A woman in prison is not a dangerous man.
Headline, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, July 3, 1996
An air of viciousness pervaded the whole place. Everyone was frightened of everyone else.
JOSIE O’DWYER, inmate, Borstal and Holloway prisons
When Dorothea Puente was convicted of homicide, she retraced the routes of her migrant childhood, back through the San Joaquin Valley of central California along Route 99, past orchards and almond groves to the Central California Women’s Facility, near the town of Chowchilla. From a distance, all one can see of CCWF are giant stadium lights rising in a ring along the flat plateau. Driving closer, along a one-lane highway, a complex of low, red brick bungalows comes into view. The prison is surrounded by two rows of electrified barbed wire fencing, fourteen feet high, nine feet apart, making it feel open and oddly transparent. Chowchilla, as it’s called, was built in 1987 to supplement the state women’s prison at Frontera, an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles. In less than ten years, CCWF’s population surged from two thousand to four thousand inmates and a sister facility opened across the highway in 1995. Christened the Valley State Prison for Women, it went immediately into overcrowding as well. In 1994, California women’s prisons received 592 new violent offenders, 1,454 property offenders, and 1,696 drug offenders. As of mid-December 1995, the state had 9,162 women in custody, for crimes ranging from armed robbery to drive-by shooting, smoking crack to dealing heroin, embezzlement to serial homicide.
The women at CCWF are divided into five yards, A through E, which consist of double-winged dormitories, each surrounded by an expansive lawn replete with baseball diamond, immovable metal patio furniture, flowerbeds, and gym weights. The only section of CCWF that truly resembles a prison are buildings 503 and 505. Each is two stories high, guarded by watchtowers, constructed of steel-reinforced brick, with narrow, enclosed cement exercise yards and steel-barred gates, which are incongruously painted pale pink. Each building has two floors (the second a catwalk) lined with rows of locked metal doors. Through small viewing windows, one can see the six-by-eight-foot cells, furnished with metal cots and lidless, stainless steel toilets. Building 503 is the gateway to CCWF, housing new inmates, no matter their crimes, for a minimum of five days. The purpose is to dry them out, calm them down, observe their behavior. Who’s going to be a troublemaker? Who gets assigned to which yard? Building 505 has two wings, each of which houses forty women at any given time, for two months to a year, after they’ve committed assaults or other serious infractions in their yards. Guards and visitors here are required to wear protective vests. Women in lockdown are not happy campers.
In the bottom right-hand corner of 505 is a corridor of nine cells with an outer perimeter of bars, which creates a narrow cage for residents to pace. This is death row, the rarest destination in the world for a woman of California. Only four women have been executed in the state in the twentieth century, the last one in 1962. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, no governor has signed a woman’s death warrant. When serial murderess Louise Peete taunted the U.S. Supreme Court by saying that “No gentleman would put a lady to her death,” she was almost entirely correct. The only four who lost that gamble in California were safely beyond the pale of voter sympathy—Peete herself, plus two notorious organized crime figures, and a woman who killed her husband for his money in the 1950s.
Today, there are six women on death row at Chowchilla. Mary Ellen Samuels hired her daughter’s fiancé to kill her Hollywood cinematographer husband. He wanted a divorce, and his life insurance was worth more than his alimony. Samuels then hired additional hit men to kill her daughter’s fiancé, and was photographed some months after the murders, lying nude on a hotel bed, in a bath of $100 bills. Rosie Alfaro was a drug addict who stabbed a nine-year-old girl fifty-seven times while robbing her home. Maureen McDermott was a respected nurse who hired a hit man to kill her female roommate for the mortgage on their house. Catherine Thompson killed her husband for his life insurance. Cynthia Lynn Coffman abducted and strangled two teenaged girls during a crime spree with her boyfriend, an ex-con known as the Folsom Wolf. Caroline Young slashed her two small grandchildren to death with a butcher’s knife to protest their father’s taking custody. (Their mother was in jail on a drug charge and hadn’t ever told the father that he’d sired her children. He found out when the state hit him with twelve thousand dollars’ worth of back pay for child support, at which point he requested, and gained, custody.) It is a testament to the arbitrariness of the death penalty that both Dorothea Puente and Carol Bundy are milling around in the yards.
To house the general population, all four women’s prisons in California are constructed as cottage-style compounds, the theory being that women don’t escape by digging tunnels or scaling walls. They don’t need to be confined in the sort of stone fortresses built for men. “I think women are escape risks, as much as men. Absolutely. It’s just that they don’t go over a gate. Here, they enlist help,” says CCWF Lieutenant Toby Wong, a convivial, suavely dressed man in his thirties. He is strolling the yards with his visitor, as relaxed and expansive as a real estate agent showing off a house, except that he has a black belt in karate and the house is ringed by scorching wire.
Wong moves through the compound, nodding to guards who sit in bubble-enclosed control booths. He sweeps his gaze back and forth for potential trouble and muses on the special challenges of guarding women. Correctional officers need to struggle with their own prejudices, he explains. They need to resist the sentiments that the Sacramento social work community invested in Dorothea Puente: that women who come to them, friendly and helpful, are not capable of using that cover to conceal a power play. “I tell my staff, ‘Never be alone with an inmate. I don’t want you set up, fool,’ “says Wong. “Men have a cover officer because they might get hurt. Here, you need one in case you get set up.” Indirect strategies of aggression are common in women’s prisons, perpetrated not only by inmates but by guards.
