Celling Black Bodies:
Black Women in the
Global Prison
Industrial Complex

by Julia Sudbury

Used with permission of author. Originally appearing in Feminist
Review: 80. 2005. pg 162-179
introduction

My mother got twelve years. She’s in Foston Hall. They can give people those
long sentences just for knowing drugs are in the house. He sentenced her to
12 years for knowing. She wasn’t even involved and he knew that. But he said
she knew it was in the country and if it had got through, she would have
benefited from it, from any money. He said one only has to read the papers
every day to know the trouble it causes once it gets in the pubs and clubs,
what it does to people. There was a recorder in the cage and she was saying:
“Why did you do it? They convicted her on that

(Janet, HMP Holloway).

Janets is an African Caribbean woman in her mid-twenties serving a seven year
sentence for importation of Class A drugs. She was six months pregnant when she
was arrested at Heathrow airport and brought to HMP Holloway, England's oldest
‘and most notorious women's prison. After having her son, she was transferred to the
Mother and Baby Unit where | interviewed her. In this ‘compassionate” penal
environment, designed to punish the mother but not her innocent child, Janet and son
are confined t0.a 60 by 80 cell with a bed, toilet and closet from § PM to § AM.
During the day, they have intermittent access to a creche, playroom and roof garden
where the baby can breathe fresh air under wire mesh designed to prevent escape
attempts. When her son reaches nine months, Janet will be transferred to another unit
where she can keep him for a further nine months, at that sage, they will be.
separated while she serves the remainder of her sentence. While Janet was sentenced
toa ‘lenient” seven years because of her guilty plea, her mother, who was not
involved in the drug trade, was sentenced to 12 years because of her filure to report
her daughter to the police.

Janet, her mother and her son represent three generations caught up in an ever
expanding network of penal repression and profit that increasingly defies national
borders. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic increases in women’s
incarceration accompanicd by expansive prison building programs in Britain as well
as the rest of Western Europe, North America and Australasia. At the same time,
there has been a shift in the nature of confinement as the private prison industry has
been embraced by New Labour and Conservatives alike, and the deprivation of
liberty has become an extremely profitable enterprise. This article wil argue that the
explosion in women’s incarceration is the hidden face of nco-liberal or ‘corporate”
elobalization and can not be understood without reference to three overlapping.
Phenomena. The firs s the fundamental restructuring of national cconornics and
social welfare provision that has occurred as a result of the globalization of capital,
The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expan-
sion of what has been labelled a “prison industrial complex” made up of a intricate
web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison
corporations. The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is
symbiotically related and mutually consituted by the transnational trade in 3

criminalized drugs.» These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I will argue,
build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the super-
exploitation of black women and women of colour: within the global prison
industrial complex.

the glol

boom in women's imprisonment

Since the carly 1990s, increases in the prison population in England and Wales have
sparked a boom in prison construction. leading commentators o comment on “the
largest prison building program since the middle of the 19th century” (Morgan, 1999:
110). While women make up a small proportion of those incarcerated,thei raes of
imprisonment have multiplid faster than men's, causing feminist activists o call for
drastic measures to counter “the criss in women's prisons'.+ Between 1985 and 1998,
for example, the number of women in prison more than doubled, from 1,532 t0 3,260
(Prison Reform Trust, 2000). The prison service has responded by contractng with
private corporations to buil and operate new prisons, and by rerolling men's prisons
for women. Recent govemment initatives designed to slow the increase in the use of
incarceration, such as Home Detention Curfews, have had little impact on the
number of women sentenced to prison which continued to grow during the year
02001 by 9%, compared to 2% for men. The Britsh patter is mirrored clsewhere.
Inthe US, where the prison and jail population reached two millon in the year 2000,
women’s incarceration is also spiraling upwards at a greater pace than that of men.
‘While the number of men in US prisons and jils doubled between 1985 and 1995,
women’s imprisonment during the same period tripled (Department of Justice, 1995).
In 1970, there were 5,600 women in federal and siate prisons, by 1996, there were
75,000 (Currie, 1998). In Australia, a surging women's prison population,
accompanicd by pressure from activist organizations, forced the Parliament of New
South Wales to commission a Select Commitiee on the Increase in Prisoner
Population (Bacon and Pillemer 2000). The Select Committee was instructed (o
investigate 2 20% increase in men’s and 40% increase in women's incarceration
(Parliament of New South Wales, 2001). In Canada, the increase in federally
sentenced women prisoners, accompanicd by pressure from penal reform
organizations, ha led o the consiruction of five new federal prisons for women
(Hannah-Mofftt and Shaw, 2000). In Ontario, spiraing numbers of prisoners have
fucled the construction of three 1600-bed superjails where a growing women's
population will be warchoused within US-style, austere cocd fucliies.

