Status Updates From Are Prisons Obselete?

“The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where prison no longer serves as our major anchor.”

“at the current rates of increase, there will be more women in American prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceede that for white men as recently as 1980.” !

masculine criminality has always been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality.
() women who have been publicly punished by the state [are seen as] more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts. ()they continue to be subjected to forms of punishment not acknowledged as such. they have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons.

discussing search practises in prison done on women, specifically black: "The "internal search" was as humiliating and disgusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this table and the nurse holds your legs open and sticks a finger in your vagina and moves it around. She has a plastic glove on. Some of them try to put one finger in your vagina and another one up your at the same time."