It’s lunchtime. Out in the yards, dozens of inmates suddenly emerge from the dorms and walk carefully along a prescribed path—no stepping on the grass—to the yard cafeteria, where they can pick up box lunches to take back to their rooms. Mostly in their twenties and thirties, the women’s faces are strikingly unhealthy, wan and pockmarked, their hair frizzed, sheenless and limp. They walk in twos and threes, dragging silently on cigarettes. Here and there a pair hold hands, until Wong discourages them with the mimed gesture of a slit throat: “Cut it out,” to which they respond with a shrug. Most of the women are dressed in bland, long-sleeved baseball shirts and jeans; others wear the prison-issue muumuu, a shapeless floral-patterned Hawaiian tunic, which resembles a large swath of drapery. One woman so dressed is tall, about five feet, eleven inches, with beefy arms and a hardened face. She walks flat-footed and lan-gorous, like a man made foolish in drag. The youngest women—who are, by all accounts, the toughest and craziest, the quickest to brandish a weapon—flash gang colors, red or blue around their neck or at their hip.
The inmates of Chowchilla reflect the full array of human temperament and desire. They have committed crimes of passion, greed, necessity, and want, because they’re unemployed, high, bummed out and fighting back, or because crime is a culture for them—it’s what they know. It’s estimated that about 20 percent of female inmates in most prison populations are psychopaths, like Dorothea Puente. The rest somehow just got lost along their way. Four in ten have a prior record for violent crime. A third are in prison for drugs. They dealt drugs, or stole for drugs, or committed assault, armed robbery, or homicide while high on drugs. Nationally, one in three women in American state prisons were serving time for drug offenses in 1991. One in four had committed a crime to get money to buy drugs. More women than men had used drugs in the month prior to their arrest, and more women were high at the time of their crime, including a quarter of the violent offenders.
To an inmate—gay or straight, stud or feminine, high or sober—the women of Chowchilla reveal nothing of themselves to the awkward gawker with a visitor’s pass. Their expressions are muted, concealed. Lunchtime is no time to reveal the complex relationships that women form within their prison world. “They’re not gonna be smiling,” says ex-inmate Marti Salas-Tarin. “They don’t got time for you. They stick to the schedule. Get up, go to work, go back to the dorm, do drugs.” Do a lot of other things, too. Fight, make love, run a thriving illicit economy, launch lawsuits, gather in groups to compare notes on abuse, and arrange themselves into an all-female hierarchy of power that combines masculine and feminine strategies of aggression in a virtually unprecedented way.
Thirty miles from Chowchilla, amid arid miles of ranch land, vineyards, and almond groves, lies the city of Merced, a port of call for the women who are released from CCWF equipped with a bus ticket and a pat on the back. There are no state-run halfway houses for women in Merced, but on a quiet street lined with dogwood and apple trees, a handful of ex-cons live together in a white wooden house with a wide front veranda. The place is called Miracle House, named by its founder, Marti Salas-Tarin, a charismatic and vivacious fifty-year-old who spent twenty years addicted to heroin. Salas-Tarin served one sentence in “the click,” as she calls prison, for dealing, which she had an immense talent for—she dealt in prison, too—and three more sentences for “dirty tests,” or violating parole on her first conviction. Eventually, she got sick of walking out of prison gates and plunging back into the gutter, so she went back to her Hispanic-Catholic roots, rediscovered church, and dusted herself off.
Now Salas-Tarin zips around Merced in her white Chevy pick-up with a bumper sticker that puns, “My hire power is Jesus Christ,” fenagling donations of furniture and food from neighborhood businesses, and persuading the Merced County District Attorney’s Office to steer women into her one-year halfway house program. She has a glossy tumble of jet-black hair and gorgeously large dark eyes, and when she’s on a business run, she dolls herself up in high heels, cherry-colored skirts, and gold hoop earrings. But her preferred form of dress is a turtleneck, jeans, and her own bare feet—a habit she formed when she was shoeless and adrift as a junkie, sleeping in the backs of wrecked cars. What Marti likes to say about her feet, and her drugs, and the noise of brawls and sex in prison, and the fact that she never quite managed to raise her two children, as well as every other detail in two decades of disastrous dishevelment, is this: “You can get used to anything.”
Salas-Tarin owns her own home right next door to Miracle House, so she can supervise her “girls” by padding back and forth across the grass. She lives with her electrician husband, Domingo, a soft-spoken sweetheart who stuck by her through her last stints in prison, and their bouncy black lab, Ishaia. In her living room, she sprawls on the sofa, like a down-home Cleopatra, regal and comfortable, one leg trailing the other on the floor, one arm slung over the back, waving her hand in the air. She keeps her big color television set on mute, tuned to a channel that displays the FBI’s most-wanted list. Marti’s life, her work, her friends, her politics, are dominated by the subject of prison. She hangs out with women who’ve been in the click, women who should probably have been there except that they never got caught, and women whose boyfriends and fathers and brothers are down at San Quentin or upstate in Pelican Bay.
Her friend Pauline calls collect from jail when Marti’s in the kitchen making a soup of tomatoes and tripe called menuto. Pauline’s bawling, she’s been hauled in with her daughter on a theft-for-drugs charge, and they’re both up against their third felony conviction, which, under California’s 1994 three strikes law, means that they face a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life. “Man,” Marti says, when she hangs up the phone, “you gotta pay more attention!” She’s equal parts mad at Pauline and at the system. Users don’t pay much mind to headlines. As a result, a lot of them are getting caught in the dragnet of the three strikes law and being thrown into prison for twice as long as someone like Karla Homolka.
While Marti frets about the fate of Pauline, she’s joined by Cat, a quiet woman with a slow, sweet smile who is round and plump, doubtless once voluptuous, now gray and bespectacled on the edge of sixty. Cat was Marti’s partner in crime for nearly two decades, both of them totally devoted to their drugs, ripping off whomever they could for a dime bag. Crime, for Cat, is a family business. Her husband is in prison. She hasn’t seen her only son in eighteen years, since he got sent to San Quentin, then up to Pelican Bay on a robbery-kidnap charge. She’s come to tell Marti that the parole board has turned her son down, again. “I’m glad he’s strong,” she says, and shows her only photograph of him, taken when he was a boy. “He’s a real tough character.” Cat’s life has been constant chaos, full of mundane deprivation and injustice, but she has her own apartment at the back of Miracle House now, and it’s a cozy nest of flowers and family pictures, like any other mother’s parlor.
