all sorts of political projects and
organizing. New motherhood definitely made me sit still! Once my
daughter was born, I realized that I had to pick a few issues and focus
on them. I also couldn’t risk arrest or bringing my daughter to
something where the police might attack the crowd.
I started
researching resistance and organizing among incarcerated women shortly
after my daughter was born. Being stuck inside during the winter with a
newborn gave me a lot of time to read, respond to letters, contemplate
ideas and issues—this, by the way, is something I did a lot while
nursing—and work on draft after draft of this paper. I don’t know if I
would have had this same opportunity if I had tried to do this as a
childfree person rushing off from one political [event] to another at
various hours of the day and night, or if my daughter had been older,
more mobile, and needing more direct attention.
I want to stress
that what’s made my continued involvement and even writing my book
possible is the huge amount of support I get from my friends and the
people with whom I organize. I realize that not all mothers get this
type of support, although they should, and that I’m extremely fortunate
to have such a wonderful support system.
What are you working on now?
My next book, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind,
will be an anthology co-edited with China Martens, a mother, writer,
and publisher of the longest running subculture parenting zine, The Future Generation.
Originally, China and I wanted to share our experiences as radical
mothers and advocate for community support of all families. We were
meeting parents and their allies and hearing their stories and
experiences. A few years ago, we realized that we wanted to extend the
reach of our message of community support and decided to compile a
handbook specifically geared towards allies, or potential allies, of
radical parents.
With Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind,
we’re addressing the need to support—and build support systems
for—families in our own social justice movements. In so many of our
so-called radical movements, we’re not providing support for people who
decide to have children so that they can continue participating in
political work. There’s an individualistic attitude that says, “Well, I
didn’t choose to have kids. You did, so you deal with them.”
Even
when there’s not an overt resistance to having children in our
movements, we need to look at how ways that we organize and socialize
exclude parents and caretakers. We lose valuable organizers—and
organizing experience—when we don’t take these factors into
consideration.
Unlike Resistance Behind Bars,
this book will be an anthology of both caregivers and their allies of
ways that their movements support children and their caretakers in your
collectives, organizations, or communities. We are especially seeking
experiences that take into account factors such as race, class, gender,
single parenthood, and/or mental health issues, since these issues often
aren’t talked about when we talk about building communities and support
systems here on the outside. We’re still reaching out, meeting people
and collecting submissions, so if anyone out there has stories and
experiences to share, they should definitely get in touch!