Aggregate rates of increase in prison populations under-represent the impact of the
prison boom on black women, women of colour and indigenous women. In all the:
countries mentioned above, oppressed racialized groups are disproportionately
represented. For example, in New South Wales, while all women’s imprisonment
increased by 40% in 5 years, aboriginal women's incarceration increased by 70% in
only two years. In Canada, aboriginal people comprise 3% of the general population
and 129% of federal prisoners, a figure that increases to over 60% in provinces like
Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canadian Criminal Justice Association 2000). Afican

4 Canadians are also disproportionately policed, prosceuted and incarcerated

(Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System 1994). In
the US, Latinas and African American women make up 60% of the prison
population. And despite their small numbers in the population, Native Americans are
ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned (Rojas, 1998). Finally, 12% of
women prisoners in England and Wales are African Caribbean British passport
holders: compared to 1% of the general population (Elkins et al., 2001). In addition,
British prisons hold numerous women from West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin
America, either as immigration detainees, or serving sentences for drug importation.
The erisis of women’s prisons can therefore be read as a erisis for black women and
women of colour worldwide.

the emergence of the prison industrial comples.
Activist-intellcctuals in the US have traced the emergence of what has been labelled
the “prison industrial complex” to the economic transformations of the 1970 s (Davis,
1998, Goldberz and Evans 1998). As advances in technology enabled corporations to
transport information and capital between distant geographic locations in fractions of
a second, new forms of globalized capital began to appear. US-based corporations
downsized their unionized Western workforces and relocated manufacturing
operations 1o locations in the global south where labour was cheap and labour and
environmental protections minimal. Multinational trade agreements such as NAFTA
and GATT and the establishment of Free Trade Zones hastened the process, opening
the doors to the unhindered super-exploitation of predominantly young women of
colour from Tijuana to Manila. The impact of massive downsizing in the US on
urban African American and Latino communities was catastrophic. Redlining and
racist violence had kept African Americans and Latinos out of the 1950s
suburbanization drive that had allowed many working class white familics to move
out of the inner cities,restricting the former to urban ghettos where they were.
warchoused with few opportunities for mobility (Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). As job
cuts hit these communities, they were devastated by pandemic rates of
unemployment, a declining tax base and resultant cuts in social, welfare, educational
and medical provision. The result: spiraling rates of poverty, drug addiction, violence
and social dislocation. These conditions were not met passively. The Black Libera-
tion Army, Black Panthers, Young Lords, Chicano Power and American Indian
movement were the organized voice of the resistance that sprung from these
oppressive conditions. However these movements encountered brutal repression and
eriminalization. The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) identified
the Black Panthers as THE number one threat to the sceurity of the US and targeted.
activists such as Assata Shakur, Pam Africa and Angela Y. Davis for *neutralization’
via tramped up charges, massively publicized manhunts and incarceration in
maximum security institutions (Churchill,1990). The scene had therefore been set for
the mass criminalization of African Americans, American Indians and Latinos. In the
white imagination, black protest was synonymous with lawlessness and violence.
While overt Jim Crow racism had waning public acceptance in this post-Civil Rights
era of Martin Luther Kingesque integrationist policies, eriminalization provided a
new camouflaged racist language in which code words such as “eriminal”, ‘drug
dealer” and ‘welfire queen’ could be used to refer obliquely to the racialized 5

“enemy within’ (Davis, 1998: 66). Criminalization therefore became the weapon of
choice in dealing with the social problems caused by the globalization of capital and
the protest it engendered.

Joel Dyer argues that three components make up the *perpetual prisoner machine’
that transforms eriminalized populations in the US into fodder for the prison system
and has caused the prison population in the US to increase tenfold in twenty years
(Dyer, 2000). The first s the consolidation of large media corporations that rely on
violent and crime-oricnted content to grab ratings and tht have created a dramatic
sise in the fear of erime in the US population at large. The second i the increasing
use of polling and market rescarch by politicians to align their platforms with
“popular” views about policy arcas, leading to ‘tough on crime’ thetoric on both sides
of the electoral spectrum, This rhetoric is translated into policies such as mandatory.
minimums,truth-in-sentencing and three strikes that cause more people fo serve:
prison sentences, for longer terms and leads to spiraling prison populations. The third
s the intervention of private prison corporations such as Wackenhut Corporation and
Comections Corporation of America which provide a way for governments to expand
their prison estate without having to spend the initial capital cost of prison
construction. The mutually profitable relationship between private corporations and
public criminal justice systems cnables politicians to mask the enormous cost of their
tough-on-crime policies by sidestepping the sual process of asking the clectorate to
Vot for prison bonds'to raise funds to build publicly operated prisons. Instead, they
can simply reallocate revenue funds from welfare, health or education

into contracts with privately run for-profit prisons. Since the 1980s, the private sector
has allowed prison building to continue, even where public coffers have been
exhausted by the prison construction boom. It has been rewarded with cheap land,
tax breaks and discounts in sewage and ilities charges, making prison companies
major beneficiary of corporate welfare. These three components constitute the
“political and cconomic chain reaction’ that we have come to know s the prison
industrial complex: a symbiotic and profitable relationship between politcians
corporations, the media and state correctional institutions that generates the
racialized use of incarceration as a response to social problems rooted in the
globalization of capital.

