Though I may not write about it too often, prisoner rights is a feminist concern. Women and non-gender conforming prisoners find themselves uniquely affected by a variety of issues: just take a moment to read about the all-too-horrific practice of shackling incarcerated women during pregnancy or the large amount of sexual assault inflicted on inmates with an unconventional gender identity.

But steps are being taken in the right direction to ensure that prisoners are treated humanely. Most mental health experts agree that the use of solitary confinement in prisons can result in long-lasting psychological damages. According to the ACLU, a bill was introduced in the Colorado state legislature this week to end Colorado prisons' use of solitary confinement. Some shocking numbers tell why this is clearly the humane thing to do:

In Colorado, 37 percent of those in solitary confinement are prisoners with mental illness or developmental disabilities – up from 15 percent just a decade ago. The more than 1,400 Colorado inmates in solitary confinement spend 23 hours a day in isolation, for 16 months on average, at an increased additional cost of up to $21,485 per year, per inmate.

Read a copy of the bill online.

This makes me sick.

In the Mexican state of Guanajuato, which holds the strictest abortion policy and the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, and also refuses to teach comprehensive sex education, six women have been sentenced to 25 to 30 years prison time for the crime of violating Guanajuato's abortion laws. From womensrights.change.org:

Ms. Magazine reports that the six women were tried and sentence for homicide under laws criminalizing abortion. Activists working with the women reports that all six defendants were poor and had little education. Two were impregnated by rape, and all were abandoned by the sperm-providers. One had a spontaneous abortion, a.k.a. a miscarriage.

To have a woman charged with homicide and thrown in jail for making a decision about her own body is appalling to me... it sounds like something out of some horrifying dystopian novel. Too bad it's reality.

Stories like this make me really grateful that I live in the U.S.

A student in Afghanistan, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, was sentenced to death for distributing information regarding the role of women in Islam. He was convicted of "distributing blasphemous material."

"Blasphemous material"!!!

Thankfully, he has now been freed, but as his brother publicly stated, "Pervez should never have been put in that position." All he advocated for was the bettering of women's lives.

I haven't written yet about Barack Obama's comments on the Gates arrest because I haven't quite been able to put how I feel about it into words. But thankfully, journalist Greg Palast (who I saw speak at my school a little while back) did it for me. From his piece in The Huffington Post:

He's in hot water now. For a moment, on national television, the President of the United States turned black!

Last week, when his buddy "Skip" Gates got busted for being Black in Boston, Barack Obama forgot his official role: to soothe America's conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.

Instead, Obama, the excruciatingly middle-of-the-road President, was seized by Barack the militant State Senator from the South Side of Chicago, who reminded us that cops bust Black guys for no goddamn good reason all the goddamn time.

Truth. Obama shouldn't have had to apologize for his comments; the police did act stupidly, and there is a history of people of color being persecuted by cops more often than white people. President Obama said what we were all thinking, and all the other people who want to pretend that racism doesn't exist need to get the hell over it.

This is outrageous. Women in Texas are being charged thousands of dollars to get rape examinations.



Please contact the office of the Texas Attorney General at crimevictims@oag.state.tx.us and tell them you will not stand for this. You can copy the letter I sent if you're so angry that you're at a loss for words:

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to express my outrage over the fact that the state of Texas is charging rape victims thousands of dollars for rape kits. By doing this, you are essentially punishing women for cooperating with the authorities. What kind of message does this send? Already, large amounts of rape victims avoid reporting the crime due to emotional trauma, and to tack on an unreasonably large fee only further discourages terrified and humiliated women from going to the authorities. This means less rapists behind bars and more roaming the streets. Don't sacrifice the safety of the women of Texas, and stop charging victims for crimes they had no power to stop.

Sincerely,
[Name]

Two days ago, a Human Rights Watch report was released showing that there are at least 12,669 untested rape kits in Los Angeles County, the largest known backlog of its kind in the US.

Holy. Crap.

They estimated that thousands more rape kits have been destroyed in LA County as well. Interviews showed that many of the rape victims assumed that the DNA did not match in the database or no evidence was found when they did not hear their results. According to Ms. Magazine:

The backlog on rape kits is not unique to Los Angeles, and 2004 federal legislation advocated by the Feminist Majority and other women's rights groups, renewed this year, addressed the problem by authorizing funding for local police departments to catch up on DNA analyses. L.A.'s crime lab was awarded nearly $4 million, but lost nearly $500,000 of that due to lax oversight. And the backlog has worsened.

