NYC Activists Push Again In opposition to Proposed “Feminist” Ladies’s Jail in Harlem
Distinguished mainstream feminists have been more and more advocating for a proposed girls’s jail in Harlem. Earlier this month, feminist activist Gloria Steinem urged New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams to behave on the proposal.
Steinem claimed the proposed jail would dovetail with the political goals of the feminist motion, saying that, “Ladies and gender-expansive [people] at [the Rose M. Singer Center state prison at Rikers Island] deserve security, dignity and justice, and New York Metropolis can ship with a Ladies’s Middle for Justice at Lincoln.” New York Occasions critic Ginia Bellafante echoed Steinem’s sentiment earlier this month in a column, “What Would a Feminist Jail Look Like?” Bellafante urged that victims of home and sexual abuse may discover therapeutic with the social setting of the proposed jail.
Nonetheless, jail abolitionists resoundingly oppose this proposal and demand that true security and therapeutic requires the discharge of incarcerated folks and funding in high-quality social providers for folks upon their launch. These opponents of the Harlem girls’s facility affirm “there is no such thing as a such factor as a feminist jail.” As they see it, freedom from violence is a foundational a part of feminist politics, and prisons are inherently violent establishments.
The pattern of self-described feminists selling new jail building in New York within the identify of defending the ladies trapped inside them is over a century previous. Jarrod Shanahan’s new e book Captives particulars the historical past of jail reform and enlargement in New York Metropolis and reveals many situations of jail building during which progressive reformers led the cost to construct safer jails for ladies and queer folks. One after one other, plans to repair girls’s jails resulted in “reformed” amenities that devolved into disaster, signaling the rise of the subsequent jail — with extra funding and extra beds.
Advocates for Ladies Constructed These Jails
All through the mid-Twentieth century, New York Metropolis’s most distinguished avatar of girls’s caging was the Home of Detention for Ladies, positioned on the nook of Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, within the coronary heart of bohemian Greenwich Village.
This facility housed a disproportionately Black and working-class inhabitants of prisoners arrested for intercourse work, drug possession, and different so-called crimes. The Ladies’s Home was characterised, above all, by its proximity to metropolis streets and the noise generated inside; girls may shout to passersby, talk with family members in plain sight and broadcast the dismal situations inside to anybody who would hear. Due to this common observe, the recurrence of prisoner revolt, and the high-profile captivity of political prisoners like abolitionist Angela Davis, the brutality of Ladies’s Home grew to become extensively identified to the general public. More and more, broad swaths of New York Metropolis activists, together with a lot of the town’s feminist motion, opposed the jail.
However, after all, the Ladies’s Home had not been constructed with the acknowledged intention of reproducing racist, misogynist class violence. Its building was advocated by Progressive Period girls’s activists, together with the temperance motion and the Ladies’s Jail Affiliation, and it counted many suffragists amongst its supporters, together with the Ladies’s Metropolis Membership of New York. The marketing campaign for a brand new girls’s jail to exchange squalid amenities for detained girls started in 1910 and continued for a number of a long time, throughout which era lots of the identical activists fought for and gained the correct to vote. These activists additionally pushed for the set up of progressive penologist Ruth Collins because the jail’s first superintendent.
Nonetheless, most of those reformers didn’t grapple with the query of whether or not it was secure or simply for ladies to be locked up within the first place. The decision was to not “free all of them”; as an alternative, the progressive demand was to construct “higher” cages.
Quickly sufficient the Ladies’s Home had fallen into infamy, partially as a result of it was used not only for girls detained earlier than trial, as had been deliberate, but additionally to soak up those that had already been sentenced from the smallpox-laden hovel that housed feminine prisoners on Blackwell’s Island. Overcrowding, sexual assault of prisoners by docs and guards, routine rebellions and press protection of those points meant that by the Sixties, the Ladies’s Home was a scandal. Division of Correction Commissioner Anna M. Kross, herself a product of the suffragist milieu that had campaigned for the jail, known as it a “surprising penal anachronism.”
