Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison

Evidence

There has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviors as significantly more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 174 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Even though this may have been a publicity stunt designed to bolster the fame of Sheriff Arpaio, the fact that this women’s chain gang emerged against the backdrop of a generalized increase in the repression inflicted on women prisoners is certainly cause for alarm. Women’s prisons throughout the country increasingly include sections known as security housing units. The regimes of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation in the security housing unit (SHU) in these sections within women’s prisons are smaller versions of the rapidly proliferating super-maximum security prisons. Since the population of women in prison now consists of a majority of women of color, the historical resonances of slavery, colonization, and genocide should not be missed in these images of women in chains and shackles. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 207 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Domestic violence against women is continuous with state corporal punishment; Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 175; Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 170 (+4 more)

Related

• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible (similarity 0.90)
• Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons (similarity 0.89)
• Sexual abuse operates as an institutionalized, unsanctioned dimension of women’s punishment. (similarity 0.89)
• Women who are punished are seen as more aberrant and threatening than men (similarity 0.88)
• Male prisons functioning as the punishment norm drives women’s conditions toward greater repression. (similarity 0.83)
• Punishments inflicted on women and slaves were systematically excluded from prison reformers’ agenda. (similarity 0.83)
• Men’s prisons are gendered institutions, not the norm against which women’s prisons are judged (similarity 0.83)
• Imprisoning women who resist abusers cannot solve intimate violence (similarity 0.82)
• Women’s imprisonment increasingly echoes slavery, colonization, and genocide. (similarity 0.81)
• Formalistic equality with male prisons makes women’s prisons more repressive, not less. (similarity 0.80)
• Early prisons held mostly men because women lacked rights to lose (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Women who are punished are seen as more aberrant and threatening than men #corroborates (0.80) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 174
• Women’s imprisonment increasingly echoes slavery, colonization, and genocide. #complicates (0.50) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 207