It really saddens me that when terrified women can muster up just enough courage to undergo a humiliating and time-consuming rape kit, their evidence is not even tested. It's a horrifying thought and it really makes me lose any faith I had left in our justice system.

A survey conducted by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights showed that as many as 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women have experienced some form of sexual harassment or unwarranted sexual advances in Egypt in public. Noha Rushdi Saleh, a 27-year-old well-known film director, became one of those women when she was persistently harassed and groped in the streets of Cairo by an Egyptian man, Sharif Gommaa. He trailed her in his car, and at one point grabbed her breasts so hard that she fell to the ground.

Though the country's criminal code outlines a prison sentence and fine for sexual abusers, never before has Egypt issued a prison sentence for sexual harassment of a woman in public. The harasser faces three years in jail with hard labor, and Noha will receive 5,001 Egyptian pounds ($895) in compensation.

Baby steps.

Cell phone cameras are a wonderful invention. Especially when they help to land a scumbag harasser into police custody. While walking up the stairs at the Dyckman Street station, a 28 year-old woman noticed a man following her and taking pictures up her skirt with his cell phone. Suddenly, she decided "since he is taking pictures of me, I am going to take pictures of him." She followed the jerk onto a train, where she held up her cell phone camera, and told him: "smile, because I am going to the police."

She sent the picture to the police, and on Tuesday, an officer recognized the degenerate, 36 year-old Aaron Olivieri, and arrested him. He was charged with unlawful surveillance and attempted sexual abuse and harassment. Oh, sweet justice.

So ladies, have those camera phones ready. We can learn a lot from the wonderful Holla Back NYC blog, because not only is snapping a picture of a disgusting pig gratifying, but it can also lead to one less harasser on the street.

This is just preposterous. Two elderly women in China have been sentenced to perform labor as punishment for attempting to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing. The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, wanted to protest in an area designated as a "protest area" by the government itself. However, it seems as if the government did not actually intend to let anyone protest in these "protest areas," as it has denied around 77 applications from people wishing to organize demonstrations. Because the two elderly women were persistent, they have been sentenced to "re-education through labor," known as laojiao, which is often given to political and religious dissenters, and those who commit minor crimes. The two women will most likely be forced to perform agricultural or factory work, although one of them is nearly blind. Here I thought they respected the elderly in China.

There's a piece on Yahoo! News that is worth taking a few minutes to read. It's about the ongoing problem with witnesses or victims of crimes wrongly identifying a suspect of a different race. From the article:

In the midst of being raped, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino told herself to pay attention to details that would allow her to identify her attacker. Then she identified a man from photographs, picked him out of a lineup and told jurors she was certain he was the rapist.

That man, Ronald Cotton, received a life sentence and spent more than 10 years in prison before DNA testing cleared him of the crime.

Now victim and the innocent man she helped convict are writing a book together.

Thompson-Cannino, who is white, had mistakenly picked out one black man; another was guilty of the crime.

Read the rest of the article here.

I can't imagine living in a country where I could possibly be jailed for writing in this blog.

In Iran, a 22-year-old male student was thrown in prison for one year for campaigning for women's rights. Amir Yaghoub-Ali was arrested while collecting signatures in a park, although a fellow campaigner has said, "According to our constitution ... collecting signatures is not a crime."

Dozens of women's rights activists have been jailed in the past couple years. Iran rejects the notion that women are discriminated against in the country, but many women feel as if they have been made into second-class citizens.

A leading member of the campaign, Parvin Ardalan, says, "They are trying to control us."

Read full article here, help women in Iran here.

This is wonderful. New nursery programs in prisons are allowing imprisoned mothers more time to bond with their newborn babies. An article on Yahoo says that New York, Washington, Ohio, California, Nebraska, and soon West Virginia are all states that are a part of the growing trend of launching prison nurseries. The Indiana Women's Prison now allows new mothers to keep their babies with them up until eighteen months.

Studies show that children benefit from having extended contact with their mothers. Children who are separated from their imprisoned parents are more likely to have emotional problems, do poorly in school, and/or have trouble with the law.

In the end, it's better for both the child, and the mother.

Happy Mother's Day, by the way :) If you can, give big hugs to your mother, grandmother, aunt, etc.

A new study shows some appalling results when it comes to linking race and death sentences. I was already aware of this information, so to me this study is merely reiterating what has been a problem for several years, but I suppose this issue really can't get enough coverage.