the PIC goes global

Although the prison industrial complex emerged in the US, the past 15 years have
witnessed its transformation into a global phenomenon. Multinational prison
corporations have fucled this expansion through an aggressive strategy of pursuing
foreign markets through sophisticated marketing techniques. Targeting British
politicians has proven particularly fruitful. During the 1980s, Labour and
Conservative politicians were invited to the US for tours of flagship private prisons
where the new steel and glass buildings and latest technological advances in
surveillance appeared to offer a striking advance over Britain’s decaying penal estate.
6 The glossy thetoric of the ‘new corrections’ where prisoners were called
“residents,"prison guards ‘supervisors’ and cells ‘rooms’ was favourably compared to
the brutal and dehumanizing prison culture in Britain which had long proved
resistant (o reform. Prior to this time, both sides of the House of Commons were
opposed to prison privatization. Polificians tended to view the denial of freedom as
100 serious an undertaking to be entrusted to private interests and subjected to the
vagaries of the profit motive. But these carcfully orchestrated visits led to a sca-
change. As Sir Edward Gardner, Chair of the ali-party penal affairs group.
commented afler a visit 1o the US in 1986: ‘We thought it was stunning. These places
didn't feel like prisons and didn’t smell like prisons. There was nothing we could
find to criticize” (Young, 1987: 3).

In 1987, 2 Home Afairs Select Comitie visited four adult and juvenle jils run by
the Corrections Corporation of America and the Radio Corporation of America. The.
Select Committce subsequently recommended that corporations should be invited to
bid for contracts to build and manage custodial institutions, initially as an
experiment. A key to the recommendation was that privatization would dramatically
accelerate the prison building program, which was hindered by lack of public funds
(Speller, 1996: 5). Gradually, key Britih politicians and adinisrators were won
overto the possibilites for cost cutting, modernization and prison expansion offered
by the corporate agenda. Privatization was presented as 2 panacea to the problems
facing the prison service: overcrowding, old buildings, high annual costs, resistance
to reform and a igid prison guard culture reinforced by the powerful Prison Officers
Assocation. Between 1991 and 1994 the mutually profitable relationship between
conservative polifiians and the prison industry culminated in a series of Acts which
allowed for corporations to design, construct, manage and finance new prisons and to
bid to operate existing prisons FN [S]. By 1997, when New Labour came to power,
Britain had become a profitabl ocation for multinaional prison corporations,
producing revenues of over 95 million Briish Pounds for the five leading private
incarcerators, Premier Prison Services (a joint venture of Wackenhut and Sodexto),
Wackenhut (UK) Lid., UK Detention Services (a joint venture of Corrections
Corporation of America and Sodexho). Securicor and Group 4 (Prison Privatisation
Report International, 1998a: Sudbury 2000). Although Labour had condemned the.
Conservative privatization program, pre-clection promises to return prisons to the
public sestor were short lived (Prison Privatisation Report International, 1996).
Within a year of clection, Home Secretary Jack Straw announced that pivately run
prisons would only return to the public sector i the lattr could outbid their private
competitors, and that new prisons would be built under the Private Finance Initative
(Prison Privatisation Report Interational, 1998b) While Wackenhut Corporation.
Corrections Corporation of America and others have reaped enormous profis n the
US since the 1980s,ther profis have recently becn compromised. A rdical popular
prison movement, and a serics of high profile legal cases have pushed the US prison
industry into a period of crisis s shares go into freefall.« Critical Resistance, the
Prison Moratorium Project and the Black Radical Congress”“Education not
Incarceration’ campaign have mobilized popular support and media coverage in
questioning the logic of ever increasing incarceration. AL the same time, private
prisons corporations have proven vulnerable to the *Jena’ effect, whereby a case of 7

malpractice tuns the tide of popular and political sentiment and corporations are left
with legal costs and empty facilities due to cancelled contracts.: Potentially damag-
ing incidents of prisoner abuse, sexual assault, violence and protests are generated by
the very conditions that make prisons profitable: low paid non-unionized staff low
staffing ratios and sparse provision of activities for prisoners (Yeoman, 2000).
Although corporations engage in a process of damage limitation, whereby they seck
to suppress public knowledge about such incidents, close scrutiny by prison activists
has severely limited their ability to do so. As domestic profits come under threat,
foreign operations play a key role in maintaining corporate viability. New prisons in
Marchington, Olney and Peterborough therefore play an important role in
maintaining the viability of the multinational prison industry as it secks new markets
in South Alfrica and further afield (Martin, 2001). Women and men serving time in
British prisons thus fuel stock market profits from London to New York, reinforcing
the logic of incarceration with the logic of capitalist accumulation,

the war on drugs wages war on women

‘With the entering of the New Year, I want o give you the gif of vision, t0 see
this system of Moder Day Slavery for what it is. The government gets paid
525,000 a year by you (taxpayers) to house me (us). The more of us that they
incarcerate, the more money they get from you to build more prisons. The
building of more prisons create more jobs. The federal prison syster is
comprised of 61% drug offenders, so basically this war on drugs is the reason
why the Prison Industrial Complex is a sky rockeling enterprise

(Kemba Smith, 1999).

