African American Women Within the P.I.C.
“While women still constitute a relatively small percentage of people behind bars, today the number of incarcerated women in the state of California… alone is almost twice the entire state and federal women’s population of 1970. In fact, the fastest growing group of prisoners are Black women”
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a. “Structured by colonial and antebellum judiciaries, laws representing the priorities of enslavers effectively negated and criminalized black womanhood by subjecting black women to brutality and exploitation and by barring them from lawful avenues for redress. Without institutional safeguards, black women seeking security or justice would have to create those circumstances for themselves, which often placed them on the receiving end of harsh sentences from the same legal system that failed them”
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Author Kali Nicole Gross’ academic journal begins by introducing readers to the story of Marissa Alexander. On November 28, 2013, Alexander was freed from a Florida prison after serving three years of her twenty-year sentence. Alexander was incarcerated for firing a warning shot during a confrontation with her estranged, abusive husband, whom she had a restraining order against. After her release, Judge James H. Daniel found that the original jury instructions were flawed and thus overturned her conviction. However, the Judge denied Alexander’s request for a new hearing under Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground Law. This Florida law might sound familiar since it was the same law that was upheld in the case of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. Yet, despite the circumstances of her situation, Marissa Alexander was unable to invoke the same protections. She did not kill anyone. She did not harm anyone. And still, she was faced with a twenty-year prison sentence.
“A person is justified in using or threatening to use force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. A person who uses or threatens to use force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat before using or threatening to use such force.”
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Alexander had a new trial scheduled for December of 2014, but in November, she accepted a plea deal that sent her to Duval County Jail to serve an additional sixty-five days. Alexander’s plea deal also included two years of probation under house detention and required her to wear a surveillance monitor. Alexander agreed to these terms instead of facing the new charges filed against her, which could have amounted to up to sixty years in prison.
“These new regimes of accumulation and discipline… build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the superexploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex.”
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The case of Marissa Alexander demonstrates the many institutional structures at play. With the additional understanding of intersectionality, it is evident how gender has played a crucial role in affecting Alexander’s hearing and sentencing.
“If the issue of black female incarceration is raised, it is usually as a tangential afterthought in discussions about the carceral experiences of black men—and even then the role of intraracial gender violence is rarely discussed”
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Alexander’s case highlights the flaws of the prison and justice system. In her situation, Alexander should have been able to invoke Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground-Law. In comparison to Zimmerman’s case, which resulted in the tragic death of helpless teen Trayvon Martin, Alexander stood her ground under threat from her abusive husband who was violating the terms of their established restraining order. And yet, as the biases of race and gender work against her, Alexander was left to serve a lengthy prison sentence when she was only ever trying to protect herself. The incarceration system failed her. But, it is stories like Marissa Alexander’s that allow us to see the intricacies of the system at play, which will allow us to be better informed and equipped to fight against these injustices by sharing the stories of these targeted individuals.
As mentioned in introducing the concept of intersectionality, scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s activity with an audience already begins to shed some insight into the unequal representation of Black women in the policing and prison systems within the US. Despite facing similar injustices to Black men, public knowledge of the treatment of Black women in the American prison system is limited. However, these institutional discrepancies faced by women have been long-running.