Angela Davis

Gina Dent

Conversations:

Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender,

Globalization, and Punishment

he following conversation on prisons between Angela Davis and Gina

Dent took place in Oakland, California, on November 4, 2000.
Angela Davis (AYD): As I reflect on the history of our collaborative
work around prisons, I remember your arrivalin Californiatwo years ago
amid the excitement preceeding the inaugural Critical Resistance confer-
ence. The conference organizing committee was quite impressed by the
way you immediately began to calmly work out some of the overwhelming
problems that arose at the last minute and also by your vision of what this
gathering would potentially accomplish.
Gina Dent (GD): I remember that there was a good deal of discussion
and trepidation among participants of the large committee. Before I ar-
rived, it was about whether or not we would be able to attract enough
people to the conference. Later, it was about whether or not a group of
volunteers would be able to productively host and accommodate the enor-
mous number of respondents. I remember saying then that I was certain
that the people who came would be taken up, as I was, by the spirit and
vision of the event, which foregrounded the questions of gender and glob-
alization as starting points, ratherthan last instances, for a radicalcritique
of the punishment industry. It seems to me that one of the real strengths
of Critical Resistance remains this vision as it is reflected even in its struc-
ture- as a loose network and a campaign, ratherthan a member organiza-
tion, joining people whose work touches on prison issues but is not pri-
marily defined by them (e.g., in education, health care, media, education,
and the environment) with current and former prisoners, activists, and
culturalworkers to fight together against the prison industrial complex. As
Critical Resistance is based on the idea of spreading information about
the socially destructive business of imprisonment--the links between the

[Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society2001, vol. 26, no. 4]

? 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2001/2604-0010$02.00

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 1236 I Conversations

corporate economy and the punishment industry under globalization -it

invites committed individuals and organizations to affiliate in a variety of
ways, including by taking on the work and the name of CriticalResistance.
Of course, this is also connected to the articulation and development of
abolitionism as the vision, rather than just a goal, of the work- a prag-
matic program that also seeks to analyze its own limits in a radicalcritique
of the punishment industry in these days of reform. I think it was this
vision-connected to the nineteenth-century work of antislavery aboli-
tionism -that also helped to change our working process when the seven
of us met in Irvine as a researchgroup.1
ATD: Yes, we are drawing on important legacies. In recently rereading
Rosa Luxemburg's (1999) study on the relationship between capital accu-
mulation and imperialism, I was struck by the way her work resonates
powerfully with our contemporary critiques of globalization. It reminded
me of the rich history of theoretical and activist opposition to imperial-
ism - especially in the Marxist tradition - and how the forgetting of that
-
history can be so disempowering. Radical working-class formations par-
ties and unions, for example- do have a history of acknowledging the ten-
dency of capital to disregard national borders and thus to internationalize
their resistance.It is against this backdrop that we have been reconceptual-
izing the relationship between the prison industrial complex and globaliza-
tion-from a discussion of how the prison is affected by the globalization
of the economy (where the prison fits into globalization) to using the
prison as a contingent historical institution that not only prefiguresglobal-
ization but allows us to think today about the intersections of punishment,
gender, and race, within and beyond the borders of the United States.
GD: Certainly,we return again and again to the impact of the prison as
the paradigmaticinstitution of democracy- encapsulating democracy as a
reform, with its attendant and necessary contradictions. Thinking about
Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 researchtrip to the
United States to study the new American penitentiary, we are reminded
of the important context that produced the volume Democracyin America
([1835] 1990).2 Of course, this is why we have had something specific to
say about a concept and a practice of decolonization that does not chal-
lenge the contemporary use of the prison around the world. We continue
to find that the prison is itself a border.This analysishas come from prison-
1The other members of the researchgroup from the University of California Humanities
ResearchInstitute are Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Berkeley), David Goldberg (Irvine), Avery Gor-
don (Santa Barbara),Sandra Baringer (Riverside), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Berkeley).
include
2 Works
by de Beaumont and de Tocqueville (1833) 1964 and Drescher 1968
work preceding the publication of de Tocqueville (1835) 1990.

