Sexual abuse operates as an institutionalized, unsanctioned dimension of women’s punishment.

Evidence

As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases, and, paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison regimes recedes, sexual abuse—which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punishment of women—has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger socie ty is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the privatized punishment of women to domestic violence and to Davis’s earlier distinction between public and private spheres of punishment. — connects to: Sexual abuse of prisoners is reframed as prisoner deviance; Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 170; Domestic violence against women is continuous with state corporal punishment (+1 more)

Related

• Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison (similarity 0.89)
• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible (similarity 0.85)
• Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons (similarity 0.85)
• Male prisons functioning as the punishment norm drives women’s conditions toward greater repression. (similarity 0.83)
• Imprisoning women who resist abusers cannot solve intimate violence (similarity 0.82)
• Women who are punished are seen as more aberrant and threatening than men (similarity 0.82)
• Men’s prisons are gendered institutions, not the norm against which women’s prisons are judged (similarity 0.82)
• Formalistic equality with male prisons makes women’s prisons more repressive, not less. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Sexual abuse of prisoners is reframed as prisoner deviance #expands (0.85)
• Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison #expands (0.70)
• Domestic violence against women is continuous with state corporal punishment #corroborates (0.60)
• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible #complicates (0.50) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 170