For the San Quentin News staff, reporting news from the perspective of women prisoners is challenging. So reading an authentic source, such as The Fire Inside, became a portal into their world.
“The transformation that prisoners’ words go through from being a spoken ‘gripe’ to a printed article validates the writer’s sense that their thoughts and feelings are objective; that they speak to others who hear them in this form,” wrote inmate Urszula Wislanka.
The Fire Inside is a newsletter, which has published 50 editions in 18 years. As an incarcerated man, I felt privileged to learn what issues are important to The Fire Inside writers.
“Brutality and Use of Excessive Force,” is a story about a woman prisoner being pepper-sprayed and beaten by a male correctional officer. After reading about this ordeal described by Tammarra Tanner, the words of Viktor E. Frankl immediately came to mind. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl said, “The most painful part of beatings is the insult which they imply.”
Multiple impressions arose as I thought about what Tanner went through and pondered “the insult which they imply”— being beaten as a prisoner—a woman being beaten by a man—being a woman prisoner and being beaten by a male guard.
I remembered a poem, “with no immediate cause” by Ntozake Shange, which begins: “every 3 minutes a woman is beaten.”
The abuse women undergo every day on this planet is described in graphic detail in Shange’s poem. This was the reality I carried with me into the painful world of Tanner.
A long time ago, I was beaten in county jail for talking.
I juggled Tanner’s reality with my own memories while focusing on Frankl’s statement: “the insult which they imply.” I lingered with her story for a long time. It will never leave me, because beating a prisoner implies so much about who we are as human beings.
The reality is there was no immediate cause for Tanner’s beating. Her story made me think about how prisons operate in this vacuum of ignorance—as if brute force is the answer to complex problems—human problems.
Naomi Murakawa clarified this mindless practice of discipline and punishment in The First Civil Right—How Liberals Built Prison America by quoting sociologist David Garland. She wrote, “in a conversation that assumed the fundamental institutional structure of criminalizing, policing, and incarcerating…the ‘heated’ conflict…became simply a matter of ‘how best to run prisons, organize probation or enforce fines, rather than question why these measures are used in the first place.’”
So, when I read that Tanner was beaten for asking questions about her medical care, I weighed the borders and the differences between guard and prisoner, and of course, the 1974 Stanford Experiment popped into my mind. (A psychological experiment, in which college students were assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards” and some “guards” became increasingly abusive.)
So, the million dollar question becomes: “Why don’t we do something better than what we’re doing now with a prisoner considered to be disruptive, a ‘problem child’”?
I believe that we don’t correct the situation because the public is ignorant of the realities of prison life as unveiled by publications like The Fire Inside.
The Fire Inside enlightened me about healthcare for female prisoners, specifically, that shackling pregnant women has been curtailed. I found out that if someone is experiencing a drug overdose, a bystander won’t be punished for helping. I learned the facts and fiction about HIV and AIDS. And, I learned that the Alternative Custody Program is a better solution to overcrowding.
I was disheartened to notice that the most recent issue was published in the summer of 2014. No doubt funding is always an issue.
The Fire Inside is produced by the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, which holds “volunteer nights” for the newsletter at 6 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month at 1540 Market St., Room 490, San Francisco. 415.255.7036, Ext. 4. Direct questions to: info@womenprisoners.org.
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