When Chanell Burnette implores fellow incarcerated women with children to “hold on” and never relinquish love for their sons and daughters, she speaks to a wider trend across the U.S. over the last forty years – the growing number of mothers behind bars. Ms. Burnette, a mother of two, is imprisoned at Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Virginia, a state that has experienced uninterrupted and astronomical growth in the number of women prisoners over the last forty years (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/VA_Women_Counts_1978_2015.html).
Chanell, when she was first sent to Fluvanna, wondered “how [she] would survive being away from [her children] for so long? How would they survive out there without their mom? And more importantly, would they ever forgive [her] for leaving them?” Those same questions must be asked by the nearly 150,000 incarcerated mothers across the nation, who make up 58% of the total number of women in U.S. jails and prisons (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/05/05/mothers-day-2021/). Troublesome as such raw statistics may be, behind those impersonal percentages lies a history of the carceral system defining racialized gender roles across American history.
Incarcerated women of color like Ms. Burnette encounter centuries-old mechanisms to shape their identity. Historian Jen Manion relates the ways in which the carceral system categorized individuals in the early American republic, with particularly high stakes for Black women. Far from a phenomenon that took root only in the 1970s and ’80s, Manion argues that “punishment was a vital component of the early American national identity.” Despite Enlightenment ideals that encouraged a move from corporal punishment, prisons in the early U.S. became tools to regulate sexuality and establish eighteenth century racial and gender mores, at once reinforcing and redefining concepts of womanhood that continue to guide racial and gender hierarchies in twenty-first century America. Women like Ms. Burnette are merely the latest victims in a long lineage of such a system, hardly alone in encountering the rigid prison structures that dictate their supposed place in society.
Such systems were perpetuated throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, shaping what historian Sarah Haley labels “gendered racial terror” in the post-Reconstruction South. Haley details effects of the convict-leasing system on Black women in postbellum Dixie, which reproduced abhorrent means of labor exploitation that had supposedly been abolished with slavery, but, through a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, remained in place for those convicted of a crime. Those crimes for Black women included offenses like infanticide and murder in self-defense. The unremunerated labor of those women helped to build cities like Atlanta and grow industry in the so-called “New South.”
Those facts are eerily echoed by Ms. Burnette, who writes more than a hundred years after Haley’s narrative concludes. Ms. Burnette describes her “negative feelings” towards prison labor “because there have been times when I have felt as used as my ancestors who were slaves.” Indeed, prisoners in Virginia make as low as 27 cents per hour (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/), so it is no wonder that Ms. Burnette experienced such stark misgivings.
Though perhaps it may be tempting to assume that women in the 2020s are no longer used as quasi-slave labor for crimes like murder in self-defense, such an assumption would be incorrect. Ms. Burnette writes passionately about the many victims of domestic violence in Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, some of whom are locked up because they stood up to their abuser. One such woman was sentenced to five years, though the judge who decided her case regretfully caveated “that if there was a self-defense law in the state of Virginia, she would not have received any time to serve at all.” With the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs ruling, there is an additional danger that women today might also be exposed to criminal charges of infanticide like those nineteenth century subjects studied by Haley. In other words, “gendered racial terror” persists.
While women like Ms. Burnette inherit the legacies of gendered and racialized networks of incarceration inherent to the nation’s development, the explosion in prison populations beginning in the 1970s and continuing today can be tied directly to the ways in which conservative policymakers shifted national support from social welfare to criminalization. Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann relates mass incarceration to the decimation of the welfare state in the 1970s, when policymakers began “getting tough” on poor people of color. Rather than continue systems of governmental support in place since the New Deal, a contracting U.S. economy and the explosion of culture wars led to widespread retrenchment and revanchism, replacing social programs with networks of surveillance, punishment, and prisons.
Beyond those expanding networks of social control, the carceral turn of that era described by Kohler-Hausmann also employed language that described Black women as enmeshed in a “culture of poverty,” a term first used by sociologist Oscar Lewis. Such a label, according to Kohler-Hausmann, shifted the blame for poverty from society’s failures to individuals themselves, in the process pathologizing Black and Latinx individuals as inherently criminal and undeserving of aid. The results of such conceptions had real, and devastating, consequences. In Virginia, Black Americans now constitute 58% of individuals in prison despite making up only 19% of the state’s total population (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/disparities2010/VA_racial_disparities_2010.html). Such disparities explain Ms. Burnette’s consternation upon learning of a lenient sentence for a white man convicted of a similar crime as her own, for which she was condemned to thirty years under lock and key.
Making matters worse for incarcerated mothers is the fact that correctional facilities are often located in rural localities far from prisoners’ families and neighborhoods. Such a fact is illuminated by the field of study known as “carceral geography,” pioneered by scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore to describe the relationships between space, institutions, and political economy that help to shape the U.S. prison system. Virginia, Ms. Burnette’s home state, is a case in point. Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, located in rural Troy, is over an hour from Richmond, the nearest large city, and more than three hours from Virginia Beach, the state’s most populous municipality. Such physical distance from family accentuates the emotional and spiritual distance felt by mothers like Ms. Burnette who have been separated from their children.
Covid-19 has further disrupted the lives of imprisoned women. Ms. Burnette writes that the pandemic has “been especially hard on those of us who are incarcerated because we have basically been forced to stay stuck in our housing units with little or no recreation and no access to the exercise equipment,” heightening her already palpable feelings of fear, isolation, and deprivation, while tangibly impacting her health. Furthermore, Ms. Burnette ruminates over soaring drug usage in Fluvanna because of those policies, describing that issue as “problematic prior to the pandemic but ha[ving] increased greatly because we have nothing to do.” Studies bear witness to a mishandling of the pandemic in Virginia correctional institutions, with the Prison Policy Initiative assigning the state a D- for its response to Covid-19, and estimating “that prisons and jails led to an additional 12,040” cases of the virus in the summer of 2020 alone (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/VA.html).
There have been some limited resources extended to incarcerated mothers to help deepen bonds with their children, including Mothers Inside Loving Kids, or M.I.L.K., of which Ms. Burnette was a part and writes about glowingly. However, those beneficial but sorely insubstantial programs have been widely curtailed amidst the pandemic. As such, it becomes even more crucial to consider the ways mass incarceration impacts women and their children, and to conceive of inventive policy that might combat those effects. To do so, those who advocate an end to the carceral network as it is presently constituted must recognize the ways in which such a network is woven into the nation’s very fabric, with dire implications for women of color. As important, society must collectively recognize the humanity of people like Chanell Burnette and fight to create a system of justice that lives up to its name.
Hypertext links to all articles cited
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/VA_Women_Counts_1978_2015.html
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/disparities2010/VA_racial_disparities_2010.html
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/disparities2010/VA_racial_disparities_2010.html
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