Speaking truth to power: women in prison.

• Author: Kerness, Bonnie
• Position: Salvaging Democracy - Speech

The following was a speech given on January 14, 2006, before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women [Editors].

I've been working with the American Friends Service Committee as a human rights advocate on behalf of prisoners in the United States for the past 30 years. The relationship between women living in poverty and women being incarcerated is indisputable. There are currently over 950,000 women in criminal justice custody in the US, with thousands of those living under other forms of social control such as parole or probation.

Since 1980 the number of women entering prisons in the US has risen almost 400%, double the rate of men. Nearly a quarter of these women are mentally ill, with untold numbers being infected with AIDS. Forty percent held no jobs prior to imprisonment, two thirds of them are women of color, and 60% of them are mothers of an estimated 1.3 million minor children.

Incarcerated women bear a double burden of punishment: their children "do time" with them. The average age of the women in prison is 29 and 58% haven't finished high school. Without any fanfare, the "war on drugs" in this country has become a war on women and it has clearly contributed to the explosion in the women's prison population.

I'd like to share some of the voices of the women in prison that I hear during my day:

From New Jersey:

We are forced to sleep on the floor in the middle of winter with bad backs and aching bodies, cold air still blowing from the vents no matter what the temperature was outside. At two o'clock in the morning they wake you up and tell you to clear the room. They go through your personal belongings and then put them in the trash.... From Texas:

The guard sprayed me with pepper spray because I wouldn't take my clothes off in front of five male guards. Then they carried me to a cell, laid me down on a steel bed and took my clothes off. They left me there in that cell with that pepper spray in my face and nothing to wash my face with. I didn't give them any reason to do that, I just didn't want to take my clothes off. From Arizona:

The only thing you get in isolation is a peanut butter sandwich in the morning, a cheese sandwich in the afternoon and for supper another peanut butter sandwich. If you want a drink here, you have to drink toilet water ... From Missouri:

When I refused to move into a double cell, they came into my cell and dragged me out and threw me on my back. I was beaten about my face and head. One of the guards stuck his finger in my eye deliberately. I was the rolled on my stomach and cuffed on my wrists with leg irons on my ankle. I was made to walk a thousand feet with the leg irons. Then they put me in a device called a restraint chair. When they put you in this chair your hands are cuffed behind your back and tucked under your buttocks. They stripped me naked ... and kept me there over nine hours until I fouled myself on my hands which were...