The newest addition to Miracle House is Geita, an energetic platinum blonde with a wrinkled tan and candy-bright jewelry who usually lives in Las Vegas. Geita did time in Nevada for possession of crank, a mixture of crack and speed. Like Marti, she’s in her late forties. She has five kids, none of whom has been in touch with her since she went to jail. While her kids were still home with her, Geita’s preferred vice was pot smoking. But later, after she got divorced, someone introduced her to crank, and she got herself a steady, four-year shooting addiction, in the midst of which she swung a post-hole digger at her boyfriend, breaking his leg. Now she’s doing Marti’s program as a court-ordered alternative to a second jail sentence, this time for getting caught with crank paraphernalia in her trailer.
At first, Geita resented being in Marti’s program, because Geita hates rules and didn’t have much time for straight people, let alone church. But now, after a few months, she’s pretty keen on the arrangement. “Church is my new drug,” she says with a wide, white-toothed grin, her voice gravelly from cigarettes, “my new high.” People for whom addiction is a religion often turn to religion to give up their addiction. If Geita hadn’t stayed in Marti’s program and gotten clean, she’d have been sent to CCWF or Valley State, in and out again through the revolving door. Women’s prisons are no more likely to be filled with new faces than men’s prisons. Seventy-two percent of America’s female inmates have had prior incarcerations. The American media have a pronounced tendency to depict women in prison as melancholy daughters of virtue who are unjustly sentenced. They don’t need rehabilitation because as soon as they get out, they’ll rush back to their kids and start saving money for Christmas. The reality is that many of the female inmates are stoned when they’re arrested, stoned in the mix, and stoned all over again as soon as they hit the streets. Thanks to Marti, and no credit to the press or the state of California, Geita and Cat are now thinking of starting a beauty parlor. That, for both of them, would be a nice change.
Cat first went to prison in 1963 and has watched with some interest as the landscape around her unalterably shifted. “Back then,” she says, “it wasn’t but five hundred women. It was empty. The halls echoed. We didn’t have radios and TVs. White sheets was contraband. Had to be green. Our rooms was just regular. One woman to a room. It got better and better.” She smiles, amused. “I had rugs, curtains, fish. You could have pets. When I went in in ‘seventy-nine, the dress code had changed. Women was wearin’ mink coats, hats, leather. I mean everything! I thought: ‘I gotta dress and get down with ’em,’ because I wanted to be like everybody else, dress nice. My mother sent me what I wanted. We ended up havin’ a wardrobe there.” Now the dorms that echoed when one woman called to another to show off a fancy coat are crowded and increasingly tense, with eight women jammed into cells built for four, sharing one toilet with a chest-high window. Hundreds of other women at CCWF sleep in gray-blanketed bunkbeds in the prison gymnasium, as restless and displaced as evacuees.
No classification system exists for female offenders. Unlike men’s prisons, which are divided into different levels of security, most women’s prisons are indiscriminately filled with any female who happens to have committed a crime. Multiple murderesses mingle with check forgers, psychopaths share bunks with petty thieves. “I been in a room with a lifer, murderers,” says Cat. She crosses her arms. “They very serious.” Geita was in prison “with a woman who shot her old man up with Dràno. Another one went on a rampage in Reno and ran a bunch of people down with a car.” Imagine the junk bond trader Michael Milken sleeping three feet away from Charles Manson, or J. Gordon Liddy bunk to bunk with Ted Bundy.
Nor do prison officials honor the hierarchy of female transgression. Among inmates, killing children or infants is the least forgivable crime. “They’re so many [baby killers] here they could have their own fan club,” Lieutenant Wong says. “We have a lot of predatory women, too, a lot of sex offenders.” Indeed, one quarter of the women at CCWF are considered “maximum risks.” “Baby killers used to be in protective custody away from the population ’cause they caused a lot of violence,” says Marti on her sofa in Merced. But overcrowding jettisoned the luxury of separation. At present, only one unit at CCWF holds what Wong calls “disturbed characters,” which is to say those who are mentally ill. Otherwise, everyone’s shoulder to shoulder, creating an admixture of harmless and highly dangerous women that generates deep unease.
To quell chaos and achieve some semblance of security in a threatening environment, male prisoners create hierarchies of power, inventing a rigid code of conduct that they themselves police. They mete out their own justice, they run their own economy, they fight their own wars. Their laws have nothing to do with the guards’ laws or with the values of the world outside. A murderer whom we might revile in society might have very high status in Pelican Bay, while an essentially decent, mild-mannered man may be treated with utter contempt. “It’s all the way you carry yourself,” says Cat, reflecting on her son’s journey through California’s toughest lock-downs. “My baby, he went in fightin’. That’s how he gained his respect.” It’s also why he now gets turned down for parole. “My husband, they call him the Professor. They respected him a lot in there. They left him alone.”
What men import from the outside is a basic idea of how to build their power structures. Prison gangs, for instance, are no different than the gangs on the streets of L.A. The members know how to follow laws of respect—how to gain it, how to use it as deterrence against unprovoked assaults. Men bring military, corporate, or street experience with them into prison. They know how to vie for status in a strictly impersonal way.
Women, on the other hand, tend to have little or no familiarity with combat in a public arena. They possess no repertoire of in-your-face aggressive postures. Karla Homolka and Myra Hindley and Marybeth Tinning hadn’t been socialized to order themselves into an impersonal hierarchy with explicitly enforced rules, based on formal expressions of status rather than relational alliances. Yet when they entered prison, heterosexual femininity was suddenly the least valuable currency. For the first time in many of their lives, women must find a way to build a system of power and privilege that has nothing to do with men.
