The majority of offenses committed by women are nonviolent drug and property crimes, motivated by poverty and addiction. Most women offenders are under thirty years old, and are disproportionately low-income, black, and didn’t complete high school.
The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for white women is 1 in 118; for black women, it’s 1 in 19.
Now that I’d begun seeing the full picture, I couldn’t keep silent about it. I went around disrupting meetings, fussing at anyone and everyone who had some power. I’d jump to my feet, shout out the uncomfortable truth. I had no desire to play nice or polite about issues that were crushing people.
When I showed up to the Watts Labor Community Action Committee for a “Day of Dialogue” program about police and community relations, my hand was soon waving in the air. “We need police accountability,” I called out. “All of us here in South L.A. know police misconduct isn’t a new thing. It’s never not been happening.”
This was in the early 2000s, before everyone had a cell phone with a camera or video recorder in their pocket. The brutal 1991 beating of Rodney King had exposed to the world American police acting with impunity. But, unlike the way it was portrayed by the media, this wasn’t a rare occurrence. Something as minor as jaywalking routinely landed a black man facedown on the street, his hands slapped with cuffs. Power was a beast, and it was hungry, especially in poor communities where citizens had little recourse.
“The equipment at their disposal could decimate an entire neighborhood,” I continued, in front of the full meeting room. “It’s frightening to think what they’re capable of doing to us at the drop of a dime.” The militarization of police weaponry had started in L.A. with the creation of the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit in reaction to the Watts riots. But it didn’t stop there. Under the nearly fifteen-year reign of Police Chief Daryl Gates, the War on Drugs became literal, with officers in war gear, busting through houses with the infamous armored B-100 battering ram. “It’s like state-sanctioned murder,” I said.
At this point, I sensed others in the crowd getting riled up too. I continued on, mentioning K.K.’s death, but one of the facilitators interrupted me.
“Ma’am,” she said. “That doesn’t matter.”
“How dare you,” I said. “How can you be a conflict resolution facilitator and say my son’s death doesn’t matter?” I rose, slinging my purse over my shoulder. “I’m not going to participate in any sham-ass meeting,” I said, and marched out. To my surprise, more than half the crowd followed me.
But a bespectacled man trailing after us wasn’t happy with me: City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. He’d founded this “Day of Dialogue” event several years earlier, after watching the verdict of the O. J. Simpson trial divide his city and the nation.
“We have some simple rules of the road here,” he called after me. “Everybody listens to everybody else, and everybody has an opportunity to be heard. I know that can be frustrating for those who are a bit more . . . spontaneous.”
I turned to face him. Mr. Ridley-Thomas was a rising political star—he’d go on to the state assembly and then to become L.A. County supervisor—but I was frustrated by some of his tough-on-crime stances. Just like most every policymaker and elected official, he knew it was political suicide to be soft on crime—though I wondered if that put a black man such as himself, born and raised in L.A., at odds with his personal beliefs.
“You mentioned you have an organization?” he said.
I told him about A New Way of Life.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Right here in Watts.”
“Well, I’m coming over there. I’m going to do to A New Way of Life what you’ve done to my meeting today. I’m going to tear it up.” But his voice was chiding, not angry. And, together, we laughed. Some years later, he’d tell me he had sensed something about my spirit that day. That, alongside my nonconformity, he saw a goodness in me, and that’s what had compelled him to follow me out of the meeting room.
Mark Ridley-Thomas would, indeed, visit A New Way of Life, though he’d do the opposite of tearing things up. “What you’re doing here grounds my perspective,” he would tell me. “This makes it clear what the issues are, what people’s journeys and struggles are, and roots the policies that we’re trying to advance. It keeps it real.” He would go on to put solid and heartfelt action behind his words.
While I saw firsthand the power of my voice to inspire, I also realized I was raw, and my words were crude. If I was going to continue speaking out, I needed to get myself a better vocabulary. It wasn’t as though I had extra time on my hands, but I knew that continuing my education was crucial. I enrolled in Southwest College in psychology and chemical dependency counseling.
Sitting in a classroom brought back memories of when I was a little girl and school was my safe place. I wasn’t only learning about psychology, I was learning about myself. I delved further into the study of family dynamics, noticing similar dynamics in the lives of most of the women at A New Way of Life. Like me, they’d been conditioned to have low or no expectations of themselves or others. Also, like me, they’d turned to using. When all around you life was hard and unfair, when you were filled with rage and you didn’t know where to put it, why wouldn’t you seek a way to numb yourself? But what started as an attempt to find some relief went on to become an illness. Because it’s what they saw, the next generation followed your lead, and then the next. And, now, generations in, it had become just the way things are, a treacherous form of normal.
For three years, I took night courses, lugging my textbooks all around town, studying at the kitchen table of A New Way of Life, reading by my mother’s bedside when she took ill. At last, I completed my certificate. Though I had dreams of going on to a university and pursuing a degree, my advocacy work had taken over. A Ph.D. wasn’t going to happen. But that was okay; life was earning me a Ph.Do.