1n 2000 two Affican American women were among the prisoners granted clemency
by outgoing President Clinton. Dorothy Gaines and Kemba Smith’s cases had been
highlighted by organizations including Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the
Kemba Smith Justice Project and the Million Woman March as evidence of the
egregious injustices occurring as a result of the ‘war on drugs’ and the particular
impact on women. Kemba Smith’s case in particular attained national attention and
was widely reported in the mainstream press.s Kemba was a student at Hampton
College, a traditionally black college in Virginia. She became involved with a young.
man, Khalif Hall, who, unknown to her, was a key figure in a large drug operation.
Kemba stayed with Hall despite abuse and threats to kill her because she was afaid
for her family and herself and because she had become pregnant. Shorlly before the
drug ring was apprehended, Hall was shot and killed. Kemba pleaded guilty to
conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, but hoped Hall's abusive behaviour would be
taken into account. Instead, she was held responsible for the full 253 kg involved in
the offense, although she personally was not found to have handled the drugs, and
was sentenced 10 24.5 years in prison. Kemba, like Janet and her mother (above)
have been targeted by a transnational war on drugs that emerged in the mid 1980s in
the United States and has since been aggressively exported around the globe. While
the shadowy figure of the drug dealer or trafficker tends to be 8

envisioned in the popular media as male, increasingly women are the low level

“footsoldiers” within the transnational drug trade who are most vulnerable to arrest
and punishment.

The current war on drugs was announced by Ronald Reagan in the carly 1950s and
formalized in the 1986 Anti Drug Abuse Act. The Act made a critical break with the
concept of drug users as a medical population in need of treatment, and instead
targeted them as a criminal population. It lso utilized the erroncous assumption that
users would be deterred from their habit and dealers and trafickers incapacitated by
punitive and extensive use of penal sanctions. By removing those involved in the
eriminalized drug trade from the streets for long periods of time, it was assumed,
syndicates would be severely damaged in their ability to get drugs to the streets.»
ince “liberal” judges could not be trusted to hand down sufficient sentences to deter
and ineapacitate those involved in the drug trade, the Act removed discretion and
imposed mandatory minimum sentences. Thus treatment programmes and
commanity service were effectively barred in cases involving drugs, and sentences
length related not to the role of the defendant in the offense, but o the weight and
purity of drugs involved. In the US, Affican American women and Latinas arc
disproportionately affected by mandatory minimums. Since the only way a lesser
sentence can be given s in cases where the defendant provides ‘substantial
assistance’ in the prosccution of another person, women, who tend to be in
subordinate positions within drug syndicates and thus have little access to
information are usually unable to make such an agreement. The crack-cocaine.
disparity also feeds the disproportionate impact on women of colour. The mandatory
minimum sentence for crack cocaine is 100 times harsher for crack than for powder
cocaine. Since crack s cheaper, and has flooded poor inne city neighbourhoods,
Affican Americans and Latinos receive disproportionate sentences when compared
with white powder cocaine users and dealers (Waters, 1998).

‘While the war on drugs has had a dramatic impact on US communities of colour, it
has reached far beyond US borders. s From the mid-1980s, the war on drugs
increasingly played a key role in US forcign policy decisions as Reagan and Bush
administrations pushed a US drug agenda on the global community. Initial efforts
focused on the G-7 countries as the Reagan administration used US economie clout
to push for intemational compliance with US drug policy. In 1988 the Toronto
Summit endorsed a US proposed taskforce which in turn led to the 1988 United
Nations Convention Against Ilicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances (Friman, 1996). The Convention contained a number of controversial
conditions that ran counter to the policies of other member states. By requiring states
to criminalize drug cultivation, possession and purchase for personal use, maximize
the use of criminal sanctions and deterrence and limit carly release and parole in
drug related cases, the Vienna Convention represented the transnational spread of the
US punitive *law and order” agenda (Jorg-Albrecht, 2001). By signing the
Convention, member states signed onto the logic of incarceration, pledging 1o use
criminal justice sanctions in place of medical or social solutions and turning
decisively away from legalization.i1 By the mid-1990s, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Taiwan, South and Central America, the Caribbean and African countries 9

including Nigeria and South Africa were fully fledged partners in the US driven
transnational war on drugs.

The Americanization of drug policy is evident in the British approach to criminalized
drug use, trafficking and retail. While the “British System’ of prescribing heroin or
methadone to addicts, dating to the 1920s, indicates a medical approach to drug use,
it exists uncasily alongside recent developments that draw on the US model of
criminalization and incarceration. UN Conventions are not the only way in which US
drug policy is exported abroad. Indeed, British politicians on both sides of the house
have *gratefully accepted and sometimes sought' the *benevolence, advice, influence
and leadership’ of the US on drug matters (Bean, 2001: 90). US-Bri