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 S I G N S Summer 2001 I 1237

ers, who name the distinction between the "free world" and the space be-
hind the walls of the prison. This is an important interpretation that un-
does the illusions of the powerful nation-states on the one hand and the
seeming disorganization and chaos of capital'stravels on the other. There
is a very specific political economy of the prison that brings the intersec-
tions of gender and race, colonialism and capitalism, into view.
AYD: Our own visits to prisons in Europe, South America, Australia,
and the United States have allowed us to begin to think about the appeal
of the prison across time and space as the most influential paradigm for
punishment over the past two centuries. We need to draw on the history
of the prison as a colonial institution profoundly linked to that earlier era
of imperialism in understanding the ease with which new models of im-
prisonment developed in the United States- such as the supermax (super
maximum security facility) - travel around the world today. Don't you re-
member how stunned we were when we learned a company headquartered
in Nashville, Tennessee (the Corrections Corporation of America) owns
and operates the largest women's prison in Australia?
GD: And that white Australians, proud of a convict heritage, did not
automatically link this history to the troubling contemporary circum-
stances for prisoners today--the overwhelming percentage of whom are
Koori women (that is, aboriginal--approximately 2 percent of the total
population but 30 percent of the prison population).
ATD: If I were to try to summarize my impressions of prison visits all
over the world, and most of them have been to women's prisons, including
three jails which I visited involuntarily, I would have to say that they are
uncannily similar.I have always felt as if I am in the same place. No matter
how far I have traveled across time and space-from 1970 to 2000, and
from the women's House of Detention in New York (where I was myself
incarcerated)to the women's prison in Brasilia,Brazil- no matter how far,
there is a strange sameness about prisons in general, and especially about
women's prisons. This sameness of women's prisons needs to be measured
against how important it has been for feminisms to divest themselves of
the notion that there is some universal quality we can call woman. This
makes me think about your work on the challenge for us to rethink the
boundaries between social science and the humanities as a means of think-
ing specificallyabout women in prison.
GD: Yes, I think our collaborative work also contests the
hegemony of
social science in producing knowledge about the prison not
only in the
most obvious places but also in activism and popular culture. The
assump-
tions that exist in these supposedly separatespheres have been
remarkably
consistent and mutually constitutive. Knowledge is never secured for use

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 1238 I Conversations

on only one side of the divide between science and the real of social life. I
am always struck by the extent to which scholars, activists, and legal prac-
titioners draw their assumptions not only from their personal experience
but from the experience of popular culture as a source of understandings
that are used like one's own life (assuming already that these understand-
ings are not just drawn from other scholarship). Where these understand-
ings are insufficient, we often assume they can be addressedwith the facts.
But what process generates these facts?So, we are forced to think seriously
about the status of traditional social scientific paradigms (and their perme-
ation in all kinds of arenas) as the more reliable, legitimate evidence. For
example, in what sense could we produce knowledge about women in
prison? How would this violate what we know about the shrouded condi-
tions of imprisonment (where only the state permits access) and the mis-
sionary zeal that can be the most obvious sign of the desire to know about
prison and prisoners?To what uses can we put knowledge produced under
these conditions? This is not merely a question about how we have to
rethink knowledge but about how to rethink an abolitionist politics that
starts from the position of those women on the underside of capital but
does not put them in another cage.
ATD: Any conventional social scientific study of women prisoners in-
troduces you to the typical woman prisoner- generally characterizedas a
"mother,"with a relatively low level of education, who is also a drug ad-
dict. We know that when we go into a women's prison in a European coun-
- -
try,we discover as is the case with men a disproportionately large num-
ber of women who are immigrants, noncitizens, African, Asian, and Latin
American. But, as you point out, this is not enough. We also have to con-
sider the role that criminology and penology have played in giving us this
striking similarity,not only in the populations but in the methods of con-
trol, architecturalmodels, and custodial practices that devolve from the
psychology of the criminal generalized around the world. In other words,
the institution of the prison and its discursive deployment produce the
kind of prisoners that in turn justify the expansion of prisons. As a matter
of fact, the term prison industry can refer precisely to the production of
prisoners even as the industry produces profits for increasing numbers of
corporations and, by siphoning social wealth away from such institutions
as schools and hospitals, child care and housing, plays a pivotal role in pro-
ducing the conditions of poverty that create a perceived need for more
prisons.
GD: This is key to stating simply why more and more people are in
agreement that the prison industrial complex underwrites the social prob-
lems that it purports to solve. And we have to consider scholars' role in

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 S I G N S Summer 200 1 1239