Although some feminists would argue that no such hierarchy need exist, that women can fall into a healing harmony side by side, the reality is more complex. Female prisoners are not peace activists or nuns who were kidnapped off the street and stuck in jail. They are miscreants, intemperate, willful, and rough. Conflicts flare, and because there is no stable hierarchy, they flare with the frequency of brush fires, with no mechanism for containment. Infraction rates against prison rules are extremely high in women’s prisons. Nationally, in 1986, female inmates racked up an average of two infractions per year versus 1.4 for males. In England, “the incidence of violence in women’s [prisons] is two and a half times higher than in men’s.” A study of the two female prisons in Texas, Gatesville and Mountain View, found that women committed 3,698 infractions against prison discipline in one year, nearly five times the rate at which male inmates were cited. Among the women’s ten most common infractions were striking an officer, fighting without a weapon, damaging or destroying property, and creating a disturbance. More offenses “of a threatening, violent or sexual nature” were cited against women than men.
“You can get into a fight every ten seconds in here if you want to,” an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State told Psychology Today. “I figured that I was going to spend the rest of my life locked up … so what the hell? A lot of the women here feel the same way. Just look at them the wrong way and they’ll go right for your eyes.” Says Marti: “Sometimes the fights are out of the blue, especially when you gonna eat, you don’t mess with that. You better not be crowding—a fight will start.”
Flare-ups also ignite over trade in the illicit prison economy, in particular the buying and selling of dope. “I seen a woman that’s got AIDS shootin’ AIDS blood at a woman who can’t pay,” recalls Cat. “I seen a girl’s head put down in one of those industrial kitchen mixers, tore off the top of her head. You can’t pay, they’re serious.” They’re serious, but in a much less systematic or decisive way than men are. “My old man was in Folsom,” says Geita. “Some of the stories he told me … cold-blooded. He’s seen men die for a cigarette. Men have an image to live up to. If you’re weak, you’re through. Women are more into trying to heal each other. Still,” she adds, “a deal’s a deal. If you say you’re gonna do something, do it. Don’t play games.”
Men in American prisons are far more likely to commit homicide. As their hierarchies are more strict, so, too, are their penalties. “Men stab each other,” says Wong, “but here they use weapons to disfigure each other, curling irons, razor blades, locks in a sock. Throwing hot liquids at each other. Their issues are drug-related or lovers’ quarrels or sexual misconduct.” Both women’s weaponry and their “issues” are fashioned from what is at hand, in a world where gender roles and power strategies are suddenly up for grabs.
The sense of urgency women feel when they first enter prison—to locate themselves, connect, find a safe point of reference when the codes are scarily cryptic—leads them to adopt a variety of tactics that are, in effect, wild guesses about how to survive. One tactic is to emulate masculine violence. Josie O’Dwyer entered the British penal system at the age of fourteen, convicted of a relatively harmless robbery. O’Dwyer had never shown a predilection for physical aggression, but when she entered the Borstal prison, she quickly decided that force was her best option for feeling secure. The way she saw it, if she didn’t fight the guards, they wouldn’t respect her. They’d abuse her privileges. If she didn’t fight the other girls, she wouldn’t gain any “credit,” the ultimate objective being to be left alone. So she fought like hell and achieved a traditionally masculine attitude toward violence. “When I came out of Borstal my ambition in life was to be the top dog, the most hardened criminal, the most vicious,” she wrote in her memoir.
According to research in both Britain and the United States, young women are by far the most physically aggressive inmates in their prisons. Maybe they’re more insecure, or more impulsive and defiant, but certainly O’Dwyer’s tactic was one she was more apt to adopt than older, more seasoned inmates like Marti and Cat. At nineteen, when O’Dwyer was in London’s Holloway prison, she took on Myra Hindley. She didn’t know how high up Hindley was in the prison hierarchy, only that the famous serial murderess had killed children. She attacked Hindley in a dimly lit hallway. “Her nose was crossed to the left side of her face, I’d split her lip, her knee and her ear, and she had two black eyes.” O’Dwyer had, in fact, been set up: Holloway’s guards had deliberately exposed her to news clippings about Hindley, then waited for her to explode. Apparently, Myra Hindley was subjected to this kind of set-up every few years. Unlike the prisoners, who could engage in overt aggression, the female guards were still beholden to conventional gender rules. Their aggression was indirect.
Over the years, as O’Dwyer weaved in and out of prison, psychiatrists variously described her as a “paranoid schizophrenic” and “a psychopath.” She felt they were completely missing the effect of imprisonment itself on the behavior of women. “They always asked me about my early life but not about what had happened to me in those institutions since the age of fourteen.” Prison, for women, can be a transforming experience; in this milieu, it is undeniably culture that dictates how violence bursts forth.
Nevertheless, scholars have generally failed to delve into female inmate aggression, according to criminologist Clemens Bartollas. “Most researchers have focused on the pseudo-family relationships” that women form, their nurturant roles. Apropos of his observation, the one scholar to do a thorough study of Chowchilla’s population, the feminist criminologist Barbara Owen, told a criminology conference in 1994 that “women’s prison is completely different than men’s. The women are all really supportive, really nurturing of each other.” Yet one of the few academic studies to focus on hierarchy building in women’s prisons confirmed O’Dwyer’s experience, in that women who “had established reputations for being able to fight and otherwise physically defend themselves” achieved high status, getting first choice of drugs, for instance, as well as their sexual pick of the new girls. Also high in the hierarchy are white women, who can manipulate preferential guard treatment and get guards to run interference. Men tend to settle disputes among themselves, valuing inmate solidarity above all else. But women will appeal to staff for mediation, or as a means of setting one another up. “You constantly have to watch your back,” notes Toni Cato about her own life at the Scott Correctional Facility in Michigan, “because you never know who may wake up wrong or think you’re out to take their woman away from them and try and set you up, by putting a razor or stolen food from the kitchen in your room.” A study of inmate strategies at Frontera in California found that up to 90 percent of the inmates had acted as snitches. “Women watch each other,” says Wong, “who’s twisted around whose finger, who’s seeing who. Allegations can bury you whether they’re valid or not.”
