Shared brutal treatment can grow solidarity among incarcerated women

Evidence

But if the holding area reminded her of TV prison, the prison wing was different. On TV, inmates are constantly in your face, goading you into fights, organizing into gangs, and carving out turf. But at Bergen, Rasha eventually found out that the women were there because of crimes they’d committed just to get on with their lives, to make money, to survive. Petty theft, smuggling, and dealing were their offenses. It didn’t matter if the women were serving criminal sentences or were detained for immigration violations. Everyone was incarcerated together. And slowly Rasha and her sister and mother learned that the women in jail, both immigrant and criminal prisoners, were kind with each other. The system had turned all of them into caged specimens, and as a way of defeating it, the inmates shared in a surplus of goodwill for one another. Being treated as beasts grew their humanity to one another. It was how everyone survived. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 107

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the prison reading list and to the post-9/11 detention narrative arc; the solidarity-among-incarcerated dynamic rhymes with accounts in other mass-detention literatures. — connects to: Prisoner solidarity changes one’s experience of ordinary social distance — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 465
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive inversion — institutional dehumanization producing increased mutual humanity — is dense enough to sit with.