this andalsofindthe meansto makeuse of the writtenhistoryof the prison

to understandrace,gender,andglobalizationanew.
ATD: Well,we could startwith thinkingaboutthe strangebut predict-
ablewayfeminismhasbeenembracedby custodialhierarchies. Thedemand
for morewomen guardsandhigh-levelofficershasbeencomplementedby
the demandto treatwomen prisonersthe sameas men prisoners.This has
occurredas departmentsof correctionsdiscoverthat through "diversity
management" - incorporatingmen of color andwomen of all racialback-
-
grounds theirprisonsrun all the more efficiently.Thus putativelyfemi-
nist positionshavebolsteredthe trendtowardmore repressiveimprison-
ment practicesfor women and specificallythe move from the cottage/
campusarchitectural model to the concretefortressesbeing constructed
An
today. interestingexampleof thisfeminismthatdemandsformalequal-
ity of men andwomen prisonersis some wardens'insistencethatwomen
prisonershave the right to be consideredeverybit as dangerousas men.
TeklaMiller,the formerwardenat HuronValleyWomen'sPrisonin Michi-
gan, complainedthat the arsenalat the women'sprison was inferiorto
those at men'sinstitutions.She also successfullylobbied for the right to
shoot at women escapees.
GD: And we know these new recipesfor equality--partof the legacy
of the conjunctionof capitalismand democracy--travelas a preeminent
Americanexport.It seems that we'rebackto the point that prisonshave
becomenot only a terrainfor our activismbut alsoa challengeto ourwork
as feministintellectualstryingto think aboutthe limits of feminismsand
the terrainof new struggles.We can discuss,for example,the distinctions
between an equalityof samenessand an equalityof difference,but what
aboutan embodiedtheorythatalsoconsidersagency?I'm thinkingof two
paradoxesthatcontinueto hauntus. Firstof theseis the incommensurabil-
ity of women andthe prisonandthe consequentsymbolicuse of women as
the prison'sexcess.AmnestyInternational's campaignimageof the woman
giving birth in chainsis only one example.What if we set that picture
up againsta second example?In California,we know that one emerging
"protection"for women is that no sexualrelationsbetweenprisonersand
guardswill be consideredconsensual.The history of the resistancesto
women'ssubordinationin prisonalso constrainus-inasmuch as they as-
sumethatthesewomen arenot agents.We know one meansof rethinking
this throughfeminism.Yourreferencesto the prisonwriting of Barbara
Saunders,who comparedlife in prisonto a violentdomesticrelationship-
you canneverbe surewhatwill happennext andwhat it will requireemo-
tionally(citedin Chevigny1999, xvii)- arehelpfulhere.If the expression
of agencyagainstdomesticviolenceis leavingthe relationship,we know

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 1240 I Conversations

that women in prison present a further challenge to us. Of course, this is at

the heart of why Critical Resistance took up the idea of "Go to Prison
Week" to celebrate the thirty-fifthanniversaryof the Civil Rights Act. Vis-
-
iting prisons not so much to gain information, as researchersor tourists,
but to work with women prisoners-helps to create a firmer basis for fu-
ture work. This also suggests that we need to be able to talk about how some
men are then also in such a domestic violence relationship. Who these men
are- in terms of class, race, and location - matters then in a different way.
ATD: Well, we know that the gendering of men's prisons equates vio-
lence with masculinity and that not only is violence expected but the vio-
lence of the institution produces the relations between prisoners and
guards and among prisoners themselves. As we saw in our visit to Calipa-
tria State Prison in California, prisons - and this is the case in other states
as well-a system of racial classification and separation prohibits black
prisoners from being housed with white or Chicano ("northern Hispanic"
in the official vocabulary) but permits them to be housed with Mexi-
can ("southern Hispanic") prisoners. This strict segregation inevitably pro-
duces violent clashes along racial lines. The historical gendering of racial
contact in women's prisons intersects with policies governing sexual con-
tact. Estelle Freedman (1981) points out that historical policies of racial
segregation at Bedford Hills Prison for women in New York (which, of
course, still operates and holds such political prisoners as Kathy Boudin)
involved rules against racialintegration of the prison population to prevent
interraciallesbian relations. While sex contained by race was tolerated, sex
across race was treated as a major threat.
GD: Yes, and this is why it is important to think of the prison: not only
because of the very genuine concerns for those who are incarceratedbut
also because of its place in revealing the organization of the structuresthat
we hold to be democratic and their connections to gender and globaliza-
tion. We have spoken in the past, for example, and in the context of U.S.
history, of miscegenation as a threat that is legitimated not only through a
raciallyproscribed heteronormativity but also through the assumption that
the site of reproduction-the "mixed" child-is the site of fear. Prisons
teach us that this analysis is insufficient. Perhaps the more reverberating
site of fear is that of the reproduction of a social world that would read
along and against the boundaries of nation-states, races, genders, and sexu-
alities-the solidarity that is produced and most surveilled in the prison.
Isn't that precisely the site of the critical resistanceof which we speak?

Universityof California,Santa Cruz (Davis)

Universityof California,Berkeley(Dent)

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 S I G N S Summer 2001 I 1241

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Drescher,Seymour.1968. Tocqueville and Beaumonton SocialReform.New York:
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Freedman,Estelle. 1981. TheirSisters' Women's
Keepers: PrisonReformin America,
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Luxemburg,Rosa. 1999. RosaLuxemburg: Writingsand Reflections.
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Blanc.Amherst,N.Y.:HumanityBooks.
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).