Dorothea Puente has solid rank at CCWF, partly because of her crimes, which make her deadly, and partly because she spent a lot of time while out of prison sending care packages of Levi’s jeans and other prized possessions to the right people in prison, so that they’d owe her if she had to go back. Marti Salas-Tarin possessed a similar instinct, which was to grease the wheels: to head her potential combatants off at the pass by offering something they wanted. “You follow the flow there,” she explains. “If you think you’re better, they’ll beat you up. If you don’t want to be tough, you become tough, if you’re not a lesbian … most of the young girls get caught up in that, because they want to be popular. I wasn’t a lesbian in there, but I was respected. I hung with all the heroin addicts, and they knew that I worked in the infirmary. I had access to all the needles. So I was their connection.”
One of Marti’s cellmates was a rich Filipina who’d been caught embezzling. Terrified of prison, she threw money at the problem, buying her safety from Salas-Tarin. “Drugs, food, whatever I wanted— for protection. ’Cause she was in the click, man! And she was scared. So she paid me to look out for her.” Another cellmate was a fortyish blonde from Los Angeles whom everyone called Blondie. For her sense of safety, Blondie opted for the most successful tactic in the outside world, but the most disastrous one in prison: the maiden-in-distress motif. “One of the guards was fucking her for nothing. She saw it as, like, a romance!” says Marti, her astonishment vivid on her face. “I said, ‘Blondie, you gotta get something out of it, girl!’ ” Sure enough, the guard was shortly transferred to another prison and didn’t so much as bid Blondie good-bye.
White women seem more prone to throwing themselves at the mercy of their jailers, whether through sex, romantic manipulation, or by seeking out protection through medical attention. White inmates are reportedly more likely than any other women to receive mental health care in prison and to use prescription drugs. Black women believe this is because whites are more shocked by prison. “Your average drug user knows there’s a possibility they’ll go to prison,” says one African-American inmate, “but a lot of white women are in denial. Prison is something they didn’t envision in their future, they’re more traumatized by it, more afraid of their surroundings. You see a lot more of them in the line-ups for meds.” White girls, according to this same inmate, “Jane,” are also more likely to seek out and receive protective custody. “Coming in, you have to spend time in reception. They will put white women in a priority cell because they are worried about their safety. Maybe they think they’re weaker, or they care more.”
Indeed, it is white heterosexual women, with their more traditional guise of femininity and “weakness,” whose power plays succeed with prison officials, judges, parole boards, the media. They are the ones who get interviewed by journalists, who get the best jobs working in administration, who get released and go on to lecture others on the conditions of female imprisonment, playing to the script of feminine virtue. “White women get to come out of ninety-day mandatory work schemes quicker,” says Jane, “they get into programs quicker, this is commonplace. In the last six weeks, all the white women who came in are now in better jobs with better status— law library clerk, tutor, administration. White women see themselves as more entitled. Many of them come in with their Jean Harris attitude. They’ve owned their home, they have strong family ties. Do they see themselves as better? Yes. And I have to say they’re better equipped to negotiate the system.”
What most women inmates have in common, regardless of race or class, is a desire to be romantically linked to another inmate as the basis for their personal security. If men join gangs in prison to secure their sense of safety, women join “families.” They become, to a remarkably high degree, homosexual for the duration of their stay behind bars. Lesbianism in prison has little to do with lesbianism as a sexual preference on the outside. California inmates and correction officers estimate that actual lesbians make up about 20 percent of the yard population. Beyond that particular group, perhaps another 60 percent of inmates “turn” in their yards, forming relationships with other women and going back to their husbands and boyfriends as soon as they’re released.
That women, crime, and aggression should come together in many people’s minds as an image of Big Betty, the antifeminine butch dyke who couldn’t get a man, means, of course, that lesbian stereotypes flourish in popular depictions of prison life. A rash of prison chick flicks in the 1970s, which for some reason always starred Linda Blair of The Exorcist, invariably counterposed nice girls with large, leering “lesies” wielding weapons. The iconography angered some feminist cultural critics so much that they vigorously countered the images by arguing that there weren’t any lesbians in prison, and if there were, they looked and acted just like other women.
“Common messages gleaned from female prison films, none of which are supported by observations of actual women in institutions,” Karlene Faith wrote recently, “include … [the messages that] women locked up are masculine, and do routine physical damage to one another” and that a “disproportionate number of women in prison are lesbians,” caricatured as “macho heterosexual men.” Well, in fact, although the B movies are salacious and cartoonish, and split their characters into a dichotomy of virtuous feminine and amoral unfeminine, the truth is that there are inmates in each North American women’s prison who transform themselves into the equivalent of macho heterosexual men. In California, they’re known as the stud broads.
There are only two stud broads in B Yard this noontime, one is African American, tall and broad-shouldered, with gnarled rasta hair and a distinctive mustache. She lopes, moving from her shoulders rather than her hips, projecting an air of supreme self-assurance. The other stud is white, with a brush cut and a goatee. She is shorter, but wiry and muscled, like a marine. There is no point in saying she. These are not women imitating men. They don’t look campy, like the woman in the muumuu. They have achieved an almost pure masculinity. Their transformation takes your breath away.