When the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, released a 2004 report entitled “Breaking the Barriers for Women on Parole,” a photo of me, in cap and gown, at my graduation from Southwest College, appeared on the cover.
Spurred on by this report about the unique issues affecting women in the correctional system, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger created the Gender Responsive Strategies Commission and appointed me one of ten commissioners. Among the state and local officials, criminologists, and a seemingly disproportionate number of people from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, I was one of only two formerly incarcerated women on the commission. We were tasked with addressing the unique issues of female prisoners in an environment designed, structured, and programmed for men, despite the massive increase of women behind bars. It was, of course, a dubious distinction that Schwarzenegger’s own state was home to the largest women’s prison in the world, the Central California Women’s Facility, a full square mile in Chowchilla, about four hours from Los Angeles—filled to over 180 percent of its intended capacity.
Our Gender Responsive Strategies Commission met quarterly, each time in a different county in California. I identified many issues affecting women behind bars, such as the shackling of women during labor, a routine and often mandatory practice. Though a handful of states had guidelines against shackling, it still continued, unchecked. As did the ruthless practice of separating babies from their mothers immediately after birth.
I brought up the more routine issue that women in jails were not provided sanitary napkins or tampons; in prisons, women were required to purchase sanitary products at two to three times the market price. The only time an incarcerated woman was provided sanitary napkins—but only a maximum of five pads a month—was if she was declared “indigent.” This distinction spotlit yet another issue: it used to be that having less than $5 in a prison account qualified an inmate as indigent, but the amount had been updated to $0. So, if you had a nickel in your account, you weren’t considered indigent, but you certainly couldn’t afford a package of ten tampons for $2.70. Even if you had several bucks in your account, you still could face precarious decisions—see a doctor, or buy tampons? Sadly, it wasn’t uncommon for women inmates to resort to bartering sex acts for basic necessities.
I was eager to get to work on these pressing issues but, for reasons unexplained, the commission wasn’t pursuing any of them. It was becoming clear to me that, although the commission sounded great on paper, we weren’t accomplishing much of anything.
When I hosted one of our meetings, in Watts, the most important thing to come out of it happened by chance. As an official from Valley State Prison spoke, she casually mentioned that they ask pregnant women going into labor if they want to get their tubes tied. The meeting room fell silent. Performing sterilizations in prison for any reason other than medical necessity was a violation of state law—likewise, it was illegal to seek a woman’s consent for a tubal ligation while she was in labor.
But the comment was brushed off by the commission heads, assuring us that nothing like that ever happens. Still, the scene harkened back to California’s dark history of eugenics—what historians cite as a model for Nazi Germany—targeting the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, minorities, and the poor. Though thirty-one U.S. states practiced eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century, California was the leader of the pack for the number of forced sterilizations on men and women.
Unlike our commission, a women prisoners’ rights group called Justice Now did not disregard the prison official’s comments. The group opened an investigation and managed to obtain prison records, which indeed revealed a practice of tubal ligations, beyond the amount that, statistically, would be deemed medically necessary. The baton was then passed to Center for Investigative Journalism reporter Corey G. Johnson, who, after years of research, broke the story in 2013 that sterilization procedures were occurring in state prisons without proper approval.
His reporting painted a picture of the women being coerced into surgery, each fitting a strikingly similar profile: repeat offenders who already had children and who had low levels of education. Firsthand accounts revealed inmates who’d been unaware what “tubal litigation” or other sterilization procedures were. Others described being pressured for consent on the operating table as they were about to undergo a C-section. Also documented were various other surgeries resulting in sterilization, such as hysterectomies and ovary removals, most of which were not demonstrated to be medically necessary. Resulting from this investigation, a 2014 bill was signed into California law banning sterilization as a form of birth control for all state and county prisoners.
As for our Gender Responsive Strategies Commission, the only progress I could point to that was a direct result of our years of meetings was the passage of a 2006 bill, spearheaded by Assemblywoman Karen Bass (who’d founded the Community Coalition), to remove restrictions so that a cosmetology or barber license could be earned by someone with a criminal record.
This was certainly a step in the right direction, and yet, when our commission visited the California Institution for Women, a cosmetology teacher there told me that even though her students were now able to obtain licenses, they still were falling through the cracks upon release, unable to get placement in salons. We decided I would return and spend some time with her cosmetology class to gather more insight and provide some inspiration and information about finding jobs and housing on the outside.
A few weeks later I drove back to the prison. But I was denied entry. Apparently, my clearance as part of the Gender Responsive Strategy Commission meeting didn’t apply to my solo visit. I returned home and reapplied for clearance. After some months of waiting, my clearance came back denied. I called the cosmetology teacher and asked her to advocate for my clearance. But she was scared to intervene, even though we were trying to help her students.
I never did end up visiting the cosmetology class. Sometimes you get too tired of having to walk that same extra mile over and over again.