drug policy comes about as a result of exchanges of rescarch findings, fact.
missions to the US by politicians and administrators, international conferences and
visits by “specialists’to Britain. An infamous case involves Drug Enforcement Agent
Robert Stutman’s 1988 visit to Britain. Addressing the Assistant Chicf Police
Officers Conference, Stutman ‘scared the hell’ out the participants with his
apocalypic visions of the crack epidemic in the US and its inevitable migration to
Europe as the US market became saturated. Stutman’s account was based on an
unpublished report and anccdotal evidence. Nevertheless, a 1989 Home Affairs
Committee Report echoed Stutman’s unsubstantiated argument that there is ‘no such
person as a fully recovered crack addict’ and that crack, by its very nature, called for
a penal, rather than a medical response (Bean, 2001). Stutman’s presentation had
immediate and racialized effects. From the late 1980s, the press ran reports of crack
infiltrating British citics. Crack became a foreign threat, an enemy brought into.
Britain by Yardies, with African Caribbean communities as the Trojan Horse
enabling the foreign infiltration. As a result, resources were pumped into law
enforcement activities such as Operation Dalchouse and the Crack Intelligence
Coordinating Unit specifically to increase the surveillance and policing of black
communitics. Coinciding with the entrenchment of *Fortress Europe, the erack threat
was also a ustification for a heightened suspicion of black British women and men
entering Britain afier vacations abroad, as well as Caribbean nationals entering to
visit family and friends. With such targeted policing and customs attention, the
Pumbers of Affican Caribbean women and men apprehended for possession, sales
and importation of both class A and lesser drugs increased dramatically. In some
instances, retal of crack was largely inspired by police operations and protection of
informans, as is the case in a northem city where a senior police officer admitted
that undercover police buyers stimulated demand that disappeared once the police.
operation was over (Joyce, 1995: 179). While the belicf that Britain was on the verge
ofa US-style “crack epidemic’ was found by the mid 1990 s to be a ‘media inspired
panic’ (Joyce, 1998: 181), the pattern of targeted surveillance has continued
unabated. As public funds are poured into the high-tech policing of black suspects, a
self-fulfilling cycle is generated whercby increased arrests in the black community
reinforce the public fear of African Caribbean drug dealers and traffickers, legitimate
the continuation of racially discrepant policing practices and generate additional
resources for the police. : The impact on black women has been devastating. While
10 in 1980, 4.4% of women serving time in prisons in England and Wales were

incarcerated on drug related offenses, by 2001 that figure had risen to 39% (HMSO;
1982, Elkins et al, 2001). Between April 2000 and April 2001 alone, the number of
women sentenced to prison as a result of the war on drugs grew by 20% (Elkins et
al..2001).

As the risk of apprehension at Heathrow, Toronto or New York increases, drug
syndicates find it increasingly profitable to use black women and women of colour as.
low level ‘mules” to carry drugs through customs. Women are seldom involved in the
planning and organization of drug trafficking, nor are they party to the large profi
involved (Harper and Murphy, 1999). Male dealers may believe that women will be
less likely to come under suspicion of carrying drugs and more likely to receive
lenient sentencing if they are apprehended. However, black women are not the
recipients of such chivalrous behaviour, since they do not fall under the benevolent
patriarchal protection of the white men who judge them. Nicole, a 29-year-old Black
Brifish woman incarcerated with her daughter at HMP Holloway explained:

“The judge when he sentenced me said he's going to use me as an example.
Because he knows I've been set up, but he has to give a message the world:
“Don’t bring drugs'”. He used me as an example because he knew I was
prognant. [ was st up by a friend of mine, if you can call him that. And they
knew that. But still he said that's why they’re using women 10 bring drugs to
the country be cause they think that the system is not going to be as hard on
women as on male prisoners. He said that's not the case.

The women I interviewed became involved in the transnational drug trade through
three paths: economic need; threats and coercion; and deception. Faced with poverty
and often without a second income to support the family, many women make the
ehoice to risk carrying drugs, sometimes believing it will be a one-off. Interviewees
offen had specific financial goals, such as an emergency medical bill, or school fees
for a son or daughter. Marta, a Jamaican mother of four serving a five year sentence
at HMP Winchester explaind:

‘They do it mainly for the kids, to support the kids. You have a mother who
has four or five kids, two is very sickly, every time she visit the hospital or the
doctor, you have to pay to register, you have to pay for medicine, you have to
pay for an X-ray. Everything costs money. So anything comes up they're
‘zoing to jump at it, the casicst way to make moncy.

Marta s typical of women who import out of economic necessity. Knowing lttle
about the punitive criminal justice system that awaited her in Britain, she took a
calculated risk based on the limited options available for her to ensure the survival of
herself and her children:

Iwas self employed doing a bit of selling. | was married but my husband
wasn’t supportive afler sending the kids to school and the money kept going
down. I never knew nothing much about drugs, the only form of drugs 1 11
know is ganja, we call it weed. That's the only hard drugs I've known of in
my life until | come here. And I was just asked by somebody to carry some
baggage for $100,000 Jamaican dollars and I just jump at it, thought it could
really help out. They said there is no risk involved, they make it look so casy,
just carry the drugs and collect your money and that’s it and come back. They
didn’t show me the possibility that I could get caught, just do it

‘While Marta was not told explicitly that she was importing drugs, the fee involved
made it evident to her that the package was illegal. In contrast, Maureen, a middle
class North Londoner of Jamaican ancestry and mother of six was unaware of the
contents of her luggage. While on a visit to her father in Jamaica, she was
approached by an acquaintance who asked her to carry coconuts, rum and cans of
coconut cream to England. She was apprehended at customs and cocaine was found
in the cans:

I'm 50 embarrassed. | haven't old no-one. I keep going over in my head, what
have I done wrong? What happened? Was I set up? Was I being duped? [
don’t know what happened to me. I told them the truth and they didn’t believe
me. I know so many people who lic to them and they get off, they get a few
years. Its not fair. And then again the jury was all white and it was a verdict of
10t02.

Maureen’s case, she believes, was exacerbated by a customs officer who mistook her
for another detainee and stated that she was carrying 9,500 British Pounds, rather
than the fow hundred pounds she actually had with her. In the face of racialized
stercotypes of Affican Caribbean drug traffickers, Maurcen’s class status is erased.
she s processed through the criminal justice system as *just another courier, found
guilty by a predominantly white jury and given a mandatory minimum sentence.