“The girls loved the studs to death, man. ’Cause they looked like men!” says Marti, explaining what she saw as a pretty obvious equation. “That’s your mentality when you’re in prison for a while.” Women don’t want to date women, they want to date men. Moreover, women don’t feel secure in an environment as volatile as prison by partnering up with another woman. They feel secure by seeking out the tough, strengthening shelter of a man. “Usually the girls who turn are young,” says Marti. “When they walk in, there’s like a hundred stud broads standing there fishing. They’re like, ‘Oh, man, look at that one, I want that one.’ And pretty soon they know what room the new girls are in, and they’re sending them candy, they’re sending them cigarettes, a pair of 501s.… And the [young girls] are naive, you know. So they hang onto the stud broads for this stuff, for protection. The cute girls get turned out right away.” The relationships may or may not be sexual, depending upon the women. They are rather more marriages of convenience, like political or economic alliances, ceremonially consolidated. “They get married in there, too, you have a ceremony. Another stud that’s been there a while will marry you, she’s like a priest. They’ll just invite certain people.”
Which way the cute girls turn—toward the feminine or the masculine—is one of the most fascinating aspects of women’s prison culture. “There was this girl named Blanca at Chowchilla,” Marti remembers, “she looked exactly like a boy, she was bea-u-tiful. Real cute face. Blond. Every girl in Chowchilla wanted to be with her, that’s why they’d go to the chapel, just to see her.” Blanca had a boyfriend on the outside, and whenever he came to visit, she kicked off her droopy, slim-hipped men’s jeans, pulled off her muscle T-shirt, and slapped on some makeup. She was living two lives, the allure of the feminine, the command of the masculine. “Blanca used to tell me, ‘Marti, pray for me. I want to be a man.’ “
At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, stud broads are known as aggressors. One winter afternoon, in the prison’s bright, tidy administrative offices, an aggressor named Mohammad strolled in and sat down warily for an interview. Mohammad, whose first name is actually Arlene, is a handsome woman in her forties with crimped hair, cut close to her head, graying at the temples. She sports a tasteful burgundy sweater and an elegant pair of men’s tasseled loafers, and plants her feet firmly on the floor when she sits, her hands held loosely in her lap in a posture of relaxed self-possession. Mohammad isn’t as flamboyantly masculinized as the California studs. She has no visible facial hair, for one thing. Her sexual preference is more internalized, less connected to the power structure of prison itself. “I’d never heard the word aggressor before I came here in ‘eighty-four,” she says. “Prior to coming to prison, I’d been called stud, dyke, bull dagger, it changes with the years. I don’t change. I’ve been gay since I was fourteen.” Mohammad’s experience of being gay on the outside, where homosexuality is not the norm or an arrangement of expedience, makes her particularly sensitive to the negative stereotypes. So, one of the first things she wants known is that aggressors are not the ones who corrupt straight women. “A lot of people think that when a young woman comes in here, she’s not given a chance, she’s hit on by a bunch of women dressed like men. It’s the total opposite. There’s so few aggressors (five to eight to a unit) that we’re like the woman going alone to a singles bar, who gets hit on. If you happen to be gay before you get in, you’re even more popular. People say, ‘Hey, she’s the real thing.’ “
If you’re not gay when you go in, then, like Blanca, you find yourself with a choice that no one ever offered you before. “Feminine women are making little aggressors out of the [new girls],” says Mohammad, “and [because] they haven’t been in the world long enough to know their own sexuality,” they’re responsive. How they dress themselves and what posture they adopt depends to a large degree on the fashion of the times. “The same way you see fads on the street, certain lifestyles, that’s carried over to prison.” says Mohammad. “You’ll find that the younger aggressors have their pants hanging off their butts.”
But how deeply do these superficial fads penetrate women’s sexual identities? There is a vigorous debate about this within women’s prisons. According to Mohammad, women who “turn” in prison will probably continue to explore their bisexuality. “I think a very high percentage will go home to a husband and have, every now and then, a liaison with a woman. They are exposed to something here they didn’t know existed before in themselves.” To what? A transmutation of sexual boundary, a leveling of the playing field where gender is concerned, an altogether different sensation of power. “When Blanca got outta there,” says Marti, “we set her up with Victory Outreach [a Christian, largely Mexican, program]. She completely changed and went back to being a girl, a lady. She goes: ‘You know what was the hardest thing for me to do when I went in this program? They told me, “You got to take off those boxers and put on a dress.” I cried and cried for about two weeks, and then finally I put the dress on.’ “
Mohammad’s friend Precious Bedell, who is working on her master’s degree while serving time for homicide, wrote a play about the transmutations women undergo in prison. One of the scenes, published in Prison Life, involves an aggressor named Moneylove discussing gender with a feminine woman named Sandy, who calls Moneylove “Mr. Career Criminal.”
MONEY: That’s me, but don’t change the gender, baby. Ms. suits me.
SANDY: Oh, so today you want to be a woman?
MONEY: Come on now, baby. I have no illusions about who or what I am. I’m just aggressive and prefer men’s attire.
Most stud broads and aggressors view themselves as women, and the physical differences between them and feminine women can be quite subtle, depending upon the individual and the institution. What generates the argument is that some appropriate masculine strategies of domination. “You can use women,” Cat points out. “They can do a lot of things that you want done. If you stupid or weak enough to get caught up in that, they’ll use you sexually, or make you their maid, or whatever, make you run dope.” Abuses of power by aggressors are the subject of heated debate for women inmates. “Lesbianism is not the issue,” wrote Washington State inmate Veronica Compton (partner of the Hillside Strangler) in a guest editorial in Prison Life:
Lesbianism is, ideally, women loving other women. What I oppose are women who … act as oppressive male figures wielding control and power over other people.… What’s especially tragic is that a woman finds her misogynist in other women inmates, not just staff.