The findings of the study show that those who are convicted of killing whites are more likely to receive the death sentence than those who kill blacks. Moreover, the race of the actual defendant plays a part as well, with studies showing that blacks are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites are.

Ridiculous. Racism is so deeply ingrained in our society it sickens me.

See the full article in The New York Times for more information on the study.

On Wednesday, Freddie Johnson, a serial sex offender, stepped onto a crowded subway train and pervertedly rubbed himself up against a woman. An NYPD transit team caught him in the act, resulting in Johnson's fifty-third arrest. Of his 53 arrests, 30 of them were for sexual abuse. 53 strikes and you're out? Wow, I'm ecstatic that women are so wonderfully protected from perverts.

It really upsets me when I hear stories about law enforcement officers abusing their power. A New York City police officer, Wilfredo Rosario, was recently charged with sexually assaulting one woman, and trying to convince another woman to have sex with him in order to avoid a summons. He has been charged with felony sexual abuse, official misconduct, unlawful imprisonment and attempted coercion. He could face up to seven years in prison, and I'm assuming he lost his job. You know, it's really scary when we can't even trust the people who are meant to protect us.

Full story here.

I'm all for good solid airport security as a means to keep our nation safe, but this just goes way too far. Can someone explain to me why I have personally talked to people who were able to board planes with small pocketknives and lighters, but this woman is forced to remove her nipple rings? Mandi Hamlin was going through airport security, when a handheld metal detector started beeping in front of her chest. Mandi explained to security agents that she had both her nipples pierced, but they refused to let her board the flight. She got so desperate that she actually offered to show her nipple rings to a female agent, but they still refused. Mandi was not allowed to board the flight until she went behind a curtain to remove her nipple rings.


Crying, she removed the first one, a barbell, but had a difficult time with the second one, a ring. She told the agents. Their solution? They gave her a pair of pliers to pull out her nipple ring. Ouch. To top off Mandi's wonderful day: while taking out her nipple rings, she overheard security agents snickering about what happened to her. Mandi has now hired prominent feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, who is representing Mandi in her attempts to receive an apology from the security agents and to have their civil rights office perform an investigation. The agency maintains that they performed the security check properly, but I don't know how that's possible when there were so many other options they could have explored before choosing so quickly to humiliate this woman. See the video below for more information, as well as Mandi performing a demonstration on a dummy of how she had to remove her piercings.

I'm really glad this story is getting media coverage. Because there are way too many people who claim that it is a woman's responsibility to protect herself from rape, but no one concentrates on the responsibility of law officers.

On March 6, a woman was returning from her job at a homeless shelter, when she was suddenly attacked in her housing project in Brooklyn. The man threatened her with a knife and forced sex on her. Here's the kicker: this woman might have been saved if the two rookie police officers who were supposed to be doing rounds at that time actually performed their duties instead of lying and saying they did. From the New York Times:

In investigating the rape, detectives from the housing bureau spoke to two officers who said they were doing “vertical patrols,” walking up and down the stairwells of the building, at the time of the attack and had marked it in their memo books. But investigators who reviewed the videotaped images found no evidence of the officers’ being there.

As a result, the officers, whose names were not released, were placed on modified assignment on Thursday and stripped of their guns and badges, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

I hope these officers feel like shit for not being there when they were needed the most. I'm going to take a wild guess in saying that this was not solely prompted by laziness, but also by a prejudiced notion that somehow, people living in housing projects in Brooklyn deserve less protection than others. Thank God these officers were caught and punished. I don't want any other cops thinking that they can get away with this. You choose to be a cop to protect people... so do it.

In a Target store in Oklahoma, a 16-year-old girl was shopping. Unbeknownst to her, a 34-year-old peeping tom was using this opportunity to slip his camera under her skirt and snap pictures. The man was caught, but ultimately, was not found guilty in a court. Why? Because the girl was not in a "private" place.

Ferrante, now 34, was charged under a "Peeping Tom" statute that requires the victim to be "in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy." Testimony indicated he followed the girl, knelt down behind her and placed the camera under her skirt. In January 2007, Tulsa County District Judge Tom Gillert ordered Ferrante's felony charge dismissed. That was based upon a determination that "the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy," according to the appellate ruling issued last week.

Excuse me, but shouldn't a girl expect men to stay out of her skirt in ANY place, regardless of whether or not it's "private"? This man would have been convicted only if he snapped a picture of her in a bedroom or a bathroom, but sticking a camera up a girl's skirt is perfectly fine in the middle of a Target. Sigh.

Full story here.