‘While it may be tempting to draw a bold line between guilt and innocence in these
o cases, the reality of women’s involvement in importation s far more blurred. In
many instances, importing was part of a complex emotional relationship between a
male dealer or trafficker, often himself a minor player in the drug trade, and a
lover/partner/*mule. Diane, a biracial Canadian 25 year old, is serving the second-
half of a five year sentence for importation at the Elizabeth Fry halfway house in
Toronto. As a young woman, Diane left home and moved into a women’s sheler
because of her abusive relationship with her father. While she was there, she entered
into a relationship with a Grenadan man who was subsequently arrested for drug
dealing. While he was incarcerated, Diane visited him regularly and he discussed
marriage with her. Shortly afier his release, she gave up her job and started importing
drugs for him, not knowing at the time that his previous courier had been arrested
and incarcerated. She was not paid in cash for the trips she made, but accasionally,

he would buy her expensive gifs such as jewelry and a compuer:

He looked at it this way, he was paying the rent, he was paying for the food.
12 he was paying the bills, if I needed anything I'd ask him for it. I needed a

new pair of shoes. But it was hard for me to ask him for anything be cause |
don't like asking anybody for anything. I never got any money.

Diane and her partner were married before she was finally arrested and incarcerated
at Grand Valley State, Kitchener. During the first few days of her sentence, she met
the first courier and also leamned that her husband had alrcady moved in with another
girlfriend. Nevertheless, she refused to trade information for a shorter sentence out of
loyalty and respect for his paternal role:

1 had been told don’t implicate him because he's still on parole, so he'd do.
more time than I would, because he'd go back o jail o finish the remainder
of his sentence, plus a new charge. So I figure I can't do that to him because
I'd be taking the kids away from their father. And altogether I was with him
for 7172 years,

Diane’s case illustrates the complex web of emotion, economics and abuse that often
draw women into criminalized activitics. In her study of battered Affican American
women, Beth Richie argues that *gender entrapment” best describes the way in which
black women are incarcerated due to their involvement with a coercive and violent
male (Richie, 1996). While Diane was not subjected to physical violence, her
partner’s controlling behaviour in relation to the money which she generated through
importation, the deception with regard to his other girlfriends, and his apparently
eynical use of marriage as a means of controlling her labour form a web of abuse and
exploitation. By controlling the labour of his ‘stable of mules” through promises of
Tove and commitment, Diane’s partner generates wealth for himself without either
taking the personal risk of importation, or paying the going rate of several thousand
dollars per trip. This web of economic/ emotional exploitation was a factor in the
stories of many of the women | interviewed. As Marta explained:

Men do it [import] but they tend to prey on the women more. Because they
know that the woman in Jamaica, they care for their family, especially their
kids. They would do anything to make sure their kids is looked afier. So they
mainly prey on the woman, especially single woman. You have men do it, but
the number isn’t as large as the woman.

‘Women’s subordinate role in heterosexual relationships and their role as the primary
and often sole carers of children combine to devalue their labour in the drug trade.
The low value of women’s labour in the drug trade is demonsrated by the women |
interviewed who reported being *set up’ as decoys so that their arrest would distract
customs officials from a larger shipment coming through. Paid anywhere from zero
0 a fow thousand pounds for carrying a shipment worth upwards of 100,000 British
Pounds, women form a cheap and replaceable army of labourers. As one is
incarcerated, another, like Diane, quickly fills her place.

3
the global feminization and racialization of poverty

‘While transnational drug policies play an important role in channelling women of
colour into prisons from Cape Town to Toronto, women are not without agency and
do, of course, make choices within the options available to them. As the global
economy has been transformed however, these options have become increasingly
limited. Tn the global south, this economic transformation has driven a shiftin the
role of the state. Firstly, governments have been formed to scale down their role as
providers of a social-welfare fabric as intenational financial institutions have driven
neo-liberal economic reform. In Jamaica, policies introduced since the mid 1980s by
the Jamaican Labour Party working closely with the US, IMF and World Bank, have
led to cutbacks in public sector employment, the scaling back of local goverment
services, health and education, increases in the cost of public utilities as state owned
companies are sold to the private sector and dramatic decline in real wages. Such
cuts hit women particularly hard as they carry the burden of caring for children and
sick or elderly relatives (Harrison, 1991). Marta’s experience exemplifies the
increasing economic pressures facing women:

Things in Jamaica is very expensive. Its hard for a single woman with kids
especially anywhere over three kids, to get by without a good support or a
steady job. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have an income. I did have an income,
but having four kids and an ex-husband who doesn't really care much. I had
to keep paying school fecs and the money kept going down. I did need some
kind of support. That's why I did what I did. We don’t get child support in
Jamaica, three quarters of the things that this country offers for mothers here
we don't have it. This country gives you a house, they give you benef
et nothing in Jamaica. We have to pay for hospital, not even education is
free. Primary school used to be free under one govemnment hand, but under
another government it has been taken away. You're talking about high school,
you're talking about fifteen up to twenty thousand dollars a term, for one kid
o go to high school. Its difficult in Jamaica.