Some Bedford Hills aggressors unquestionably replicate the behaviors of misogyny: stringing along three or four girlfriends at a time, making their girls cook and iron for them, smacking them if they step out of line. This, at least, was the observation of former inmate Jean Harris. She recalls one inmate wailing, “What did I do, Tony? I did it all just the way you told me. I can’t do any more. How can you be mad at me, Tony?” At least one scholar records that aggressors set up a system of tribute, in the manner of feudal lords.
Stud broads and aggressors may have high status within the inmate social world, but they are not the ones who benefit from guard treatment, because unlike tough heterosexual women or celebrity inmates, their prestige is narrowly confined to their yards. “The famous white girls like Amy Fisher and Pamela Smart, that type, always get into relationships with African-American women,” says Jane. “Maybe in their minds they feel safer. But any black girl who goes with them is running a big risk. You got a double whammy of white and celebrity. When a black woman and a white woman get into an argument, and the white woman [tells the guard], ‘She made me buy a pair of sneakers,’ the black girl goes to lockdown for extortion, even if the truth is exactly the opposite. White girls are believed faster.” Where most guards are concerned, African-American aggressors are nothing more or less than the B movie stereotype of butch dykes. “Do we feel [homophobia] in the judicial system?” Mohammad asks. “Most definitely. Are aggressors treated differently than feminine women? Sure. Both inside and outside of prison.”
Whether women’s conflicts take the form of direct assault or indirect set-up, the emotional currents running through their prisons as a result of relational power structures contribute in large part to the volatility. According to a national survey of correctional officers in America, women inmates were overwhelmingly viewed as more “emotional, temperamental, moody, manipulative, quarrelsome and excitable.” Correctional officers in women’s institutions have far more complicated relationships with their charges than those in men’s prisons, partly because women inmates involve the guards in their politics with other inmates, and partly because the guards get sexually or romantically involved with their charges. The survey found that female officers considered women to be more difficult to manage than men, while for male officers the reverse was true, suggesting that each sex has less tolerance for and less interest in the power plays of its own gender. “Women’s view of women differs substantially from men’s,” says Lieutenant Wong. “Women know when women are lying. Men can get twisted around. Female officers will arrest and cite twice as many women as men do.”
Corrections officials, like most people, feel they need to be gentler with women than with men. So instead of enforcing order by roughing up the miscreants, they barrage the women with teensy, stupid rules, adding fuel to a blazing fire. “Possession of contraband” may mean stashing drugs, but it as easily refers to having a postage stamp in one’s room (prohibited at Bedford Hills), or candy, or a borrowed comb. “Trafficking” can refer equally to selling heroin, as Marti did, or sharing shampoo in the shower. The regulations can be so oppressively petty that they wind women up to levels of teeth-grating irritability. The effect is compounded by the fact that women tend to be less fearful of their guards.
“My hardest problem has been authority,” says Geita. “All the prison guards were young.”
Marti leaps in: “And they’re trying to tell a woman forty-five years old what to do?” She raises her brows.
Responds Geita: “You want to slap ’em. They write the rules in pencil so they can erase ’em and change ’em when they want to.”
“You give ’em respect, they’ll give you respect,” cautions Cat.
Women want to understand the meaning behind a rule and, in prison at least, are more likely to argue its merit. Research on gangs in Los Angeles reveals that girls, too, are less likely than boys to follow a rule just because it exists, and will do something on behalf of the gang only if they judge it to be worth their while. In prison, getting hit with a rule violation for something like sharing shampoo can escalate into an argument between inmate and guard until she gets lockdown for threatening an officer or ripping up her cell. “Negative feelings toward staff lead inmates to respond emotionally to some minor event, which serves to confirm the staff in its perceptions” of women as moody and quarrelsome, notes the author of the study on infraction rates in the two Texas prisons for women. Interestingly, however, the study found that the one difference between the two prisons studied was that the maximum-security facility had fewer problems than the facility with all different sorts of inmates mixed together.
The Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario, to which Karla Homolka was assigned in 1993, resembles an old stone dungeon. Until it shut down in the summer of 1996, the prison held 120 women, nearly 25 percent of whom were serving life sentences for violent crime, in extremely restive conditions. On April 22, 1994, six inmates attacked four guards in a preplanned escape attempt outside B Range, a high-security segregation area like CCWF’s Building 505. The guards, all of whom were female, were put in chokeholds, punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, stabbed with a hypodermic needle, and assaulted with scissors and a telephone ripped from the wall. When one guard went to another’s aid, inmate Joey Twins grabbed her around the throat and went for her keys: “Don’t push me, Boston,” Twins warned, “I’ve got a shiv and I’ll stick you.” A male guard arrived, tried to subdue her, and got kicked in the testicles. The guards finally regained control by using Mace. They returned the inmates to their cells but forgot to strip-search them for weapons.
P4W (as Prison for Women is called) rapidly lost control of the situation; the hostility between the guards and the prisoners grew so intense that B Range geared up to full revolt, with noise levels so loud that “cell bars were vibrating.” The inmates set fires, flung urine, and threatened guards’ lives. One woman tried to hang herself. Another slashed her body with scissors, getting bloodier and bloodier and demanding that the guards let her out of her cell.
On April 26, guards demanded that the warden bring in an “Institutional Emergency Response Team” from the nearby men’s prison. The demand was to result in a national scandal. The all-male IERT stormed in, strip-searched eight inmates, and placed them, half-naked, in full-body restraints, all of which they videotaped, as was standard procedure in the prison that the IERT members worked in. Because the inmates were women, however, the strip-search became front-page news. “I felt very degraded,” Brenda Morrison, who was serving five years for armed robbery and aggravated assault, told a federal commission of inquiry. “How can they walk in there, rip my clothes off and say it’s okay? I don’t know how any man could do that to a woman and say it was their job. As far as I know, it’s a crime.” Reporters covering the inquiry described Morrison as “dabbing at tears” while she gave her account. An expert who saw the IERT videotape described what they had done as “a little like shoving a gun down the mouth of a woman—I mean, it’s a very phallic act.”