In response, as a part of a centuries-long course of Shanahan describes in nice element all through Captives, the Correctional Establishment for Ladies (CIFW) on Rikers was opened in 1971 with colourful partitions and a brand new architectural type, which planners promised would alleviate the social ills that had plagued the Ladies’s Home. However inside a number of months of opening, CIFW grew to become the topic of quite a few investigations for overcrowding and failing to offer fundamental medical care to incarcerated folks. The cost of maintaining with the elevated numbers of arrestees from law-and-order policing turned out to be greater than the reformers may deal with. Because the CIFW fell into disrepair and capital for jail building flowed into the Division of Correction, plans have been made for a brand new girls’s jail with even bigger capability.
In 1988, 17 years after the opening of CIFW, the promise of a brand new, trendy girls’s jail facility was half and parcel of bigger jail expansions happening on Rikers Island. This new jail, the Rose M. Singer Middle, identified colloquially as “Rosie’s,” had a complete capability of 1,150 together with related modules from the CIFW and the nursery for expectant moms. It was named after the Board of Correction member Rose M. Singer, who lengthy advocated for the humane remedy of feminine prisoners. The jail was, in response to Singer, meant to “be a spot of hope and renewal for all the ladies who come right here.” Nonetheless, it was no such place.
#CloseRosie’s and No New Ladies’s Jail
In 2020, Singer’s granddaughter Suzanne publicly criticized her grandmother’s namesake, describing it in The New York Occasions as “a torture chamber, the place girls are routinely abused, housed in unsanitary situations, and denied medical and psychological well being providers.” Suzanne Singer just lately endorsed the proposal for the ladies’s jail in Harlem, agreeing with Steinem, Bellafante, and different carceral feminists that the one answer to the horrendous situations on Rikers for ladies is to create a separate and “safer” jailing facility for ladies and nonbinary folks.
What motivates a feminist group to hawk this jail as the one answer to the violence at Rosie’s? The authors of the unique proposal from the nonprofit Ladies’s Neighborhood Justice Affiliation present their hand once they clarify how the power will likely be run. They state that it might be “operated by a nonprofit ‘reentry upon entry’ mannequin targeted on trauma-informed care…. The Division of Corrections’ presence restricted to securing the sides.”
Whereas guards would nonetheless be concerned in protecting the power separate from the Harlem neighborhood past the partitions of the jail, the Ladies’s Neighborhood Justice Affiliation imagines itself because the warden of the power. This could put it in a greater place to safe long-term metropolis funding and basis grants, as the primary nongovernmental group to function a “gender responsive decarceration” human caging advanced. That’s, till headlines of abuse break, and a brand new jail plan have to be devised as soon as once more.
To generate public assist for the Harlem jail, the Ladies’s Neighborhood Justice Affiliation has created a marketing campaign known as #BeyondRosies to emphasise the horrors of the Rose M. Singer Middle and appeal to pro-jail “progressives” to their trigger. This marketing campaign is akin to the #CloseRikers marketing campaign, a to construct 4 new jails in boroughs all through the town. The group #CloseRosies has recently declared the proposed Harlem jail a “win”.
Although #BeyondRosies and #CloseRosies rightfully condemn the abuse and neglect that folks endure at Rosie’s, they concurrently assist the development of extra cages and try to co-opt the facility of New York Metropolis political actions which have rejected incarceration in all its kinds. These grassroots, really decarceration-oriented efforts embrace the Neighborhood in Unity marketing campaign towards an identical girls’s jail within the Bronx within the mid-2000s; the unique grassroots #ShutDownRikers marketing campaign in 2014; and the abolitionist group No New Jails NYC, which opposed the borough-based jail plan in 2018-2020.
Irrespective of how proponents body their requires a brand new girls’s jail, historical past reveals us that the abuse endured by incarcerated folks won’t be solved by newer cages. The humanitarian crises that typify these jails are symptomatic of the racist and capitalist social order of American society. Solely steps that work to undercut this social order will mitigate the social ills which are quarantined in American jails.
As Younger Lords militant Denise Oliver defined about CIFW when it first opened, “The one factor that’s nicer about it’s that it’s not as previous, so there’s most likely not as a lot grime collected within the place. It’s nonetheless a jail. The situations are nonetheless the identical.”