Secondly, while thestte has cut back its ole in social welfare, it has stepped
up its role in subsidiring foreign and domestic capital. Free Trade Zones established
in Kingston, Montego Bay and clsewhere offer forcign garment,clectonic and
communications companics equipped factory space, tax exemptions,a cheap female
workforce and, for the busy Excutive, weekends of sun, sea and sand.

owned agribusiness and mining companics have also been encouraged.
traditonal subsisence farming and causing migraton from rural arcas to the citcs
which now account for S0% of the Jamaican population. A the cconomy has shified,
women working in the informal cconomy as farmers and “higelers” find themselves
unable to keep up withthe ising costs of survival. While younger somen may find
cmployment i the tourist industry as maids,entertainers o prostitutes,or within the
Free Trade Zones assembling clothes or computers for Western markets, working
class women in their thirtcs and older have fewer options. Even where these women
14 do find employment, low wages, driven down by mulinational corporations in

search of ever greater profit margins and kept low by governments unwilling to sct a
living minimurm wage for fear of losing foreign investment, mean that they can not
earn a sufficient income to support their families. The falure of the legal economy to
provide adequate means for women's survival is the key incentive for those who
chose to cnter the drug trade as couriers.

The feminization of poverty in the global south is mirrored by conditions among.
black people and communities of colour in the West. As Naomi Klein argues, the
flight of manufacturing jobs from the West to the global south has led to the.
Macdonaldization of jobs in North America and Europe, with part time, casual, low
wage jobs the norm in the new service and ‘homeworker” cconomies (Klein, 2001).
Atthe same time, successive governments, whether espousing compassionate
conservativism or the ‘third way," have pursued market-led economic reforms which
have dramatically reduced public services, introduced widespread privatization and
raised the cost of living. The result is the disenfranchisement of working class and
black communities and black women in particular as the state sheds its social welfare
responsibilitics. In Britain, as in the US and Canada, this has entailed a dramatic
reform of welfare, and the targeting of single mothers in particular as a drain on the
public purse. I is this impoverishment that acts as the motor to women’s
involvement within the retail end of the drug trade and their subsequent targeting by
the criminal justice systems of these countries. Working class women, and in
particular women of colour therefore bear the brunt of both the punitive and
economic regimes of neo-liberal globalization. The devaluation of their labor within
the criminalized cconomy of the international drug trade is closely interrelated to
their superexploitation within the formal sectors of the global cconomy (the Free
Trade Zones and minimum wage tourism and service sectors). Both are made
possible by the radical feminization and racialization of povery that is an essential
part, rather than an unfortunate offshoot, of the corporate maximization of profits in
the global arena.

conclusion: towards resistance
As the new millennium ushers in an era of unchecked capital accumulation and
massive and widening divides between information- rich elites and disenfranchised
majorities, feminists and anti-racists need to respond by infusing our praxis with the
new politics. The new social movements of the 215t century are more likely to be
found shutting down Niketown in San Francisco or battling the WTO in Seattle than
at a take back the night rally or consultative meeting on institutional racism. While
women of the global south and disenfranchised communities of the north have been
active in vibrant anti-globalization protests, feminist scholars have been slower to
identify corporate globalization as central to their concerns. Gradually, a body of
knowledge is being developed that can serve as a valuable resource for feminist and
anti-racist organizers as well as anti-globalization activists. Research into sex
tourism, the trafficking of women, women as workers in the free trade zones and
homeworkers in the garment industry and women in the global food chain have all
demonstrated the centrality of black women and women of colour to the new global
regimes of accumulation (Phizacklea, 1990; Kempadoo, 1999; Ching Yoon 15

regimes that underpin these processes. The *prison-like” conditions under which
women labour in the free trade zones, with restricted access to restrooms, forced
overtime and punitive sanctions for union activities and pregnancy, have generated
considerable outrage among researchers and activists alike (Klein, 2001). The
confinement of increasing numbers of women in the prisons and jails of the global
north, where they are subject to separation, sometimes permanent, from children,
sexual abuse, medical neglect and forced labour has, however, been

muted. Perhaps the explanation for this muted response lies in a failure to connect
women's incarceration to the social, economic and environmental concerns
gencrated by the new global economy. The prison has traditionally served the
purpose of separating those who have “offended’ from the social body politic.
Prisoners are therefore seen as ‘criminals’ whose behaviour s qualitatively different
from that of *normal” people and maust therefore be analysed using different tools,
hence the existence of criminology as a distinet discipline. Yet if the complex web
that has led to the massive increases in women’s (and men’s) imprisonment docu-
mented in this article is to be understood and challenged, prisons must be liberated
from the criminologists and criminal justice professionals, and brought under the
scrutiny of anti-globalization, feminist and anti-racist scholars and activists. Prisons
serve a vital role in suppressing dissent and invisibilizing disenfranchised
populations. They therefore maintain the viability of corporate globalization and
mask its devastating effects on global majority communities. Prisons also play a
direct role in capital accumulation since their operation gencrates profit for
corporations engaged in building, equipping and operating them as well as those em-
ploying prisoners as cheap labour. Increasingly, black women and women of colour
are the raw material that fuel the prison industrial complex: as scapegoats of tough-
on-crime shetoric; targets of drug busting operations that generate millions for police,
customs and military budgets; or workers sewing and assembling clectronics in
prison workshops. There is a need for a new ant-racist feminism that will explore.
how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with
contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities. It must be
transnational in scope and womanistin is integrated analysis of gender-race- class
and in locating black women and women of colour at the centre. As the gendered and
racialized bodies that turn prison cells into profit margins, women of colour play a
vital role i the global prison industrial complex. As activists, inside and outside of
the prison walls, we are a critical part of the forces that are challenging its parasitic
existence. The challenge for scholars and activists alike is to make visible the women
hidden behind prison walls and to dismantle the profitable synergics between drug.
enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and
politicians that are celling black women in ever increasing numbers.