According to the Toronto Globe & Mail, an internal inquiry into the uprising “paint[ed] a picture of the prison as a place that has tended to view women as victims, and so has been ill prepared to deal with inmates who are manipulative and capable of serious violence.” Ultimately, all the guards involved took prolonged mental health leave. Two transferred out of the prison, and one quit the business. “Noting the inevitable problems posed by trying to house prisoners requiring different levels of security in one institution,” the Globe reported, “the report [also] recommends that violent inmates be housed in a facility separate from the general population.” Yet in 1996, P4W’s inmates were farmed out to smaller institutions. None of them were maximum-security. Canada’s federal department of corrections opened a new facility in Edmonton, Alberta, for all the prairie region’s female inmates, and designed it along minimum-security guidelines, responding to arguments made by Canada’s Elizabeth Frye Society that women are only in prison because of men’s abuse, and that if you treat them with respect, they’ll conduct themselves with dignity. No security fence was erected around the perimeter, and no locks were put on the “bedroom” doors. Within the first six months, 25 percent of the inmates escaped. One inmate was apparently hanged in her room by others who simply let themselves in.
Since the P4W uprising, according to Irving Kulik, deputy commissioner of Corrections Canada, federal prison policy has been to back away from the rigid rules for minor infractions so apt to fan inmate frustration. Women, the deputy said, are not charged if they’re caught with small amounts of drugs. Although this sounds compassionate and rational, letting women dope themselves so that they’ll remain passive in prison is not a new managerial strategy. “Mostly everybody that wasn’t a heroin addict [before] was on heroin in Chowchilla,” points out Marti. “That is the god honest truth. I had girls that were, like, ‘Do me, do me.’ Everyone’s strung out.” The same is true, apparently, at New York’s Bedford Hills. “I lost a friend to AIDS,” reflects Mohammad, “after she got addicted to drugs in here.” Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the one drug that agitates the addict—crack—is nowhere to be seen in prisons, whereas drugs that pacify, such as heroin and hashish, are abundant. Coincidence or no, the fact that so many women do time in the first place for drug-related crime is hardly assisted by their continuing substance abuse in the mix. “Why do you think the courts send me the girls?” Marti demands. “Because they know. They ain’t gonna learn nothing in there. You know what I’m saying? It’s a big old game.” In the absence of a rational corrections strategy for handling female inmates, doping them may be the only unofficial alternative. The use of prescription drugs like sedatives and tranquilizers is five times higher in female prisons than in male prisons. Drugs, according to British scholar Alexandra Mandarakka-Sheppard, are “for the purpose of social control and not for the genuine help of prisoners.”
When we focus our scant attention on female prisoners, fixating almost exclusively on wrongly imprisoned battered wives, we generate the impression that women just sit around looking pensive and fragile, awaiting rescue, like Rapunzel from her tower. It is not a blessing for female inmates to be viewed this way, because we don’t ask if they’re receiving parenting skills, vocational training, drug treatment, or adequate security. We don’t provide them with halfway houses upon their release, and we don’t care that they’re all thrown together into homogeneous compounds—the most violent and volatile in the mix with those who are sane and kind. We may hope to give “wrongly punished wives” a benevolent, cottage-style purgatory from which they can escape as soon as they file an appeal, but for corrections departments across North America, that vague sentiment translates into a mandate for warehousing. Lieutenant Wong spelled out the approach of his institution: “Our obligation is to safely house inmates. Curing them, as adults, is nearly impossible. They have so few resources on the street that they have it better in here.”
Where this presents a particular problem is in the rise of violence by younger women, in terms not only of numbers but degree. “There’re a lot of younger girls now, coming in from the gangs,” says Marti. “Yesterday, I saw a girl that was in for a drive-by shooting. She shot a girl. She’s gonna do a long time. The gang girls think they’re tough, they think they’re bad. When you go into the prison, you can do your time easy, or you can do your time hard. And we did easy. Never wanted to beat anybody up. [These girls] make weapons with razor blades. They’re tough, man. They don’t want to go straight. They’re rebellious.”
“Prison very much reflects the world,” says Mohammad. “As society becomes more chaotic and violent, so does prison. When I came in, you respected those inmates who were older. Now, [new inmates] tend to be drawn to one another, to run in groups. There was no older person in their life, so there’s disrespect. I hear it every day. There was no father, the mother was an alcoholic or a drug addict. They lacked the love. A lot of them are mothers themselves now, they’re twenty-year-olds leaving four children behind in foster care. They don’t know the first damn thing about parenting.” Increasingly disconnected from the network of kinship that supposedly endows women with an ethic of care and keeps their aggression suppressed, these young women are game to display physical violence. Neither prison officials nor the unstable female prison hierarchy are prepared for the effect that a young, violent inmate population will have. “We don’t have the role models we used to,” says Mohammad. “Aggressors look to me for advice and as a role model. But there are less and less of us. To know that [in the future] there won’t be any mentoring is scary.”
One can predict with some confidence that Mohammad will be left to grapple with that concern on her own in the future. Like battered men and lesbians, female inmates are outcasts on a barren island in our thinking about violence. Myths about female nature govern the way they are treated and guarded, to their own detriment. Should it matter? Is the problem so large? Male inmates, after all, fall victim to rape, assault, and murder, and we consider it the price that they pay for their crimes. But male inmates expect to pay that price, and have acquired the skills for survival. What do female inmates expect? Perhaps, if they knew, Mohammad’s future would be a little less scary.