Notes:

1 Between 1999 and 2001 I interviewed S0 women in prisons in England, Canada
and the US. Al names of women prisoners are psyeudonyms.

2 The ‘threat” of drugs can be scen to be socially constructed in so far as some

16
drugs with addictive properties and damaging social consequences including
violence and theft (tobacco, alcohol) are sold to the public legally under government
license, and others (heroin, cannabis, cocaine) are criminalized. In addition,
substances that are llegal in one context (alcohol during Prohibition), may be
enjoyed legally in another. Others may be simultancously legal and illegal (medical
marijuana in California). Referring to *criminalized” rather than “illegal” drugs
reminds us that “the criminal’, like ‘the crime’ she commits are products of penal
regimes that shift over time.

3 Writing about gender and rac transnationally generates problems of naming, since
racial terms have different meanings depending on location. In this article, T use
“black’ as the common term for women of African, Caribbean and Asian origins in
Britain only; since *black’ i the US and Canada refers only to women of African
descent, T use ‘women of colour’ to refer to women of African, Asian, Latin
American and indigenous communitics transnationally. ] also use the term “women
of the global south” since this is now widely used by activists to refer to women in
what is often, and problematically called * the Third World".

4*The Crisis in Women’s Prisons', Press Release, Leeds Metropolitan University,
April 7, 1999 hitp//www.Imu.ac.uk/ news/press/archive/ api99/prisons htm.

5 British oficials have changed the way in which they report ethnic origin in order to
downplay the number of black women and men in prison. By excluding non Brit
passport-holders, the Home Office Research Development Statistcs unit has
“reduced” the proportion of African Caribbean women prisoners by 51% to 12% of
prisoners, compared to 1% of the general population (Elkins et al, 2001). However
this is revealed to be a sleight of hand if one considers the large number of black
Brifish residents who hold *commonwealth” passports

6 Between 1998 and 2000, Corrections Corporation of America (aka Prison Realty)
shares fell from $40 to 2, Wackenhut shares fell from $30 to $9 (Martin, 2001).

7 In September 2000, the State of Louisiana agreed in federal court o cease
contracting with privately run juvenile facilities afier an invastigation found boys in
Wackenhut's Jena facility had been abused with pepper spray and tear gas and denied
basic needs from underwear to food (Martin, 2001).

8 Kemba Smith's case is a composite of factors which make her both representative
ofand different from the majority of women incarcerated as a result of the war on
drugs. As an Affican American woman, young mother and victim of domestic
violence, she i typical enough to become a symbol of the anti-war on drugs
campaign. As a middle class, articulate student, she is clearly untypical, yet her class
status strengthens the message to ‘middle America’, that this could happen to *your
daghter’.

9 This has not been the case, instead, criminalization and targeting by law
enforcement artificially inflate the price of drugs, so that manufacturing, trafficking
and selling them become immensely profitable and increasingly associated with
violence. The crack-cocaine disparity also feeds the disproportionate impact on
women of mutually profitable relationship between law enforcement and the drug
trade has been labeled the *international drug complex” (Van Der Veen, 2000)

10 In Latin America, the war on drugs has been a military war.

Lovie, 2001; Shiva, 2001). Less attention has been paid to the repressive penal 17

Since 1989, Colombia has seen deployment of US military personnel, financial
assistance for policing, provision of aitack helicopters and weaponry 1o assist in the
fight against ‘narcoterrorists”. This fight has been closely associated with counter
insurgency measures against left wing guerillas such as the FARC and ELN and has
thus fuelled a bitter civil war. US counter-drug measures have also included spraying
of crops with herbicides including Agent Green which indigenous groups claim has
destroyed the rainforest and polluted the water table. For the impact of the war on
drugs on Colombian women, see Sudbury (2001).

11 Although Dutch coffee shops selling cannabis and the British practice of
prescribing to heroin addicts have gone largely unaffected by the 1988 Convention,
they are in opposition to and theoretically threatened by its provisions.

12 In Winter 2000, the Metropolitan Police received 800,000 British Pounds to carry
out Operation Crackdown, targeting low level dealers of crack and class A drugs on
ouncil estates in boroughs with large black populations. The Operation led to
surveillance of 700 private properties, over 80 raids and 1,000 arrests (*1,000
arrested in London Class A drugs offensive, Press release, Metropolitan Police 01
03/2001). An evaluation of the Operation found it had * litle discernible impact’ on
London’s crack trade which quickly adapted to meet continuing demand (Russell et
al..2001).

13 www.vegamedia.com/Jamaica.

18